And on the 29th day, GingerMan rested

Yeah, no leap year this time around! So, this post (my 29th of the month) is just gravy.

But, pretty cute still...

Unbearable Cuteness Alert

Tiger cub plays in the snow.

The Loss of a Dog

Bill Simmons lost his dog recently:

The day after The Dooze left us, our little boy woke up and my wife carried him downstairs to feed him like she always does. I was still half asleep and could hear her footsteps. Then I heard this: "Day-zee. Day-zee."

That part didn't make me sad. The part that made me sad happened three mornings later ... when my wife was carrying him downstairs again and he didn't say anything.

Sadie is only 4 and in perfectly good health (knock on wood), but it was hard as hell to read this.

I love my dog :)

Disguise yourself to fool our avian overlords

I wrote previously about an interesting experiment with a NYU researcher who taught crows (through Skinnerian behavioral modeling) to drop coins into a vending machine for peanuts.

Find below a video of him describing the intelligence of crows in greater detail.

Paraphrased from below:

At the University of Washington they were doing some experiments a few years ago where they were catching some crows on campus. Some students went out and netted some crows, brought them in, weighed them and measured them and let them back out again.

And, they were entertained to discover that, for the rest of the week, whenever these particular students walked around campus, these crows would caw at them, and run around them and generally work to make their life miserable.

They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week after that... and the next month... and after summer break... until they finally graduated and left campus and when they came back sometime later, they found that the crows still remembered them.

So, the moral of the story being don't piss off crows. Now, students at UW who are studying crows do so with a giant wig and a big mask.

Really amazing description of their adaptive behavior at the 5:00 mark.

Wait till they get a few credit cards

NYU graduate student prepares crows for the first stage of world avian domination...

The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he’d created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. The Binghamton crows quickly learned that dropping nickels and dimes into the slot produced peanuts, and the most resourceful members of the flock began looking for more coins. Within a month, Klein had a flock of crows scouring the ground for loose change.

Something about the creativeness of animals is always very reassuring to me. Seeing such inventiveness (and in other contexts kindness) expressed, even beyond the boundaries of humanity, seems to speak to the great possibilities and openness that the future affords to us all.

Merry Christmas!! Dog Reindeer edition

Credit to Andrew Sullivan for this link, but I couldn't help stealing it for my blog as well.

Merry Christmas to everyone and I hope you are having half as much fun as this dog.

Cat Elevator Ride