My kennel dogs, that aren't even particularly trained, figure out stuff like "that's a DIFFERENT plain white T-shirt, you must be going to town!" and act accordingly. They are VERY observant. Figuring out a pager, phone, etc. -- pretty much to be expected.
They will even figure out a basic calendar, such as "you always go to town on Thursday" and will proceed to remind me if I forget:) (I've noticed their limit for that is about 3 weeks, tho -- a once a month event doesn't seem to be regular enough to get their attention.)
Neutering has a broad array of negative health impacts, which is the main reason to avoid it... but breeding from a mix is at best a crapshoot, and most of the time the results are very disappointing (it's more likely to produce the worst of both worlds than the best). -- Lab is almost always dominant in any cross, and I'd guess most of what you're seeing is the Lab; the Oriental breeds as a rule don't have that sort of interactive intelligence (ie. desire to please and to work FOR the human). If you want to reproduce that, your best bet is a purebred Lab from working bloodlines, or just about any Chesapeake (tho Chessies are not the dog for everyone, and are much less tolerant of training mistakes).
Dobes are near the bottom of the intelligence scale (to the point that many just "turn off" when not actively obeying some command), but they are among the most observant, condition very easily, and are very imitative (even if no brain cells are involved). Seeing you open a door once or twice can be sufficient -- monkey see, monkey do.
I've had a few dogs that tried to imitate human speech, obviously without much success:) so I expect there'd be some that could figure it out, were some sort of "paws to speech" gadget available. I gather there's been some success with something like that with apes.
As a pro trainer, my observation has been that English Bulldogs aren't exactly dumb, but they process very slowly. Which makes them appear dumb if you don't realise the wheels ARE turning, just much more slowly than would, say, a hunting or herding breed -- which were bred for jobs that frequently require split-second decision making.
Obedience trainers' opinions used to be a good metric, but not so much since the advent of food-based training, and OTCH competition meaning anything less than perfection is failure (so a dog that thinks for itself or gets bored with metronome-like routines is often dismissed as dumb). And some of the dumbest dogs *condition to food* the most easily, but do the least thinking (the very definition of conditioning).
For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public
By Jonathan Swift (1729)
an excerpt:
"I have reckoned upon a medium that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, increaseth to 28 pounds.
"I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children."
As a pro dog trainer from way back, I agree -- dogs and cats are livestock, which is to say, property. And the fact that our society has started seeing them as furry children is what will ultimately destroy our ability to own pets, regardless of how any individual views our special relationship with those pets (whatever species that may be in a given culture).
Training and conditioning are diametric opposites. The goal of conditioning is to PREVENT independent thought and to get ONLY the desired response, whereas the goal of training is to ENHANCE thinking ability, channeled so that the desired actions are achieved in the best way possible.
As a general rule, the dumber the dog, the easier it is to condition it. Which make some people mistake ease of conditioning for intelligence, when it's more like filling the void.
A fairly bright dog can achieve about the same vocabulary and ability to put concepts together as a smart 5-6YO human child, including stuff like "helping" that you describe above, or putting their own toys away when done playing with them, or going to look for an absent person. I've even had one dog who tried diligently to train other dogs. And when a smart dog with a good memory lives in a household where it gets talked to a lot (and especially if it is taught how to learn via good training), its vocabulary grows just like a child's will -- and then we get wonder-dogs like yours. A smart dog, but not as unusual as you might think.:)
In my observation, wolves and wolf-hybrids are fairly dumb -- about on a par with the dimmer breeds of dogs, such as the majority of purely pet breeds. Which is indeed about the level of a 2 year old human child. This stands to reason since there hasn't been any intensive selection for intelligence or reasoning power. (Coyotes seem to be somewhat smarter, but as a DNA profile study revealed, a lot of coyotes have domestic dog DNA, dating from about 2000 years ago.)
The bright breeds, those that have been bred for brains and thinking ability and that have to do a specific job that goes against wolf instincts (primarily gundogs and some herding breeds, but most especially Chesapeakes and fieldbred Labradors) are about on a par with a bright 5-6YO human child, and will think every bit as far, up to the point of playing simple practical jokes on unwitting humans.
Trust me, it's a damn good thing for us that Chessies (and some Labs) don't have opposable thumbs.... that, and inability to form words, are probably the real limiting factors, much as they are for Downs syndrome children. And some dogs learn to work around those limits. I have one Lab who can open any door that doesn't lock with a key!
