Thought for today: the Frog –

In Egypt we see the Frog-headed Heket who is an Egyptian goddess of birth(ing).

As a Celtic symbol meaning, the Frog was deemed lord over all the earth, and the Celts believed it represented curative or healing powers because of its connection with water and cleansing rains.

More Western and European views focus on the Frog’s three stages of development (egg, tadpole, fully formed amphibian) to symbolize resurrection and spiritual evolution. For these same reasons it is also a common Christian symbol for the holy trinity and resurrection. It is often seen in Christian art to express this symbolism.

In China the Frog is an emblem of Yin energy and thought of as good luck. Feng Shui practices recommend putting an image of a Frog in the east window of your home to encourage child birth and/or happy family life.

Frog energy is also considered to be a link between the living and the dead. An interesting ancient Asian custom was to place a jade frog in the mouth of the deceased to insure his/her spirit would pass safely into the spirit world. This custom was believed to allow the spirit of the deceased to speak more clearly to loved ones still living.

Frogs are also good luck symbols in Japan - especially for travelers. Images or charms were worn during long voyages to assure safety (particularly across water).

- whatsyoursign.com : Link.

Baltimore Oriole Eating Seed (May 2008)

Copyright 2008 by John Symchych. Used by permission.

Among his many other talents, my friend and collaborator John Symchych is an excellent photographer, and I’m pleased to share his work here. He writes:

Here’s a picture of a Baltimore Oriole eating seed from our bird feeder. They normally eat insects and fruit (can be attracted with grape jelly), and are not know to eat seed. I will be going out to The Wild Bird store today to purchase some more already shelled seed to help them out. We are seeing other species that are also feeding on seed as well.”

It’s a hungry year for songbirds: late spring snowstorms, delayed plant growth, not enough food for the early migrators. Minnesota DNR has received reports of dead or dying swallows, bluebirds, and other birds from around the state. Some years this happens: the DNR expect the bird populations to recover.
Link to article @ MPR.

For more of John’s photos, see JES Photography @ Flickr: Link.

Wilderbeest 3

Full size image

My latest graphic design. I started with a photograph of wilderbeest –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wilderbeest.jpg

– and then inflicted various transformations on the image.

I’m reminded of a song:

An old cowpoke went riding out
One dark and windy day,
Upon a ridge he rested as
He went along his way,
When all at once a mighty herd
Of red eyed cows he saw,
A-plowin’ through the ragged skies
And up a cloudy draw.

Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo,
Ghost herd in the sky.

Their brands were still on fire and
Their hooves were made of steel,
Their horns were black and shiny and
Their hot breath he could feel,
A bolt of fear shot through him as
He looked up in the sky,
For he saw the riders comin’ hard
And he heard their mournful cry:

Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo,
Ghost riders in the sky ….

- Ghost Riders in the Sky: Link

My housemate Terri posted this ridiculously cute video of her cat Gelly:

The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change

Short fiction by Kij Johnson. Excerpt:

6. One Dog Invents Death.

This is the same dog. She lives in a nice house with people. They do not let her run outside a fence and they did things to her so that she can’t have puppies, but they feed her well and are kind, and they rub places on her back that she can’t reach.

At this time, there is no death for dogs, they live forever. After a while, One Dog becomes bored with her fence and her food and even the people’s pats. But she can’t convince the people to allow her outside the fence.

“There should be death,” she decides. “Then there will be no need for boredom.”

- Kij Johnson: Link.

Via Futurismic.

Interesting idea, nicely realized. The story is a finalist for the 2007 Nebula Award — best wishes Kij!

Reminiscent of The Author of the Acacia Seeds
And Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics by Ursula LeGuin, as well as Our Neural Chernobyl by Bruce Sterling.

The more I learn about crows, the more interesting they become. Joshua Crane is training crows to use coin-operated machines:

The goal of this project is to create a device that will autonomously train crows. Initially we’re training them to deposit dropped coins they find on the ground in exchange for peanuts, but eventually we hope to be able to train them to search and rescue, or to collect garbage, or who knows! For now it’s patent pending and we’re working with a bunch of scientists, artists, and researchers to see how much it can do.

- Joshua Crane: Link.

Via Boing Boing:

Crows are smart and adaptable. For example, they drop nuts on streets so cars run over them, then wait for the traffic signal to change so they can pick up the food. Other crows who see this happen quickly learn how to do this for themselves.

His machine uses Skinnerian training. He put coins and peanuts around the machine. The crows eat the peanut on the feeder tray. Then Joshua took away the nuts and left coins in the feeder tray. It pisses off the crows. They sweep the coins around with their beaks, looking for food. When a coin accidentally drops into the slot, it dispenses a peanut. Next, Joshua took away the coins. The crows learned to find coins elsewhere and deposit them.

So now he wants to train crows for search and rescue, picking up trash, and other mutually beneficial tasks.

