This is Alex the parrot, mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldYkFdu5FJk
Bird brains (2023)
91–100 of 230 posts
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apartment is no good for a cat but suddenly fine for you? It isn’t like it is in human nature to live in a shoebox either. Human nature is to live in the sahel, sleep under the stars, forage, and track game. The office and the apartment is genuinely a prison for the human in their evolved element.
Yes but I can leave whenever I want.
Can you? Leave in the middle of every work meeting next month and see what happens.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#93Makes sense, given that to birds, optimizing for weight is everything. But seeing that the ridiculously smart border collies have a comparatively low density of neurons, clearly there’s more to intelligence than that.
Most people don't know it, but birds actually are optimizing against rotational inertia far more than they're optimizing for mass.
Otherwise they would barely be able to eat or drink; their stomachs are far larger and can be far heavier than their brains.
Why would inertia need to be optimized? Think a little bit.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#94Parrots are definitely smart, but birds generally pack a lot into a small mass. That's required for flight.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but I can leave whenever I want.
Can you? Leave in the middle of every work meeting next month and see what happens.
You are not arguing in good faith. A work meeting is a commitment I made of my own volition and is only possible because I /can/ leave my apartment.
I’ll throw it back at you, maybe if you left that meeting you would find that it had less consequences than you are imagining.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#96I work on some aspects of intelligence in birds, primarily in songbirds. There have been some effort finding general intelligence ("g" cognitive factor) in birds since last 15-20 years. The results have been mixed as you would expect. Animals' intelligence have evolved for survival and designing experiments to test those are quite hard.
Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you? Leave in the middle of every work meeting next month and see what happens.
You are not arguing in good faith. A work meeting is a commitment I made of my own volition and is only possible because I /can/ leave my apartment. I’ll throw it back at you, maybe if you left that meeting you would find that it had less consequences than you are imagining.
The only one who is arguing in bad faith are the ones equating a cat chilling in an apartment to some form of slavery.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#98Birds are highly optimized. For example, all cells contain a full genome. The genomes in birds are a lot smaller - less trash DNA - which saves them weight and generally makes the cells more efficient.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out. Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. T…
If you’ve ever had a cat that is adamant about trying to escape you might feel differently.
> That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#100https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510
One of my all time favourite short stories, with or without intelligent parrots.
Time for me to read it again. This is the Arecibo story, don't miss if you haven't read it before.
"You be good".
Strangely enough, was having a lot of difficulty coaxing google to fetch this link.