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The Geekiest Animals in History
Flipper writes "CNET has compiled a list of the geekiest animals throughout history. The entries include such peculiar characters as Ham The Astrochimp (the first chimp in space), Schrödinger's Cat (used to demonstrate quantum superposition) and Hans, a horse who could apparently do complex mathematics and read words. The classics are there too, Pavlov's dogs get a well-deserved mention, as does Dolly The Sheep. What sounds like a pretty bizarre list is actually strangely interesting — some of these animals are seriously geeky."
Where's Mr. Peabody?
"Sherman, fire up the wayback machine..."
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
She would have had my first vote.
Stolen from Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika
Laika (from Russian meaning "Barker", as well as being a dog breed) was a Russian space dog that became the first living creature from Earth to enter orbit. She was found as a stray wandering the streets of Moscow. Originally named Kudryavka, she was renamed Laika after her breed type. After undergoing training with two other dogs, she was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 and was launched into space on November 3, 1957.
Laika died a few hours after launch from stress and overheating, likely due to a malfunction in the thermal control system. The true cause of her death was not made public until decades after the flight. Some former Soviet scientists have since expressed regret that Laika was allowed to die.
(more in article)
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Has to be the long horse.
It was the multicore processor of its day.
Moores' law (not THAT Moore, his great grandfather) held that horses would double in length every 18 months.
liqbase
The Geekiest Animal is the GNU!
That elephant and gorilla and seal can't come close to Chewie, who actually knew how to play a chess-type game (sorta). If they're geeky, then Chewie is like the Stephen Hawking of animals. ...Wookies count as animals, right?
I'd have been more pleased with a "nerdiest animals" list which would include Ace the Bathound, Krypto the Superdog, and Mr. Ed.
Bye-bye karma :-(
I like basketball!!1!
And how about the remote controlled goldfish?
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
ahhh crum.
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Flipper!
I mean I know he's not a real penguin, but a hypothetical cat got on the list. Every linux user (which is some form of geek, myself included) has a special place in his or her (mostly his) heart for that happy little penguin.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Less is said about an alternative test called Schrödinger's lawyer. The test involved the gun discharging no matter what state the particle was in. Schrödinger himself admitted the proposed test was pointless but much more satisfying and humane than the cat test.
Miss Piggy
I would add:
I think that finding this a strangely interesting article is the very definition of what it means to be a geek.
The Spice Must Flow!
This is a really neat research project using crickets as the ghosts in Pacman. Considering that crickets can tell the temperature and that they have the most sensitive mechano-sensors known in the animal kingdom, this is a creature that demonstrates many geeky qualities.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
A polar bear.
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I went a Seaworld once and ate dinner at the Dinner with Shamu where you get to see their larger pool, and talk with the trainers. I asked him just how smart they really were and he said VERY smart. I asked how many commands they knew, and he said 300-400, which is really very amazing. They aren't usually mentioned in terms of the smartest animal, usually that's dogs, pigs and horses, but I bet Killer Whales are WAY up there, maybe even higher because of the size of their brain.
For being a top ten list with one fucking page view. Thanks for that.
"All bastards are bastards, but some bastards is *bastards*."
-- (Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent)[Pruneau
Must. Not. Anthropomorphize.
First would be Laika, who gave her life in space exploration. Second would be Freud's Chow-Chow. Determining the mental state of a patient through pheromones and other bodily odors gets two dew-claws up.
On a somewhat related note of sniffing out people's mental state, one of my neighbors is a K9 cop. He said that several times, the cuplrit of a crime has stayed at the scene and just blended in with the crowd, and as soon as he showed up, without being given a scent or anything, his dog simply went straight into the crowd and picked out the party who turned out to be guilty.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Topping CNET's evilest animal list is:
-1 Hitlers Dog
-2 Stalins Hampster
-3 Osamas Poodle
about Hoover the seal... He sucked...
Kent Simon Multitheft Auto
Darwin could beat Flipper any day of the week (even without his speech module).
Surely the geekiest animals in history are going to prove to be the ones on the cover of the O'Reilly books.
I'd think they deserver at least an honerable mention
No such list is complete without mention of the famous "spherical cow" approximation for physics computations.
Dogs are digusting, and so are their owners.
She probably shat everywhere in the satellite and ate it all.
Gyro Gearloose!! He's brainy in the same way that Scrooge McDuck is rich.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I tried to think of an explaination for #10 being on the Top Ten Girl Geeks list but I had to give up before my head exploded.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
It's pretty much my favorite animal. It's like a lion and a tiger mixed... bred for its skills in magic.