Mark Frauenfelder @ Boing Boing: Link.

“Dreams … are a training ground in which animals and people alike go over the behaviors that are key to their survival.”
- Antti Revonsuo

A recent project involved dream deprivation in rats. The rats were placed in an environment where they could get no REM sleep. Within several days, they lost their basic survival instincts — even when jacked up on amphetamines.

Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo believes the marooned rats lost their ability to defend themselves not because they were exhausted but because they were robbed of their dreams. Dreams, he contends, are a training ground in which animals and people alike go over the behaviors that are key to their survival. Prevented from dreaming, the rats were unable to rehearse their survival behaviors. In other words, they were defenseless because they were out of practice.

… In the ancestral environment, Revonsuo reasoned, our dreams served to protect us, teaching us how to respond when a wild animal was chasing us or when we got lost in the forest. That was why the dream world was so filled with peril: to simulate the potential threats and prepare us to react quickly ….

Revonsuo believes that by providing rehearsal, dreaming helps us recognize dangers more quickly and respond more efficiently. We don’t need to be aware of this rehearsal, just as you don’t have to recall exactly where you practiced your tennis serve in order to reap the rewards.

- Jay Dixit, Psychology Today: link.

Via SlashDot:

We have 300 to 1,000 threat dreams per year — one to four per night and just under half are aggressive encounters: physical aggression such as fistfights, and nonphysical aggression such as verbal arguments. Faced with actual life-or-death situations — traffic accidents, terrorist attacks, street assaults — people report entering a mode of calm, rapid response, reacting automatically, almost without thinking. Afterward, they often say the episode felt unreal, as if it were all a dream. ‘Dreaming is a sensitive system that tries to pay much attention to the threatening cues in our environment,’ Revonsuo says. ‘Their function is to protect and prepare us.’

“When he got the job 33 years ago, the rats were no match for the catchers. Government service attracted India’s brightest in those days, and Mumbai was still clean enough to starve rats of the garbage on which they snacked. But in three decades, India has turned inside out, and so has the equation between catchers and rats.”

Mr. Harda is admired by his colleagues as the last of the great Mumbai rat catchers. His is a dying breed in a city whose dreams of being rat-free recede year by year.

… But Mr. Harda is an Indian Sisyphus. When he got the job 33 years ago, the rats were no match for the catchers. Government service attracted India’s brightest in those days, and Mumbai was still clean enough to starve rats of the garbage on which they snacked. But in three decades, India has turned inside out, and so has the equation between catchers and rats.

Private-sector jobs in call centers and software firms beckon, and the government struggles to attract men of Mr. Harda’s caliber. Many rat-catching posts lie vacant. Meanwhile, Mumbai has metastasized from a genteel city of a few million into a grimy megalopolis of 17 million. More than half of the population lives in shanties surrounded by garbage — and, consequently, by rats.

[Link: New York Times: ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Published: July 20, 2007]

Insect meets machine: “The HI-MEMS program is aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis. “

Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS)

… The HI-MEMS program is aimed to develop technology that provides more control over insect locomotion, just as saddles and horseshoes are needed for horse locomotion control.

The goal of the MEMS, inside the insects, will be to control the locomotion by obtaining motion trajectories either from GPS coordinates, or using RF, optical, ultrasonic signals based remote control …. The intimate control of insects with embedded microsystems will enable insect cyborgs, which could carry one or more sensors, such as a microphone or a gas sensor, to relay back information gathered from the target destination.

[Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]

Fox News reports on military moth cyborgs:

… This will be no ordinary moth.

Inside it will be a computer chip that was implanted when the creature was still a pupa, in the cocoon, meaning that the moth’s entire nervous system can be controlled remotely.

… The moth will be capable of landing … without arousing suspicion, all the while beaming video and other information back to its masters via what its developers refer to as a “reliable tissue-machine interface.”

The creation of insects whose flesh grows around computer parts — known from science fiction as cyborgs — has been described as one of the most ambitious robotics projects ever conceived by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Rod Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is involved with the research, said in a speech last week at the University of Southampton in England that robotics was increasingly at the forefront of U.S. military research.

… “This is going to happen,” said Brooks. “It’s not science like developing the nuclear bomb, which costs billions of dollars. It can be done relatively cheaply.”

“Moths are creatures that need little food and can fly all kinds of places,” he continued. “A bunch of experiments have been done over the past couple of years where simple animals, such as rats and cockroaches, have been operated on and driven by joysticks, but this is the first time where the chip has been injected in the pupa stage and ‘grown’ inside it.”

“Once the moth hatches,” Brooks said, “machine learning is used to control it.”

[Fox News]

More details:

The latest research aims to integrate micro-systems within insects during their early stages of metamorphoses. Thus the insect would grow around its machine implant with the aim of delivering more reliable results than through the adhesive bonding of electromechanical systems to adult insects (ie. using a kind of “back-pack” that can be connected to the adult insect as the control interface).

