Parrots get bored. They're intelligent. They like to have new stimulus. If only you could plop them down in front of a TV. Most of our parrots ignore the TV. They like the sound for a little bit, but without the visual, they get bored and go do something like rip off the bottom foot of wallpaper in the bathroom. No, I'm not kidding, and yes, the bird is still alive.
Only Chauncey watches TV, and he likes Barney and the Teletubbies. Oh, the horror! Pepperberg is trying to create a user interface for a parrot so the bird can surf a "parrot web" (probably a DVD). Screen refresh rates are a problem, as is resolution.
But she couldn't see it. The brain chunks information, and once the cake was registered, when half of it was gone, so was the cake. She couldn't see it. Rotating forced the brain to rechunk the item.
Ridiculous? Certainly.
That's a window into the ridiculous things going on inside your brain.
And yet they always pick up the spear with the same hand. They would hand the spear to a friend in such a way that the spear could be grasped most easily by the proper hand.
I suspect this is more linguistic than biological. In other words, they would say "I only see a half of piece of cake -- the pink half." They would not say the "left half" but it would be the left half that they would see.
It would be interesting to see how a person with such a world-view would respond to a brain injury.
They may not have the verbal constructs, but because the body is bilateral and assymetric, there are internal representations of "left" and "right." How would such a person answer "Which hand do you throw with?"
My parrots would disagree that "left" and "right" are human concepts. They exhibit "footedness" when they examine objects. They have personal biases with regard to spatial preferences. Footedness in parrots is linked to both species and the individual bird. Chauncey, for example, uses a screwdriver with his right foot or out of the right side of his beak. He's not really that smart; he still doesn't know the difference between straight and phillips.
The woman learned to rotate the plate. But knowing the cake was still there did not enable her to percieve the cake. Now, I'm going on Minsky's "Society of Mind" here, but think of the brain as being a bundle of subroutines, and subroutines pass information to each other. A segment of the mind invoved with perceiving "left" died in the woman. Even though she was intelligent and could learn to cope with this damage, she could not gain back all of what she lost. I suppose a damaged driver is the closest example on a computer. I've had situations where the computer knew the printer was there, knew the inks were there, but it lost the ability to print blue. For computers, updating the driver is enough to repair the problem. We can't update "drivers" in the human brain, and some of them are hard-wired in.
The mind is a bizarre creation. We think of ourselves as logical and able to adapt, but anyone with a brain injury or depression understands that our brains lie to us at the best of times, and when something goes wrong, the mind can be downright treacherous.
"Why not just set up a mirror at the end of the plate?"
Interesting try, but...
Try it. Imagine putting a piece of cake with two colors of icing on a plate. With a mirror in back. On the left, the icing is pale blue, on the right it's pink. The cake in the mirror has pale blue on the left and pink on the right. Eat the pink piece. The blue (left) piece is still on the left in both reality and the image.
Being the owner of parrots, I have a question about this:
Does the concept of "recognizing self by mirror" require the concept of "mirror?" If someone doesn't understand what a mirror does, then they may fail the test but actually be self-aware.
Brain injury patients teach us that there are circuits in the brain for things we wouldn't expect. A stroke patient lost the concept of "left." She could only eat half of a piece of cake in front of her -- her brain wouldn't recognize the other half. She learned to turn the plate, so that a piece of cake would magically appear! Doing this several times, the cake was essentially consumed.
If the concept of "left" can be lost, what about concept of "mirror?" A human may be capable of reasoning out that the person in the mirror must be me, but for creatures that are less intelligent, I'm not so sure.
One of our smarter parrots does not seem to recognize herself in the mirror. She attacks the mirror image. A second parrot seems to understand the concept of "camera." I once connected a video camera directly to the TV and videotaped him -- he began to experiment with moving and watching the parrot on the TV move. All of a sudden, he began to show off and...strut. Ever since then, he shows off for cameras and struts when he sees a photo of himself. He won't strut when he sees a parrot of his own species that is not him. (Note: I don't know if he's cueing on backgrounds to tell if the parrot is him or if he can identify himself.) He's the only parrot in the house that doesn't like anacondas on Animal Planet. Raptors also upset him. Most parrots don't watch TV, the refresh rate is too slow. But somehow he does.
I'd love to know how Alex the Parrot responds to "Who?" when looking at a mirror. One could start out by positioning the mirror so that someone else is visible, someone Alex could name. Then, by changing the angle of the mirror, have Alex look at Alex.
