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miscellanea
Apr. 5th, 2009 11:27 pmWe've been watching more West Wing, and being impressed by the characterisations in that show, but, gah! Either Lord John Marbury is *not* the Earl of Marbury, or the Earl of Marbury is *not* Lord John. Did no-one on the script-writing team read Dorothy L Sayers? Did Roger Rees not know any better? I say again, gah!
In other news, apparently chickens can do sums.
Chickens do math: Another case of eerily intelligent birds. This is case of some clever experimental design. The authors managed to get newly hatched chicks to imprint on plastic spheres, which has an interesting consequence: apparently, when faced with collections of identical spheres, they'll head for the larger group. With the chicks properly trained, the authors then determined they could count by moving two sets of the spheres behind opaque screens as the chick watched. Once released, the chicks consistently headed for the screen that obscured the larger number of items. To test for math skills, the authors then started moving items between the screens as the chickens watched, and found that they still went to the location with more of the items.
No wonder they outlasted the dinosaurs.
That was found on http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/04/weird-science-nagging-mothers-and-chicken-mathematicians.ars, where there are also toad-eating ants and another good excuse for an espresso.
In other news, apparently chickens can do sums.
Chickens do math: Another case of eerily intelligent birds. This is case of some clever experimental design. The authors managed to get newly hatched chicks to imprint on plastic spheres, which has an interesting consequence: apparently, when faced with collections of identical spheres, they'll head for the larger group. With the chicks properly trained, the authors then determined they could count by moving two sets of the spheres behind opaque screens as the chick watched. Once released, the chicks consistently headed for the screen that obscured the larger number of items. To test for math skills, the authors then started moving items between the screens as the chickens watched, and found that they still went to the location with more of the items.
No wonder they outlasted the dinosaurs.
That was found on http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/04/weird-science-nagging-mothers-and-chicken-mathematicians.ars, where there are also toad-eating ants and another good excuse for an espresso.