Chemical “training” of insects and attempts to use neural interfaces to control insects has also been investigated but these approaches have faced difficulty in overcoming behavioral traits such as mating and feeding.

The perceived benefit of integrating the MEMS during the early stages of tissue growth is that the insect will heal wounds and re-align internal organs around these tiny foreign objects to form a reliable tissue-machine interface. The locomotion of the insect could then be controlled using one of several approaches including direct electrical muscle stimulation, electrical stimulation of neurons, projection of pheromones, stimulation of insect sensory cells and optical cues.

The specific goals of the DARPA proposal include the delivery of an insect to within five meters of a specific target located a hundred meters away using electronic remote control or GPS navigation, the ability to control the insect so that it remains stationary until otherwise instructed and the successful transmission of data pertaining to the local environment through video, microphones or other sensors. The project also aims to develop ways of “scavenging” the biological properties of the insect to power these capabilities. And its not just flying insects like moths that are being targeted in the new research. DARPA envisions that insects that hop and swim could also prove valuable in attaining these objectives.

[Gizmag]

See Also:

Times Online

You can lead a horse to water

But if you want to drown it

You have to do it with your own two hands.

A thought for today: Three in the Morning

When we wear out our minds, stubbornly clinging to one partial view of things, refusing to see a deeper agreement between this and its complementary opposite, we have what is called “three in the morning.”

What is this “three in the morning?”

A monkey trainer went to his monkeys and told them: “As regards your chestnuts: you are going to have three measures in the morning and four in the afternoon.

At this they all became angry. So he said: “All right, in that case I will give you four in the morning and three in the afternoon.” This time they were satisfied.

The two arrangements were the same in that the number of chestnuts did not change. But in the one case the animals were displeased, and in the other they were satisfied. The keeper had been willing to change his personal arrangement in order to meet objective conditions. He lost nothing by it!

The truly wise man, considering both sides of the question without partiality, sees them both in the light of Tao.

This is called following two courses at once.

[Thomas Merton: The Way of Chuang Tzu, Shambala Pocket Classics]

Image: THE MONKEY TRAINER
India, Bengala, Region of Chandraketugarh
2nd-1st c. BC
Terracotta, 15.5” by 21”
asianart.com: Link

USA Today reports:

TOKYO (AP) … A flock of [crows] dressed in soccer jerseys showed off their dribbling and shooting skills at a Japanese zoo as football fever gripped the nation.

The four young carrion crows at Tokuyama Zoo in western Japan used their beaks to dribble a miniature ball toward a soccer goal, sometimes tackling each other for possession before scoring, according to head zookeeper Satoru Tanaka.

The crows get tidbits every time they score, Tanaka said.

“We tried to coach owls and falcons as well, but the crows were the best. They’re such intelligent creatures,” he said.
[Link]

Via Fark

My brother the archaeologist sent me these comments about his work:

Dog burials have come up in our work in Kazakhstan on Botai culture sites. The Botai lived in pit houses whose door opened to the southwest. Outside the door, they would bury two sacrificed dogs, presumably as symbolic or supernatural guardians. If you look in the attached image showing a magnetic map of Botai houses, you will see pairs of small magnetic highs to the southwest of the larger (but weaker) square pit-houses. These have not been tested, but it is imagined that these pairs of anomalies may be dog sacrifices.

The Botai culture, by the way, are candidates for having been the earliest horse domesticators, and also (more speculatively) proto Indo-Europeans.

See also:

• Ritual Dog Burials @ USA Today
• Dog @ Wikipedia
• Burial @ Wikipedia
• Community Organisation Among Copper Age Sedentary Horse Pastoralists Of Kazakhstan — Sandra Olsen, Bruce Bradley, David Maki And Alan Outram — Pending

People, Pets, Games:

Metazoa Ludens is the new computer gaming environment which allows pets to play mixed reality games with humans via custom built technologies and applications. The unstoppable progression of emerging technologies enables us to experience and to create new spaces, architectures, and situations that not only shape us, but which presently and also futuristically define parameters and standardizations of the quality of our lives. The structures, the core, or the code of technology determine its outcomes. Humans can mostly passively map and analyze the data that is coming as the result of the technological implications on societies. Metazoa Ludens searches for new moments that can change and beneficially solve this problem by placing animals as one of the new elements in this cycle. How can a living creature make changes to the very developed, robust, and not easy to change technologically driven systems? What are the possible [un]expected outcomes of this combination? To answer these questions, the Metazoa Ludens team creates simulations, analytic models, and prototypes that will bear new results and implications. The first game enables hamsters to have a superior position compared to the humans’ position in the game. The overall aims for these types of games are to provide new beneficial relations, communications, interactions, progressions, and the evolution of the Metazoa species.

Link (via We Make Money, Not Art).

Tiger salamander — “Squiggly”.