What is it about the scene with the kids where there's the moutains in the background? It did stick out as badly done, but darned if I know what it is that's wrong. My best guess is the gamma on the kids is dramatically different from that on the scenery -- but then wouldn't that happen sometimes in real life (clouds, etc.)?
I still loved the movie, but of course I loved the books.
Deaths occur in racing sports like NASCAR, drag racing, cycling, and even running and triathlons. But what will public perception be the first time it happens in the RRL?
Thank you. I couldn't think of a good example, but that's a classic.
I used to have a book that went over a lot of chemistry that had been discovered and then lost, but the book bought it in the last water leak in the house.
The nice thing about letting the market define "failure" is I don't have to!
I may not know what failure looks like from somoene else's viewpoint.
Of course, I do keep thinking of MS' IE and it's failure to follow standards. I used to design web pages to accomodate IE, but any more, I think that if IE doesn't work right, tough. That's their fault, and I shouldn't waste time correcting their mistakes.
Not really, the big change came mainly out of stealing information & ignoring patents (The last one because of differences in laws between countries and some wars). Those two inspired more companies to license their inventions to others so that they at least would earn some money, and set a minimum productprice which due to the license was hopefully equal or higher to what they sold themselves.
What you're describing was an important innovation, too. I'm looking a bit more back in time, say from ancient history to the Dark Ages.
A lot of things were discovered and lost and rediscovered again. It was miserable for progress.
Before science became accepted, people we would now call magicians and alchemists actually made scientific progress. Unfortunately, their secrets were closely guarded and not always passed down. What someone learned by trial and error was lost to the regular community.
The big change that permitted science to flourish was the willingness to share information. Because the information was shared, progress was not limited to what one person could create.
The failure to use Open Standards won't send us back to the dark ages. But it will slow progress down as each proprietary standard sets up a roadblock.
The failure to follow standards should be punished in some way. Using basic economics isn't fast, but it will work in the long run.
No, not the Robocop wannabe. I'm talking a reanimated computerized corpse with super-strenght and a human brain that takes over and constantly argues with the computer.
So what you're saying is... we need more peers to complete fusion?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of non-break-even fusion reactors...
Some things are not improved by scaling. Now, the more facilities doing quality research with proper funding, the sooner fusion will become a reality. Even there, though, scaling can cause problems, like dilution of the talent pool, limits to funding, etc.
With inertial confinement laser fusion, small pellets of fuel are heated with lasers. Imagine a "tube reactor" (chemical fusion engineering?) where frozen bits of fuel are dropped down a reactor, ignited by lasers as they fall. A working fusion reactor may take on such a shape, giving new meaning to "bit torrent."
It also seems that humor is inversely related to the distance travelled to reach it.
A lot of people say that "Fusion is always thirty years away." This isn't accurate.
With the latest research and technology, controllable fusion is now only always twenty-nine years away. We're making progress.
It reminds me of downloading a file, where the time to completion stays constant as the file is downloaded because the download speed keeps dropping. Either the file is finally completely downloaded at some point or the system hangs. No matter what it always takes far, far longer than it should have.
In two dimensions, gravity only has to cover a circle arc. As you go further away from the source of gravity, the line grows longer proportional to the distance, and gravity has to cover more length. It's an inverse law.
In three dimensions, gravity has to cover a circle. As you go further away from the source of gravity, the circle grows bigger proportional to the square of the distance, and gravity has to cover more area. It's an inverse square law.
The pattern continues as the number of dimensions increases. Gravity keeps getting weaker the more dimensions there are, because there's more to cover as distance increases.
I tried to create a simple explanation of why gravity gets weaker as dimensions increase. You can read it at UnSpace.
The pictures are a little crude, but I think they show the basic concept.
Just because it causes one problem in crickets does not mean it won't cause a different problem in reptiles. For example, if the parasite infests the gut of a lizard and causes minute damage, over time the lizard would not get enough nutrition from it's food.
Reptile husbandry is incredibly difficult. Enticing animals to eat in the first place is often tricky, and their environmental requirements can be surprisingly complex. Finding out that undiscovered infections cause problems wouldn't surprise me.
For our pet birds, we've just found out that a treatment for giardia stops feather plucking and mutilation in the lovebirds -- even though the birds do not show up in lab tests as having a giardia infection. The thought is that the values the labs look for is designed for humans, and avian species may be affected at much lower levels.
I've blogged a peliminary report of our findings at UnSpace.
The drug does not stop plucking in cockatiels, african greys, and mitred conures.
