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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!
And how about the remote controlled goldfish?
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
ahhh crum.
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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.
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.
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.
Surely the geekiest animals in history are going to prove to be the ones on the cover of the O'Reilly books.
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.
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.
A horse that understands the square root of negative one? No way.
a BaBOOM!
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I'd be considered the hairy, unkempt member of clan Stallman.
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?
The sexual harassment problem wasn't caused by Koko, but rather Koko's trainer. You see, Koko was first exposed to human breasts by the trainer. As could be predicted, Koko developed a boobie fetish and demanded to see boobs. Now, when a gorilla demands to see your boobs what do you do? But anyway, as the litigation goes, the trainer allegedly coerced the other female trainers to show Koko their boobs, too.
IIRC, Koko is a female herself.
...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.
You're arguing nomenclature that's standard in just about every quantum mechanics course taught in the world. You're arguing nomenclature that was established by the fathers of quantum physics. At this point, it's accepted terminology and you aren't gonna change it. An observation is the same as a measurement is the same as an interaction that can be represented mathematically via an operator. Get over it.