Saw this recent show on the relationship between Australian fishers and killers that indicates they are very smart indeed.
Poor cat. Being left alone in a box without air or water or food for all that time.
Even if the cat had plenty of food in that damn box it would have died of old age a looong time ago.
Lest we give all the glory to other species.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
CNETs sexiest animals list:
1: Sheep 2: Snakes 3: Donkeys
When I first read the title of this article, sloth is the first thing that popped into my mind. After reading more I realized what the article was about
One of my favorite parts:
Yeah, I'm really sure Koko was trying to say the word "people" by signing "nipple" which sounds just like it! Fun read.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I was pleased to see Koko the gorilla on the list. When I was young I managed to see her when my father was doing some work to help the gorilla foundation back in the early 1980s. At the time, I wore braces and she found them very interesting and made up a new sign on the spot for them. They also had another gorilla, Michael. My sister made the sign "Koko loves Michael" to which Koko responded, "Michael dirty toilet", which apparently she came up with and was not taught. Koko was never very fond of Michael, though her attraction to some of her handlers was known even back then.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Seeing as the Chomsky hierarchy is usually taught to computer science students nowadays, I'd think Nim Chimsky should have been in that list as well (maybe replacing that dimwitted gorilla..), if anything at least for that geekish name or some of his utterances such as "Play me Nim play!" ;)
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Domo-kun?
A horse that understands the square root of negative one? No way.
I think there are geekier animals to be found elsewhere on the web, even on a daily basis. /.!
Try
Defining Statistics and Social Research
a BaBOOM!
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I didn't know gorilla's are subject to the same laws as humans in the United States. Eventhough it is a serious matter, it is kinda strange he's being charged with sexual harrassment.
If my puppy humps my leg can I sue him?
I doubt anyone will forget the goat that you see.
I also think Laika has more business in this list than Pavlov's dogs or Ham. Peabody beats everyone on the list, hands down.
for Maxwell's Demons?
;-)
They allow you to derive the thermodynamic value of information. It doesn't get much geekier than that
Where's Maxwell's Daemon?????
I'd be considered the hairy, unkempt member of clan Stallman.
Steve Ballmer?
Jesus Saves
ScuttleMonkey
300-400 commands.
.... err what else do they do at the shows?
Like what? Active vocabulary of english speakers is only of the order 10 times that.
So, jump flip splash eat play-dead score-a-basket knit-a-sweater
My newest rescue dog (a little white foxy looking puppy, very mixed breed, I call her a fritz because she looks like a weiner dog with a spitz head, but she's all white so you tell me what cross she is or what breed because I don't know), plays catch with herself! She tosses chestnuts and sticks and pinecones, etc, up in the air, then runs and catches them. The other dogs stand around and watch. Pretty dang funny first time I saw it. And what's weird is she won't play catch with me, the other dogs do, she'll only play catch with herself. I've seen a couple other dogs do that (with small objects or small furry creatures they have caught like mice), but not for a long time now.
As to cooperate play like you said with the orcas, nope, can't say as I have seen anything to that level, but pretty close. I have seen a small pod of dolphins come in real close to the shore as close as they could get when a friend and I were playing latin drums on the beach and our girlfriends were dancing (our old hippie street musician dodge). They came in and just swam in a pattern,basically a fast figure 8, looked to me like some sort of on-purpose deal, for as long as we played, then they split. Pretty amazing to see really. We had tourists slack jawed watching them (in between eyeing the girls, natch). That is probably the closest I have seen to that sort of behavior.
What about Snoopy?? He was a WWl ace, an author, a world traveler, multi-lingual, a real lady's man(dog?) and he could do cool tricks with his dog food dish.
What?
Is that the one where they tied a piece of buttered toast to his back to see how he would land when thrown off the roof?
What?
"I also think Laika has more business in this list than Pavlov's dogs"
If you think computers are hard to debug and reverse engineer... try the human brain.
Tycho was known for his star measurements, and the elk died falling down the stairs after it drank too much beer (apparently the ancient equivalent of Hosehead from Strange Brew :-).
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
he also invented the Turing machine, a forerunner to the modern microcomputer
Holy. Crap.
sic transit gloria mundi
what about lancelot link secret chimp, he was the bomb. unshaven 007, well more like Maxwell Smart with spy toys.
http://www.70slivekidvid.com/lancelot.htm
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
I'd like to add as an honorable mention, Evlis, the Welsh corgi that demonstrated an intuitive ability to solve calculus optimization problems.
The people are who do things to them.
