My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: Part 1 of talking to the animals.

Alex, Talking About Things

Part 1: Birds of a Feather

Ever heard of Alex the grey parrot? Alex could supposedly use language, though his owner, animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, quite cautiously claimed he could use a “two-way communications code.”

That, you know, involved Alex understanding more than a hundred words.

He could identify more than fifty different objects (and could even tell you what color it was or what material it was made of), could count to six, and even knew how to apologize and when it was appropriate.

Alex could invent names for things (he called apples “banerrys,” presumably a combination of banana and cherry, which he was more familiar with).

Every night, as Pepperberg left the lab Alex lived in, he'd tell her, “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

They were the last words he ever spoke to her. He died in his sleep at age 31.

So why, exactly, did Pepperberg refuse to say Alex used language?

Well, it's because of linguists. Or, more precisely: the animal intelligence debate, and the role linguists and animal cognitive scientists play. The debate is a complicated, in-depth, challenging thing, and trying to summarize doesn't do it justice. But I’ll give it a shot.

Essentially: Animal cognitive scientists believe that animals might be capable of using language, while linguists don't. (There are, of course, dissidents on both sides, but those are roughly the camps.)

Alex the grey parrot is hardly alone as evidence for animals being able to speak language. Gorillas and other great apes, for example, have been taught to speak sign language. Dogs and many other domesticated animals can learn extensive commands in human languages, though how much is them actually understanding and how much is them just learning behavioral triggers is a point of massive contention.

All that being said, Alex is the only known animal to have been able to ask questions, so that somewhat leans things back toward the linguist side of the argument, outside of Alex himself.

Here's the tricky bit, though: all of the above are animals trying to speak human languages, not humans trying to understand animal languages.

_________

Next time: Animal Intelligence and Language, Part 2: Groundhog Day

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: see something where nothing exists? It's okay: you're in good company.

Everyone plays the game as kids—the one where you look for objects in clouds, right? Even the least-imaginative kids could at least see sheep. Well, it turns out there's a name for it, and it's actually pretty important.

Whoa

It's called pareidolia. Broadly speaking, this is the brain's ability to perceive a familiar pattern in a stimulus where none actually exists. Other examples: mountainsides that resemble faces and trees that look like people.

People aren't the only entities that experience pareidolia. Computers do it, too. Google has a program called DeepDream that specifically sets out to exploit this, and it produces some really, really weird results. (DeepDream especially sees a lot of dogs.)

Pareidolia is fairly important in science, and it causes a lot of problems in archeology and paleontology. Amateurs are constantly picking up rocks they mistakenly think are arrowheads, dinosaur eggs, or bones. This happens so much that there's a specific name for rocks like this: mimetoliths. This also includes larger rocks, like the mountainsides that look like faces.

Yeah, well.

The most famous applied use of pareidolia is the Rorschach inkblot test, which is supposed to give insight into a person's mental state. A fairly successful tool, we’ve used the Rorschach continually since the early 20th century—fairly astonishing, since psychology has thrown away so much from that time period.

If you're familiar with the tabloid-fodder “Jesus appears on toast” articles, you've stumbled on another example of pareidolia. (And we know a woman who saves pieces of firewood because of, well, all those faces she sees in them. Apparently, they make for good company. We hope she has enough non-faced wood to keep warm this winter.)

It also sees extensive use in art, which is unsurprising. Many optical illusions (like the famous one that could either be a lamp or two faces) are good examples. Leonardo da Vinci wrote about pareidolia as a tool in art. Pareidolia is one of the main reasons cartoons work so well, making it easy for us to assign complex emotions to simple line drawings of people.

Pareidolia isn't good or bad—just reflects an aspect of how our brains interpret the world—but can also lead you astray. This phenomenon is also probably one of the coolest oddities involved in discovering how our brains work.

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: alternative search engines. WolframAlpha'ing, anyone?

Q: What is the average weight of a panda?

A: 170-290 lbs.

Searching for Engines

There are a lot of different search engines out there, but most people never feel the need to go past Google. For the most part, I'm with them. I have discovered a few specialty search engines that I visit on a regular basis. Most of these are simply engines that search inside a specific website, usually Wikipedia. There are a couple exceptions, though. The biggest one is called WolframAlpha.

Q: How many people have the given name McCoy?

A: 1649 estimated to still be alive in the United States.

Strictly speaking, WolframAlpha isn't a search engine at all. It's a computational knowledge engine. Its creator, Stephen Wolfram, designed the engine to answer factual questions by using its curated internal database of information. This is a very different function than search engines, which provide a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer.

Q: Motorcycle traffic in Germany?

A: 11.1 billion vehicle miles per year.

WolframAlpha can perform arithmetic, trigonometry, algebra, and numerous other mathematical functions. It contains population estimates from around the globe. It records weather data from the past in the database. And so this computational knowledge engine can use all of this information, along with its countless volumes of other information, to calculate the answers to a huge number of questions.

