Posts Tagged "mirror"
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Animal intelligence & consciousness: the mirror test
Analytics and mirrors: While the ability to recognize ones reflection in a mirror appears to be an excellent test of animal intelligence (and perhaps a hint about machine intelligence), with very few animals passing the test, humans have appreciated mirrors for millennia. Sacred objects in some cultures (e.g., ancient Japan), mirrors have been cherished for at least 6000 years, since at least the beginning of the Bronze Age. Shown here is an ancient Etruscan Bronze mirror #handle from the 4th–3rd century BC on display in the Lourve museum collection near Paris in France. The piece is titled, appropriately enough, “The Judgement of Paris.” It’s easy enough to see where humans got the idea for mirrors, as we’ll show in our next photo. This is also a great segue into our Halloween posts. (This was originally posted on our IG feed as part of a series of Halloween posts.) Other than smoke and mirrors, or a room full of mirrors, what do mirrors have to do with Halloween?… Read the restAnimal consciousness: is this bird human-like?
Does this bird have levels of animal consciousness comparable to a human? Unlike the ‘bird brained’ giant chicken we featured in our last post (aka the dinosaur T-rex), this Eurasian magpie has one of the highest brain/body ratios, comparable to a gorilla. Magpies are reputed for their intelligence. (They taunt other animals and are so famed for stealing shiny objects the Italian composer Rossini wrote an opera about them, “The Thieving Magpie.”) The Ted talk linked from our post on the singularity talks about brain/body ratios. Metabolism slows down in larger organisms to reduce heat dissipation, which is why it is the brain/body ratio that determines intelligence, not the size of the brain. (T-rex had a huge brain but there are all sorts of indications it was incredibly stupid despite being one of the smarter dinosaurs. It’s brain/body ratio was incredibly tiny.) Magpies are one of only about ten animals know for certain to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror (Wikipedia: mirror test).… Read the restSextant: data and historical old ship GPS navigation
Continuing from our last post on models of historic civilizations and data, we’re drawing a line from Carl Sagan to the Conquistadors (and modern TV documentaries’ theories about them). This historic photo is an antique sextant from 1890. This historical navigation device worked by measuring the angle between the sun (or stars) and horizon using two mirrors. It was the GPS (or Apple Maps) of its day. And, as we learned from Apple Map’s initial glitches, then as now, successful navigation required a lot of information (or data) to work correctly! Since the Internet didn’t exist, this data had to arrive by some other means, which we’ll talk about in a future post. (So we’re also continuing on our earlier mirror theme.) The use of two mirrors’ reflection to align the image of the object with the horizon (when the sextant was set at the correct angle) enabled accurate measurements when on a moving platform, such as by a sailor on a boat at sea.… Read the restDolphin with wearable computer?
Finishing up our mirror animal consciousness theme, we promised one last very special animal (or group). This is it. Cetaceans, which includes dolphins, are the last of the currently known very small group of highly intelligent animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror. (All of the others are mammals, with the exception of magpies. We started off with extinct mammoths, who are closely related to elephants, then went through magpies and great apes, with a lot of mirror photos along the way.) The actual animal that passed the mirror test is the bottlenose dolphin (shown here), but it is believed all cetaceans can pass the test. Cetaceans include dolphins, whales, and porpoises, known to be some of the most animals out there. This particular leaping bottlenose dolphin is named K-Dog, and has been trained by the in mine-clearing operations by the US Navy. Many people (and some bloggers) erroneously believe chimps are the second smartest animal after humans.… Read the restRecent Posts
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