Seriously. Did the chimp want to go into space?
Did dolly enjoy having melty organs "for science"?
Not that these weren't worthwhile pursuits, but we should at least be accurate.
I'd say geeky animals are those that are geeky on their own, like chimps and beavers with
tool use, and dolphins with highly evolved social systems.
Ok ok, scratch the dolphines I guess. But the monkey beavers are geeks!
And of course the winner goes to...
The Liger! What else?
--
Wi-Fizzle Research, etc
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
These are not geeky animals, but animals experimented upon or exploited *by* geeks.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
As the owner of two African Grey parrots, I have to give props to Alex's inclusion on the list. The bird developed the use of a "zero-like" concept and abuses grad students. Pepperberg was actually able to document statistically that "Alex is ornery."
Pepperberg is also teaching Alex to surf a parrot Internet and convert visual cues to phonemes which can be assembled by Alex into recognizable words. Pepperberg, always one for rigor, will not say that she is teaching Alex to read.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
> Debate rages over the extent of Koko's understanding, however, and bizarrely the gorilla has been the subject of lawsuits in which handlers have alleged sexual harrassment by the creature.
What would you expect from a primate female?
Come to think, it is not unlike my wife... and the behaviour is similar, too.
(Honey, if you come to read this one day, I was just kidding, ok?)
Screw the rest of 'em. Everybody knows owls are the nerds of the forest. They wear glasses!
Yes, Virginia, I did watch too much King of Queens.
I am happy to see a parrot on there. I own 6 myself... although their vocabulary is limited to "Hello", "night night" and at 2 in the morning when I get home the conu8res tell me "Goto sleep" thats about it. Wish they were geeky parrots :(
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
aka CopyCat the first cloned pet
I haven't checked this one for inaccuracies yet, but the last two were pretty stupid and, in some cases, contained completely distorted information.
...maybe Richard Stallman isn't so crazy with the GNU/Linux thing, eh? Although there are many packages in the average distro that aren't GNU's...
This one from the first list still bothers me:
Torvalds' personal mascot is a penguin, he invented Linux using an old 386 PC and he insists he is named after a character in the Peanuts comic strip -- in fact he was named after Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist. Torvalds' operating system is used by computers all over the world and some believe it poses a serious threat to Microsoft's Windows -- not bad for a lone Computer Science student.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
I think this way of putting it is misleading. It actually has caused quite a lot of confusion. Observed by whom? A fly? Another cat? A phycicist? What if the phycicist is drunk? The term 'observation' suggests the presence of a conscious mind. Mangling that with (btw. completely deterministic) processes in quantum mechanics can only cause confusion and will not yield physics insights.
Let's say the system 'cat' needs to interact with another system to determine its state. No observer necessary.
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
It was one of the Hero projects of the 1930's and one of the few Lysenko genetic successes. The resulting transgenetic hamster, referred to as a hampster for its inclusion of a THC gene taken from a hemp plant, was a constant companion to Stalin. Besides providing "comfort", the little guy was also personally directed the mass deportation of peasants and intellectuals to Siberia (thus the evil appellation).
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Pinky and the Brain? Or at least the Brain? But Pinky's rhyming is pretty geeky...
I was going to Suggest Sonic the hedgehog, or Flash, but Gyro is a better choice for geeks!
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
...Who was on the team of scientists that trained the space monkeys. He told us some amazing stories about his experience. He said that they would starve them for a couple of days until they were downright hostile, and then they would drop a banana pellet into their chamber when the monkey would touch a joystick that was mounted in the chamber. Once the monkey figured out that the joystick = food, they would make the monkey hold the joystick for long amounts of time. Then they put a monitor in there with cross-hairs to simulate re-entry, and they would only give a banana pellet if the monkey could line up the cross-hairs. Pretty soon, they had a monkey that could hold some cross-hairs on a re-entry plane for 18 HOURS!!! (All the while the re-entry plane would be shifted and moved and bumped, to simulate the intense nature of re-entry. So when they finally sent the monkey into space (they had several canidates), they monkey knew exactly what to do to get the banana pellet.
As a side story, some scientists took the task of training the monkeys to play tic-tac-toe. Our professor said that the monkeys would NEVER lose, once they were taught. Some of them were so smart that they could play without facing the tic-tac-toe board and just listen to the sounds of the game (they rigged it with unique sounds for each space) and reach back and pat the square when it was their turn.
Nothing can beat small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What, no mention of Descartes' fly?
This means they'll pick the dog over you every time
*sniff* not my karma! *sniff*