Addiction isn't the need for something. It's the inability to feel normal without it.
That they *have* to self-medicate to feel normal is the very definition of addiction.
Caffeine and nicotine are relatively benign drugs, with relatively minor side effects; if they help stabilize a schizophrenic's brain chemistry, I see no reason why they shouldn't be used as needed. Better to be functional than not.
As to cures, when you find a way to rewrite the DNA-RNA-enzyme chain that leads to defective brain chemistry, let us know. Meanwhile, we'll continue to treat the symptoms, because that's what we can do. (Tho I'd agree that the drugs put forth by the pharmaceutical companies are often more about profit than about effectiveness.)
Addictive behaviour and schizophrenia go together. Nicotine, caffeine, or anything similar would probably have the same effect, by satisfying the addiction.
I haven't looked at MacOS since 9.something (whatever is on the G4 I inherited) but... it drove me insane with its notion of context-sensitivity. You had to know which whatever had changed how just to know where to click. I suppose someone used to the OS thinking for them would like it, but I couldn't stand it!
From the comments, the Ribbon seems to break down into two camps:
Occasional users initially hate it but soon learn to like it.
Those who make their living in M$ Office are more likely to hate it forever.
Myself, I don't want crap moving around on the main function set. If other stuff is going to be context-sensitive, give me Coreldraw-style, killable, dockable toolboxes.
I'm full of weird ideas:) Feel free to fold, staple, spindle, and mutilate them as may seem fit.
Seriously, I think the solution is to look at it as a resource to be harvested (thus potentially profitable to someone, somewhere) rather than as a problem to be cleaned up (which is nothing but an expense to everyone but the chosen contractor).
How would you mine this stuff if it were raw materials? Consider the problem with the same need to not unduly disrupt whatever lives there as one might in any mining operation (sieving/sorting systems already exist that should be adaptable). Could a sidelight be protein harvesting, as cheap food for the aforementioned developing nations? (Only downside I see there is that it would require daily tending. Well, so do fishing nets and lobster pots.)
What is the compressed plastic good for? Building material, for one thing. Even if it doesn't recycle gracefully into anything else, you can still compress it into bricks or planks and glue or nail 'em together, and it's that much less you need in lumber and steel (yet the same people can still be employed in its making). Cheap housing material for people who might not otherwise afford it, very likely most useful to the same developing nations that would find harvesting it profitable.
For that matter, is there any good reason why seagoing barges and seajunk-balers can't eventually be made out of recycled-plastic planks, from the very material they're going forth to harvest?
Tho the first computer I ever had anything to do with was an IBM1620, and it was a big upgrade when we went from punch cards to a paper-tape reader... so maybe I should say "Hello cousin!" instead!;)
Seems to me that's a sieving problem. Progressive sieving and some sort of continuous water wash might handle that (just a pump using the handy ocean water) -- given that the plastic is probably the lowest mass per cubic centimeter of anything that would be seived up, so should be "floatable" away from the fish, krill, etc. Not too different from what any gravel pit does to separate rocks from sand.
As to the scale, see my other post where I speculate that this could be done cheaply if we treat it like baling hay, on a small continuous scale rather than trying to do it all at once (a monunmentally impractical job).
Basically a good idea, but I think you've got the scale wrong. It doesn't need to be done all at once, and would probably benefit from being built as a sustainable project, thus:
Seems to me this would be a good job for small robot vessels, built cheap and disposable. Make a bunch of them. Have them roam the seas scooping up plastic junk. (Surely they can be GPS'd to roam mainly in the affected areas.) Compact the plastic trash into 55-gallon drum sized lumps, tag each lump with a cheap RFID and a tow loop, and drop the lumps behind itself. Essentially they'd be like hay balers, only afloat.
Then the drum-sized lumps (which will probably tend to clump together over time) can be retrieved at leisure for recycling; send out a barge with two guys, a transponder, and a crane-hook once or twice a year to take care of it. (Or if the lumps sink, they become just another rock on the ocean floor.)
Minimal cost, and the pickup/recycling part might make a nice village industry for developing nations. (And if the scoopers can't be automated, build a bunch of them cheap, and hand them over to these same developing countries for use in this seed industry.)
The output size (55 gallon drum size) would be small enough to be no real hazard to other vessels, and manageable for disposal should some wash up on shore.
