Went missing 10 years ago

[rcjordan]

Inventor Trains Crows to Find Money

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87878028

More minions, NO taxman.

[ergophobe]

>>March 4, 2008

I suspect this just popped back up into your feed now because Nat Geo just ran a huge story on birds called Braniacs because, as it turns out, some of them are damn smart and corvids* are the smartest.

The interesting thing is that the idea that birds are dumb was because a century (?) ago some researcher dissected the brains and didn't find a frontal cortex and assumed they were dumb. A researcher in the 1950s did amazing experiments to show how smart they were, but *she* (probably not an incidental detail) was attacked by the scientific establishment for anthropomorphizing and over interpreting the data.

More recently, though, she's been pretty much vindicated and, among other things, they discovered that
- bird brains have a completely different structure (they said mammalian brains are arranged like club sandwiches and bird brains are arranged like pizza, which may be the least helpful scientific metaphor I know).
- bird brains have a much, much higher neural density. So they have a lot more brainpower per gram than we do, which is why their small brains can get so damn smart.


*crows, ravens, jays, clarks nutcrackers, etc

[rcjordan]

I think about this guy's 'disappearance' a couple of times a year.  I figure he's living the high life and paying for it with bags of loose change.

>Nat Geo

Not *quite* that highbrow ... recycled gif on reddit of a crow that played with a kitten.

Worth a read:

https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2017/5/17/the-secret-life-of-urban-crows

[rcjordan]

https://mashable.com/2018/08/11/crows-pick-up-garbage/

[ergophobe]

https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows

[rcjordan]

Newfound brain structure explains why some birds are so smart—and maybe even self-aware

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/newfound-brain-structure-explains-why-some-birds-are-so-smart-and-maybe-even-self-aware

[rcjordan]

Boffins show sleight-of-hand tricks to Corvids, find they are smarter than people • The Register

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/15/corvid_tricks_study/

[rcjordan]

"One of the crows is named Waffles. They are, however, minor TikTok celebrities thanks to CrowTok, a small but extremely active niche on the social video app that has exploded in popularity over the past two years."

How to befriend a crow | MIT Technology Review

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/31/1062370/how-to-befriend-a-crow-crowtok-tiktok/

[ergophobe]

Crows are having a moment. That article is starting to pop up in my feeds. I saw it first on The Core, of course.

[rcjordan]

Must be Crow Week...

Crows able to understand the concept of recursion

https://phys.org/news/2022-11-crows-concept-recursion.html

[ergophobe]

the crows were able to pick out the embedded characters without the extra training needed by most of the monkeys...

....and most beginning programmers

[rcjordan]

Found him!

Passive income. hahaha : BeAmazed

https://old.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1695su5/passive_income_hahaha/

[rcjordan]

Son of a...

BirdBox by Robocut - Thingiverse
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4601125

[ergophobe]

According the most recent episode of Outside/In (NHPR), a four-month old raven beat adult chimpanzees on the standard battery of primate cognition tests.