(BTW: We switched from keeping reptiles to keeping birds because of the difficulty in keeping the reptiles healthy.)
In the past, we've kept reptile and amphibian pets. To feed them, we purchased crickets. The crickets were positively suicidal. If any significant water source was available, they would jump in and drown.
Now I know why.
I know the juvenile nematomorphs are supposed to only parasitize insects and the adults are free living, but I wonder if they had any effect on the reptiles that ingested the crickets? Reptiles are difficult enough to keep without worrying about some sub-clinical infection or infestation.
They couldn't possibly have filmed this movie on a sound stage.
They obviously sent real astronauts to the moon to film this, and they're only telling us it was filmed on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
It works! No one ever talks about Area 50!
Parrots get bored. They're intelligent. They like to have new stimulus. If only you could plop them down in front of a TV. Most of our parrots ignore the TV. They like the sound for a little bit, but without the visual, they get bored and go do something like rip off the bottom foot of wallpaper in the bathroom. No, I'm not kidding, and yes, the bird is still alive.
Only Chauncey watches TV, and he likes Barney and the Teletubbies. Oh, the horror! Pepperberg is trying to create a user interface for a parrot so the bird can surf a "parrot web" (probably a DVD). Screen refresh rates are a problem, as is resolution.
Ridiculous? Certainly.
That's a window into the ridiculous things going on inside your brain.
Happy Holidays and Happy "Ok, I can't believe I'm saying this but maybe a little global warming wouldn't be so bad"
I suspect this is more linguistic than biological. In other words, they would say "I only see a half of piece of cake -- the pink half." They would not say the "left half" but it would be the left half that they would see.
They may not have the verbal constructs, but because the body is bilateral and assymetric, there are internal representations of "left" and "right." How would such a person answer "Which hand do you throw with?"
The woman learned to rotate the plate. But knowing the cake was still there did not enable her to percieve the cake. Now, I'm going on Minsky's "Society of Mind" here, but think of the brain as being a bundle of subroutines, and subroutines pass information to each other. A segment of the mind invoved with perceiving "left" died in the woman. Even though she was intelligent and could learn to cope with this damage, she could not gain back all of what she lost. I suppose a damaged driver is the closest example on a computer. I've had situations where the computer knew the printer was there, knew the inks were there, but it lost the ability to print blue. For computers, updating the driver is enough to repair the problem. We can't update "drivers" in the human brain, and some of them are hard-wired in.
The mind is a bizarre creation. We think of ourselves as logical and able to adapt, but anyone with a brain injury or depression understands that our brains lie to us at the best of times, and when something goes wrong, the mind can be downright treacherous.
Interesting try, but...
Try it. Imagine putting a piece of cake with two colors of icing on a plate. With a mirror in back. On the left, the icing is pale blue, on the right it's pink. The cake in the mirror has pale blue on the left and pink on the right. Eat the pink piece. The blue (left) piece is still on the left in both reality and the image.
Our brains do not work the way we think they do. There's a book, titled "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales." The example of the woman who forgot about "left" is in there, or some other book by Oliver Sacks.
(URLs truncated to strip out referals: I'm not trying to make my living off of book referals! The Tinfoil Hat Brigade can relax.)
Does the concept of "recognizing self by mirror" require the concept of "mirror?" If someone doesn't understand what a mirror does, then they may fail the test but actually be self-aware.
Brain injury patients teach us that there are circuits in the brain for things we wouldn't expect. A stroke patient lost the concept of "left." She could only eat half of a piece of cake in front of her -- her brain wouldn't recognize the other half. She learned to turn the plate, so that a piece of cake would magically appear! Doing this several times, the cake was essentially consumed.
If the concept of "left" can be lost, what about concept of "mirror?" A human may be capable of reasoning out that the person in the mirror must be me, but for creatures that are less intelligent, I'm not so sure.
One of our smarter parrots does not seem to recognize herself in the mirror. She attacks the mirror image. A second parrot seems to understand the concept of "camera." I once connected a video camera directly to the TV and videotaped him -- he began to experiment with moving and watching the parrot on the TV move. All of a sudden, he began to show off and...strut. Ever since then, he shows off for cameras and struts when he sees a photo of himself. He won't strut when he sees a parrot of his own species that is not him. (Note: I don't know if he's cueing on backgrounds to tell if the parrot is him or if he can identify himself.) He's the only parrot in the house that doesn't like anacondas on Animal Planet. Raptors also upset him. Most parrots don't watch TV, the refresh rate is too slow. But somehow he does.