=======
We used to think that throwing old cars into the ocean was a problem... til we discovered that they become reefs that are a very friendly habitat for all sorts of critters. One has to wonder what has taken up residence in the Plastic Island, and whether it is actually doing harm or good. This probably ought to be looked at. Frex, if they provide shelter for plankton-sized stuff, does that increase the food supply on down the chain??
Scroll down to Pasadena, the one about the bogus school bus. How is that not entrapment?? they have time to block a busy street during rush hour with a BOGUS schoolbus... oh, I see. It's actually about TICKET REVENUE.
[BTW what's with the fucking 5 minute wait between comments now??!]
My college roommate's family had escaped from the Ukraine back in the Iron Curtain era. They remembered "Komrade! Your papers please!" from firsthand experience.
One night in 1973, said roommate was sitting on a curb just watching the sun go down, when a cop came along and demanded that he identify himself. There was no crime in the area, so the cop had NO cause to ask this. And under then-current MT state law, you did not have to identify yourself UNLESS you were on-scene when there was an investigation in progress.
Anyway, long story short, my roommate quite rightfully refused to identify himself, and was consequently arrested and spent the night in jail.
He was released the next day, but it was a lesson on how thin our freedoms really are, should someone in authority want to deny them.
Slashdot Mirror
My kennel dogs, that aren't even particularly trained, figure out stuff like "that's a DIFFERENT plain white T-shirt, you must be going to town!" and act accordingly. They are VERY observant. Figuring out a pager, phone, etc. -- pretty much to be expected.
They will even figure out a basic calendar, such as "you always go to town on Thursday" and will proceed to remind me if I forget :) (I've noticed their limit for that is about 3 weeks, tho -- a once a month event doesn't seem to be regular enough to get their attention.)
Neutering has a broad array of negative health impacts, which is the main reason to avoid it... but breeding from a mix is at best a crapshoot, and most of the time the results are very disappointing (it's more likely to produce the worst of both worlds than the best). -- Lab is almost always dominant in any cross, and I'd guess most of what you're seeing is the Lab; the Oriental breeds as a rule don't have that sort of interactive intelligence (ie. desire to please and to work FOR the human). If you want to reproduce that, your best bet is a purebred Lab from working bloodlines, or just about any Chesapeake (tho Chessies are not the dog for everyone, and are much less tolerant of training mistakes).
Dobes are near the bottom of the intelligence scale (to the point that many just "turn off" when not actively obeying some command), but they are among the most observant, condition very easily, and are very imitative (even if no brain cells are involved). Seeing you open a door once or twice can be sufficient -- monkey see, monkey do.
Not that I've heard of.
I've had a few dogs that tried to imitate human speech, obviously without much success :) so I expect there'd be some that could figure it out, were some sort of "paws to speech" gadget available. I gather there's been some success with something like that with apes.
As a pro trainer, my observation has been that English Bulldogs aren't exactly dumb, but they process very slowly. Which makes them appear dumb if you don't realise the wheels ARE turning, just much more slowly than would, say, a hunting or herding breed -- which were bred for jobs that frequently require split-second decision making.
Obedience trainers' opinions used to be a good metric, but not so much since the advent of food-based training, and OTCH competition meaning anything less than perfection is failure (so a dog that thinks for itself or gets bored with metronome-like routines is often dismissed as dumb). And some of the dumbest dogs *condition to food* the most easily, but do the least thinking (the very definition of conditioning).
Also, we don't euthanize the useless, unwanted, or unsocializable humans; instead we put them on welfare or into prison.
I'm not sure we don't do better by the animals, now that I think about it.
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
A Modest Proposal
For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public
By Jonathan Swift (1729)
an excerpt:
"I have reckoned upon a medium that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, increaseth to 28 pounds.
"I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children."
And don't forget to read the companion cookbook, "To Serve Man" ... here ya go: http://www.amazon.com/Serve-Man-Cookbook-People/dp/1880448823
As a pro dog trainer from way back, I agree -- dogs and cats are livestock, which is to say, property. And the fact that our society has started seeing them as furry children is what will ultimately destroy our ability to own pets, regardless of how any individual views our special relationship with those pets (whatever species that may be in a given culture).
http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/136
http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/21
and so on... all working to promote the view that dogs and cats are "fur children" rather than property (ie. livestock) -- a viewpoint which will ultimately lead to a complete *prohibition* of pet ownership.
So, yes -- for the future of our dogs and cats, it is imperative that we not forget that they are indeed a specialized form of livestock.
