from wooster collective

The Cow

There was a cow that lived on a farm. She was young but very smart. She was smart enough to know that ‘farm’ meant ‘place where they will kill my children.’ How she got that smart she could only guess, but with nothing much else to do, she spent a lot of time thinking. She knew the patterns of the farm: She saw the other cows were scared of the barking dog, She knew when gates were opened and closed, She knew the bulgy eyed guy was lazy and opened both of the gates for a time instead of opening one – moving the cows through it – closing it – opening the next one – and then moving the cows through, as the others did. In short, she knew she could escape. “But where would I go?” she thought “There are so many fences, there is no longer a meaningfully definable ‘outside’. “For example” she reasoned “pick any fenced in area, and call that the outside – then everything else is inside. In other words, the space outside all of the worlds fences was of a similar size as all the areas within them. They effectively fenced in that last space without having to do anything.” With no outside, where could she go?

She chewed her cud and thought.

Dean Kamen redeems himself

Here’s a video of Dean Kamen (of segway (in)fame(y)). I’m kidding about redeeming himself of course – the segway is pretty dumb, but he made his money designing hospital equipement and aritficial hearts and stuff, so he can make a kind of dumb scooter if he wants to. And a really great arm also apparently.

I think this paperpong book is pretty funny

(the image is a link)

He made it with a python script and you can buy it for your coffee table on amazon

Crows

TED talk about how smart crows are.

One of my thousand imagined lives is to be an animal intelligence researcher – inventing tests to test the ways animals think. I learned in an intro to cognition class once about the following such test:

The testers sit someone down in front of a computer that shows a picture: either the letter ‘F’ or the mirror image of an F. The trick is that the F’s are shown rotated through some angle, 180º say – so that they are upside down, or 90º – so that they appear on their side, etc. The game is to decide if its a real ‘F’ facing the right way or if its the mirror image, and to push a button if its real. They time people doing this, and it turns out that the time it takes people to decide is proportional to the angle – the idea being that people are rotating the ‘F’ in their minds to get it upright in its usual position to see which way its facing. We also know that they are doing this because we can ask them and they tell us (not that people always know what they are doing, but anyway it makes sense so we believe them). The crazy thing is that if you do this same test with pigeons they have a completely flat response – no matter the angle, upright, upside down, whatever – it takes the same time. Now we don’t know what they are thinking, because we can’t ask them, but it seems they’re better at dealing with things at crazy angles – maybe because they fly around and land on things at different angles or something. Now, we could argue about this interpretation, and how to test this more conclusively etc., but now we’re thinking like animal intelligence researchers – and it seems pretty fun!

Anyway, in this TED talk, the crows are very smart – one of them apparently *invents* the hook right in front of us on video! That’s right – it doesn’t just make a hook, but invents one. And in japan the crows in one town use cars to crack nuts by dropping them in the street to be run over (i’ve seen seagulls do something similar with clams on rocks at the beach) but the really cool thing is that they wait for light to turn red before going out in the street to get their cracked nut! Anyway, the guy in the video built a vending machine for peanuts and trained some wild crows to find lost coins and drop them in the machine to get peanuts. I had a teacher try to get me to build a machine to teach squirrels to play tic-tac-toe once (all i ended up making was a machine that played tic-tac-toe – pretty lame) but the guy says squirrels couldn’t figure out his vending machine, so it was probably too ambitious anyway.

Lost parrot tells veterinarian his address

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080521/ap_on_fe_st/odd_japan_parrot_returns

“I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.
The Nakamura family told police they had been teaching the bird its name and address for about two years.
But Yosuke apparently wasn’t keen on opening up to police officials.
“I tried to be friendly and talked to him, but he completely ignored me,” Uemura said.

“We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we’ve found Yosuke,” Uemura said.

Wall Animation

via the wooster collective

The Frogs

my 55 word story ‘The Frogs’ is now up at the 55 word section of Birdandmoon.com!

The Frogs

The rest of the site is very cool so you should check it out.

my first song

I made this little song a while ago – I’ve been toying with the idea of making some music and I have ideas I’m excited about but it’s going to take some time.

my-first-song.mp3

ps: if you know how i could stream this instead of linking to it please tell me.

Youngme/Nowme

http://colorwar2008.com/submissions/youngnow