I'd love to know how Alex the Parrot responds to "Who?" when looking at a mirror. One could start out by positioning the mirror so that someone else is visible, someone Alex could name. Then, by changing the angle of the mirror, have Alex look at Alex.
What is it about the scene with the kids where there's the moutains in the background? It did stick out as badly done, but darned if I know what it is that's wrong. My best guess is the gamma on the kids is dramatically different from that on the scenery -- but then wouldn't that happen sometimes in real life (clouds, etc.)? I still loved the movie, but of course I loved the books.
Deaths occur in racing sports like NASCAR, drag racing, cycling, and even running and triathlons. But what will public perception be the first time it happens in the RRL?
...scientists today believe they have finally solved the Fermi paradox. "Where are the aliens? Dead, all dead, in piles of radioactive rubble."
Thank you. I couldn't think of a good example, but that's a classic. I used to have a book that went over a lot of chemistry that had been discovered and then lost, but the book bought it in the last water leak in the house.
I may not know what failure looks like from somoene else's viewpoint.
Of course, I do keep thinking of MS' IE and it's failure to follow standards. I used to design web pages to accomodate IE, but any more, I think that if IE doesn't work right, tough. That's their fault, and I shouldn't waste time correcting their mistakes.
What you're describing was an important innovation, too. I'm looking a bit more back in time, say from ancient history to the Dark Ages.
A lot of things were discovered and lost and rediscovered again. It was miserable for progress.
The big change that permitted science to flourish was the willingness to share information. Because the information was shared, progress was not limited to what one person could create.
The failure to use Open Standards won't send us back to the dark ages. But it will slow progress down as each proprietary standard sets up a roadblock.
The failure to follow standards should be punished in some way. Using basic economics isn't fast, but it will work in the long run.
No, not the Robocop wannabe. I'm talking a reanimated computerized corpse with super-strenght and a human brain that takes over and constantly argues with the computer.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of non-break-even fusion reactors...
Some things are not improved by scaling. Now, the more facilities doing quality research with proper funding, the sooner fusion will become a reality. Even there, though, scaling can cause problems, like dilution of the talent pool, limits to funding, etc.
With inertial confinement laser fusion, small pellets of fuel are heated with lasers. Imagine a "tube reactor" (chemical fusion engineering?) where frozen bits of fuel are dropped down a reactor, ignited by lasers as they fall. A working fusion reactor may take on such a shape, giving new meaning to "bit torrent."
It also seems that humor is inversely related to the distance travelled to reach it.
With the latest research and technology, controllable fusion is now only always twenty-nine years away. We're making progress.
It reminds me of downloading a file, where the time to completion stays constant as the file is downloaded because the download speed keeps dropping. Either the file is finally completely downloaded at some point or the system hangs. No matter what it always takes far, far longer than it should have.
The pattern continues as the number of dimensions increases. Gravity keeps getting weaker the more dimensions there are, because there's more to cover as distance increases.
I tried to create a simple explanation of why gravity gets weaker as dimensions increase. You can read it at UnSpace.
The pictures are a little crude, but I think they show the basic concept.
Reptile husbandry is incredibly difficult. Enticing animals to eat in the first place is often tricky, and their environmental requirements can be surprisingly complex. Finding out that undiscovered infections cause problems wouldn't surprise me.
For our pet birds, we've just found out that a treatment for giardia stops feather plucking and mutilation in the lovebirds -- even though the birds do not show up in lab tests as having a giardia infection. The thought is that the values the labs look for is designed for humans, and avian species may be affected at much lower levels.
I've blogged a peliminary report of our findings at UnSpace.
The drug does not stop plucking in cockatiels, african greys, and mitred conures.
(BTW: We switched from keeping reptiles to keeping birds because of the difficulty in keeping the reptiles healthy.)
Now I know why.
I know the juvenile nematomorphs are supposed to only parasitize insects and the adults are free living, but I wonder if they had any effect on the reptiles that ingested the crickets? Reptiles are difficult enough to keep without worrying about some sub-clinical infection or infestation.
They couldn't possibly have filmed this movie on a sound stage. They obviously sent real astronauts to the moon to film this, and they're only telling us it was filmed on Earth.
Wasn't using the laptop. I was sitting at the computer, next to my wife.
If you think going to see a psychologist is tough, try being married to one.
That's another issue entirely. I thought others had already covered it sufficiently. So I stuck with the topic I did.