[pro dog trainer here, with 40 years at it]
Training and conditioning are diametric opposites. The goal of conditioning is to PREVENT independent thought and to get ONLY the desired response, whereas the goal of training is to ENHANCE thinking ability, channeled so that the desired actions are achieved in the best way possible.
As a general rule, the dumber the dog, the easier it is to condition it. Which make some people mistake ease of conditioning for intelligence, when it's more like filling the void.
A fairly bright dog can achieve about the same vocabulary and ability to put concepts together as a smart 5-6YO human child, including stuff like "helping" that you describe above, or putting their own toys away when done playing with them, or going to look for an absent person. I've even had one dog who tried diligently to train other dogs. And when a smart dog with a good memory lives in a household where it gets talked to a lot (and especially if it is taught how to learn via good training), its vocabulary grows just like a child's will -- and then we get wonder-dogs like yours. A smart dog, but not as unusual as you might think. :)
Pro dog trainer here with 40 years experience.
In my observation, wolves and wolf-hybrids are fairly dumb -- about on a par with the dimmer breeds of dogs, such as the majority of purely pet breeds. Which is indeed about the level of a 2 year old human child. This stands to reason since there hasn't been any intensive selection for intelligence or reasoning power. (Coyotes seem to be somewhat smarter, but as a DNA profile study revealed, a lot of coyotes have domestic dog DNA, dating from about 2000 years ago.)
The bright breeds, those that have been bred for brains and thinking ability and that have to do a specific job that goes against wolf instincts (primarily gundogs and some herding breeds, but most especially Chesapeakes and fieldbred Labradors) are about on a par with a bright 5-6YO human child, and will think every bit as far, up to the point of playing simple practical jokes on unwitting humans.
Trust me, it's a damn good thing for us that Chessies (and some Labs) don't have opposable thumbs.... that, and inability to form words, are probably the real limiting factors, much as they are for Downs syndrome children. And some dogs learn to work around those limits. I have one Lab who can open any door that doesn't lock with a key!
Addiction isn't the need for something. It's the inability to feel normal without it.
That they *have* to self-medicate to feel normal is the very definition of addiction.
Caffeine and nicotine are relatively benign drugs, with relatively minor side effects; if they help stabilize a schizophrenic's brain chemistry, I see no reason why they shouldn't be used as needed. Better to be functional than not.
As to cures, when you find a way to rewrite the DNA-RNA-enzyme chain that leads to defective brain chemistry, let us know. Meanwhile, we'll continue to treat the symptoms, because that's what we can do. (Tho I'd agree that the drugs put forth by the pharmaceutical companies are often more about profit than about effectiveness.)
Addictive behaviour and schizophrenia go together. Nicotine, caffeine, or anything similar would probably have the same effect, by satisfying the addiction.
Did you also see where I suggested that the robots and other pickup boats be built from materials salvaged from the "plastic island"??
OT, but do you have a straight download link for your sig's video? I can't see it as-is and clipnabber doesn't handle the URL. Thanks.
Oh, and I agree with you -- a great deal of this is magic handwaving, rather than informed thought on the part of lawmakers.
I haven't looked at MacOS since 9.something (whatever is on the G4 I inherited) but... it drove me insane with its notion of context-sensitivity. You had to know which whatever had changed how just to know where to click. I suppose someone used to the OS thinking for them would like it, but I couldn't stand it!
From the comments, the Ribbon seems to break down into two camps:
Occasional users initially hate it but soon learn to like it.
Those who make their living in M$ Office are more likely to hate it forever.
Myself, I don't want crap moving around on the main function set. If other stuff is going to be context-sensitive, give me Coreldraw-style, killable, dockable toolboxes.
Coreldraw has used such a toolbox approach for ... about 12 years now? and I'm not sure it was original with them, at that.
When it's done right, it's nice. When it's done wrong, you get Dreamweaver.
I'm full of weird ideas :) Feel free to fold, staple, spindle, and mutilate them as may seem fit.
Seriously, I think the solution is to look at it as a resource to be harvested (thus potentially profitable to someone, somewhere) rather than as a problem to be cleaned up (which is nothing but an expense to everyone but the chosen contractor).
How would you mine this stuff if it were raw materials? Consider the problem with the same need to not unduly disrupt whatever lives there as one might in any mining operation (sieving/sorting systems already exist that should be adaptable). Could a sidelight be protein harvesting, as cheap food for the aforementioned developing nations? (Only downside I see there is that it would require daily tending. Well, so do fishing nets and lobster pots.)