Q: Melting point of teflon?

A: 327 degrees Celsius. (620.6 degrees Fahrenheit)

Not to say that Wolfram Alpha is perfect. Its databases don't contain anywhere close to even a significant percentage of human knowledge. It doesn't know the average speed of a turtle, for instance, so you couldn't use it to figure out how long it would take one to cross the United States.

My own computational knowledge engine.

A fun Twitter account I ran into the other day is dedicated entirely to sharing odd questions that Wolfram Alpha can't answer. My personal favorites:

• “Hectares of cotton crops needed to make a superhero cape for every land mammal.”
• “Total work done against gravity to make a cupcake rise while baking it, in calories?”
• “Most common English misspelling that changes the word's Scrabble score by more than 4?”

And knowledge crawls onward…

Q: Anchorage, Alaska weather on 7/7/07?

A: Overcast, 54 to 61 degrees Fahrenheit, wind 0 to 7 mph.

Q: Most frequently erupting volcano?

A: Stromboli, in Italy.

Q: 20 gallons of gloss paint?

A: 14,000 square feet, assuming it has a spreading capacity of 690 square feet per gallon.

Q: How long did the Paleoproterozoic Era last?

A: 900 million years.

Q: x+y=10, x-y=4

A: x=7, y=3

Q: What's the temperature of the solar wind?

A: 31,000 Kelvin.

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: Some nutty blog entry.

That's me, looking for cashews.

Anyone who's worked in shipping—or anyone who has ever opened a jar of mixed nuts—has experienced the same thing, over and over again: When you're moving a jumble of little stuff, the big items (or Brazil nuts) always end up at the top.

At first glance, it seems simple enough: the smaller stuff can just fit down into the holes between everything else. Problem solved. Except...if that were true, then the small stuff would be at the bottom but the big stuff would still be scattered all the way through.

Well, what about density? If the big items are just less dense, they'd pop right to the top, yes? Well, sometimes, though much denser large objects also tend to rise to the top. It's only the items with a slightly different-than-normal density that remain scattered throughout.

In order to understand this, we need to view it a bit differently. Let’s approach it in terms of convection. In a liquid, temperature and pressure differentials can create convection currents that move particles around in huge looping patterns. If you treat the mixed nuts as a fluid, convection actually starts to accurately model what's going on. (Scientists call it granular convection.)

As it turns out, both of our previous ideas were almost right. As we move the box around and shake its contents, we force the particles in the middle upward in a current. The particles on the sides then fall into the gaps left by the rising particles in the center. Which is where our first idea comes into play: the smaller particles can fit down into the new gaps more easily, leaving the biggest ones on top.

Found 'em.

We still have the density issue confusing things, though. And this we can't solve quite as easily. We know what happens, and we have an idea how it happens (weirdly enough, density doesn't particularly affect granular convection on this scale if the mixture is in a vacuum), but we still haven't put our fingers on all the whys.

One thing is for sure, though: Cashews are definitely the best. You'd have to be a fool to think otherwise. (Well, the almonds can stay, too.) Brazil nuts and all the rest are just something you have to endure for the sake of the cashews.

McCoy...Dreaming of Roaming Around

Quite a few European countries have "freedom to roam" laws, allowing you to wander onto private land as much as you'd like, so long as you don't damage it or cause trouble.This seems unusual but, unlike in America, which has a lot of public land, some countries in Europe, such as Scotland, are 90% or more composed of private land; you’d be almost solely restricted to public roads there, without freedom to roam laws. Some 45% of land in Scotland is owned just by 450 or so people. without freedom to roam laws, an astonishing amount of the country would be cut off from most of the population.

Of course, there are plenty of restrictions. For example, you usually can’t freely enter a fenced field with a gate. If someone has a little forest on their land, though? G’head: absolutely wander through it, or even go mushroom hunting, foraging, or camping, depending on the specific laws of a particular country.

We have ample history behind the freedom to roam laws, even if, remarkably, many countries didn't bother to formalize these laws until recently, depending on custom, to keep access available.

Those customs date back centuries. I expect you could trace them all the way back to Medieval times, when peasants were allowed to freely use forests owned by nobles to forage, gather firewood, and graze their pigs on acorns and the like.

By and large, while most American states don't have a direct equivalent—you're well within your rights to exclude other private citizens from your land—we have a surprising amount of parallels.

In Hawaii, all beaches, no matter who owns them, are legally public beaches (excepting some military beaches and such). California and Florida have similar laws for their beaches, with a gaggle of variables. In Oregon, the entire coastline is public property, up to sixteen vertical feet above the low tide mark.

For the most part, these laws are wildly popular with just about everyone, except for a few ultra-wealthy people who'd prefer to own their own beaches. I'm not overly sympathetic to their plight.

America certainly doesn't need freedom to roam laws as far-reaching as Europe's, but really: only thanks to our large quantity of publicly-owned lands, like our National Parks and Forests. Publicly accessible lands are an important part of a healthy society.