moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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(and my Wish List)

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Corvid v Primate  

Corvid v Primate

Re Tool Use in non-Primates
Behavioural Ecology Research Group, Oxford Uni
Tool Use in Corvids
users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/tools_main.shtml
Alexander Weir, Jackie Chappell, Ben Kenward and Alex Kacelnik

This page includes links some movies of Betty the New Caledonian Crow making & using tools.

There's also a "laymen's" report in PDF format at www.theweeklyreport.com/Newsletters/Aug12.pdf , Science (9 August 2002), 'Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows' by Alexander Weir, Jackie Chappell and Alex Kacelnik

... Showing an extremely rare capacity for an animal to understand cause and effect and create a tool out of non-natural material, the female crow bent straight garden wire -- a material she had only seen before on cage meshes -- into a hook ...
The only time in 10 experiments when Betty did not make a hook out of the wire was when her male companion Abel managed to bring the food up with straight wire. On other occasions, he waited for Betty to bring out the food then stole it from her ...

[permalink] posted by Mez at 2:05 pm