What is the compressed plastic good for? Building material, for one thing. Even if it doesn't recycle gracefully into anything else, you can still compress it into bricks or planks and glue or nail 'em together, and it's that much less you need in lumber and steel (yet the same people can still be employed in its making). Cheap housing material for people who might not otherwise afford it, very likely most useful to the same developing nations that would find harvesting it profitable.
For that matter, is there any good reason why seagoing barges and seajunk-balers can't eventually be made out of recycled-plastic planks, from the very material they're going forth to harvest?
Granddad, is that you? :)
Tho the first computer I ever had anything to do with was an IBM1620, and it was a big upgrade when we went from punch cards to a paper-tape reader... so maybe I should say "Hello cousin!" instead! ;)
An AC informs me that DIP = Drunk In Public
Ah yes, that handy catch-all of yesteryear, for whenever you wished to arrest someone...
The instruction manual we gave my sister at her wedding was very short:
Fuzzy side up
Insert Tab A into Slot B
Worked for them! ;)
(Yes, they're still happily married, 25 years later)
Interesting viewpoint... goes to explain a lot of individual and corporate behaviour, too.
FROOMB! ;)
Seems to me that's a sieving problem. Progressive sieving and some sort of continuous water wash might handle that (just a pump using the handy ocean water) -- given that the plastic is probably the lowest mass per cubic centimeter of anything that would be seived up, so should be "floatable" away from the fish, krill, etc. Not too different from what any gravel pit does to separate rocks from sand.
As to the scale, see my other post where I speculate that this could be done cheaply if we treat it like baling hay, on a small continuous scale rather than trying to do it all at once (a monunmentally impractical job).
Basically a good idea, but I think you've got the scale wrong. It doesn't need to be done all at once, and would probably benefit from being built as a sustainable project, thus:
Seems to me this would be a good job for small robot vessels, built cheap and disposable. Make a bunch of them. Have them roam the seas scooping up plastic junk. (Surely they can be GPS'd to roam mainly in the affected areas.) Compact the plastic trash into 55-gallon drum sized lumps, tag each lump with a cheap RFID and a tow loop, and drop the lumps behind itself. Essentially they'd be like hay balers, only afloat.
Then the drum-sized lumps (which will probably tend to clump together over time) can be retrieved at leisure for recycling; send out a barge with two guys, a transponder, and a crane-hook once or twice a year to take care of it. (Or if the lumps sink, they become just another rock on the ocean floor.)
Minimal cost, and the pickup/recycling part might make a nice village industry for developing nations. (And if the scoopers can't be automated, build a bunch of them cheap, and hand them over to these same developing countries for use in this seed industry.)
The output size (55 gallon drum size) would be small enough to be no real hazard to other vessels, and manageable for disposal should some wash up on shore.
=======
We used to think that throwing old cars into the ocean was a problem... til we discovered that they become reefs that are a very friendly habitat for all sorts of critters. One has to wonder what has taken up residence in the Plastic Island, and whether it is actually doing harm or good. This probably ought to be looked at. Frex, if they provide shelter for plankton-sized stuff, does that increase the food supply on down the chain??
http://www.roadblock.org/roadblocks/ca.htm
Scroll down to Pasadena, the one about the bogus school bus. How is that not entrapment?? they have time to block a busy street during rush hour with a BOGUS schoolbus... oh, I see. It's actually about TICKET REVENUE.
[BTW what's with the fucking 5 minute wait between comments now??!]
Good link, which in turn sent me to roadblock.org, another useful site.
Gotta wonder... if the cops have time to harrass citizens at roadblocks -- DO WE REALLY NEED ALL THOSE COPS??
Absolutely. Couldn't say it better.
My college roommate's family had escaped from the Ukraine back in the Iron Curtain era. They remembered "Komrade! Your papers please!" from firsthand experience.
One night in 1973, said roommate was sitting on a curb just watching the sun go down, when a cop came along and demanded that he identify himself. There was no crime in the area, so the cop had NO cause to ask this. And under then-current MT state law, you did not have to identify yourself UNLESS you were on-scene when there was an investigation in progress.
Anyway, long story short, my roommate quite rightfully refused to identify himself, and was consequently arrested and spent the night in jail.
He was released the next day, but it was a lesson on how thin our freedoms really are, should someone in authority want to deny them.