Chatting and Cheating Chooks

So I've known for a while after seeing "Cheating Chooks" that: "Chickens are underrated. In fact, they have a complex communication system which includes over 20 different signals, and the males at least are practiced in the art of deceit."

Late last year Chris Evan's reported that chooks have representational language, "This shows that the call triggers other chickens to look for specific information – in this case, whether or not they already know there is food about – and to respond appropriately, researchers claim. This is similar to how human language works, they say.

Such “representational” communication has been demonstrated in some primates before, but never in a bird."

Sheeple

Happy sheep (mp3) "There are more than 110-million sheep in Australia. Almost 3-and-a-half million are exported overseas every year. In a bid to allay public concern about sheep welfare, a group of CSIRO scientists in NSW is working on a rather unusual project.

They're trying to work out how to tell if a sheep is happy."

Firstly, they have been able to train sheep to press a lever when they were discontent and they also found that sheep have a sense of time.

Now to the point, when sheep are in a paddock without shade they will just be distributed throughout the paddock. However, if they are hot (discontent) and there are trees they will obviously move to the shade. So it's difficult to tell the difference between a discontent sheep that has no other option or a content sheep. If there is an alternative and they are discontent then they will move to the better alternative.

Dog vs Cat

So maybe killing other human beings in the name of religion is bad, but at least people can defend themselves, I came across, "Dogs in Islam", which says, "Last Ramadaan, I wrote an article highlighting the phenomenon whereby misinformed Muslims took their dogs (and/or cats) to the animal hospitals or mobile clinics during Ramadaan, to have them put to death by lethal injection. The reason given by the majority of these Muslims was that Islam forbids them to keep a dog."

"Healthy, happy animals belonging to Muslims are also brought in to be put to death. This is a very disturbing and un-Islamic action..."

Not that Christians are much better, the most famous being Descartes and his views that animals can't feel pain. His views were used to justify cruel experiments that were performed on animals. At the same time he is said to have had a pet dog that he appreciated, I always thought "Descartes' Dog" would be a good title for a book.

Dog's saliva has a bactericidal effect on E. coli and S. canis, whereas cat saliva can cause Cat-Scratch Disease. Of course, they both eat rather suspect things and don't brush their teeth so it's not all good.

Also, dogs and cats can make their own vitamin C. Does that show a bias or just a cunning plan? The point of my initial Googling was to work out why my dog's food had all kinds of ingredients but not vitamin C. I came across these other interesting facts in the process.

Burst of Links

• As everyone knows OS X's default behaviour is to replace a folder not merge it. Luckily, there's Apple's free FileMerge utility.


• Peter Singer: The Ethics of What We Eat mentioning his books "Unsanctifying Human Life: Essays on Ethics" and "The Way We Eat : Why Our Food Choices Matter" - providing more than one example of the differences between moral and religious. His entry on animals also reinforces this. His essay "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" reminded me of the recent Richard Curtis movie "The Girl In The Café".


• The Asymmetric Web "Then began an awful period - which continues to this day, sadly -- of companies developing intranet applications and then concluding, erroneously, that the application can be deployed on the Web by just flicking the proverbial switch."


• Redux: Enterprise Software Licensing on Life Support "...by 2008 conventional software licenses will account for less than 10% of total revenues for all software companies, and less than 20% for leading enterprise search vendors..."


• Converting Between XML and JSON "In an ideal world, the resulting JSON structure can be converted back to its original XML document easily. Thus it seems worthwhile to discuss some common patterns as the foundation of a potentially bidirectional conversion process between XML and JSON."


• On First-Order-Logic Databases "We have demonstrated an equivalence between dependency statements (or functional dependencies) of a relational database on the one hand and of implicational statements of propositional logic on the other hand." Hopefully this means what I think it means.