Research more or less in, on, or about dogs and/or calculus by Otto Didact, Improbable Research staff
The College Mathematics Journal published a series of studies by humans who were chewing at the question of whether and how dogs do calculus. Here are some significant items from that series.
Do “Do Dogs Know Calculus?” Timothy J. Pennings, The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 34, no. 3, May 2003, pp. 178-182.
A long drive with the most popular postman on the planet.
No one loves the mailman quite like outback Australians do. It’s mid-afternoon when the truck pulls into the dusty driveway in front of a small ranch house. The door bangs open and a small blond boy comes running down the walk pushing a big yellow Tonka. He wraps a hearty hug around the mailman’s legs—and receives a pat on the head in return—before accepting the delivery of letters into the bed of his truck.
As the boy pushes his haul back toward the house, his mother and a few other women step out. They, too, greet this mailman with easy familiarity, eager to catch up on local gossip and news for a few minutes before he continues his route.
If the scene sounds unlikely, it’s because this is no ordinary mail route. Peter Rowe’s path carves a 372-mile loop through a landscape that looks extraterrestrial: the South Australian outback. Rowe doesn’t look like a typical mailman. He’s in his sixties, with friendly, round features, and today he’s wearing a polo shirt and jeans. And for that matter, he drives no ordinary mail truck: It’s a rugged, caterpillar-like four-wheel-drive minibus that can hold a dozen passengers and still leave ample space for supplies and deliveries. For a decade, Rowe has been traveling this route twice a week, delivering mail and sundries to the few human outposts that dot this endless landscape. On an average day, it’s a 13-hour trip. To pass the time he invites tourists like me to come with him.
(Image credit: Jessanne Collins)
Australia’s outback holds a special place in the imagination. It’s a destination synonymous in many American minds with snakes and scorpions, big rocks, and swashbuckling adventurers. People come to marvel at the stunning desert scenery and the diverse wildlife. But there’s something more mystical than that too. It’s cliché to say that people go Down Under for a perspective shift, but it does feel like a different planet. The thing that keeps awing me is the way my sense of time has changed. I don’t mean that things move slower than they do in New York City, where I live, though of course they do. It’s something deeper.
If you want the ultimate vacation getaway, you can buy your own private island. However, if you aren’t made of money, but you have some to spend on vacation, you might want to consider the folks who already bought private islands and turned them into luxury resorts. No traffic, no advertising, and plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy the beach -not to mention a resort staff dedicated to providing all you need. Pictured above is Anantara Medjumbe Island Resort off the coast of Mozambique. Read about the wonderful amenities at island resorts in Canada, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as well at Money Inc.
Charlie Helms was golfing with friends at the Buffalo Creek Golf Course in Palmetto, Florida, when a large alligator walked across the fairway. How large was it? “Dave, get next to it for perspective!”
It’s a monster, but not unknown to the staff. A pro shop clerk said he’s between 15 and 16 feet long, and owned by Manatee County. He’s their course mascot. That’s kind of like having a dinosaur casually hang around for tourists to take pictures with. -via Buzzfeed
April Siese traveled around the world, and like many long-term travelers, she began to look for anything familiar. That would be McDonald's, with its instantly-recognizable logo. But the food isn’t exactly like you’d get in the States. It’s just closer to home than the unfamiliar foods at other eateries where you don’t speak the language. Some of it was good and different, while some was awful and different. She wrote up unvarnished reviews of five of the best McDonald's offerings from the countries she’s visited, although the bad stuff about the top five gets mentioned as well.
Margaret Knight went to work in a cotton mill in New Hampshire when she was only ten years old. After all, that was in 1848, and her widowed mother needed every penny the family could earn. Knight was smart and had a talent for making things even as a child, when she fashioned toys for her brothers and their friends.
By the time she joined the Columbia Paper Bag Company as a lowly factory worker, the 30-something, unmarried Knight had spent years as a ‘Jill-of-all-trades’, becoming proficient in daguerreotype, photography, engraving, house repair and upholstering. Spending long hours at the factory, she soon heard of current efforts to create a machine that could efficiently manufacture flat-bottomed paper bags. ‘I am told that there is no such machine known as a square-bottomed machine,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I mean to try away at it until I get my ideas worked out.’ Independent of the factory and without her bosses’ knowledge, Knight began to study the issue intently.
And she got her ideas worked out. Knight designed a machine that would manufacture flat-bottomed paper bags so that they could be mass-produced. The trouble was that a man who’d seen her invention had gone ahead and patented it. That meant war. Read about Margaret Knight and her invention at Aeon. -via Digg
Léo Brunel’s student animation project Voltage is a nightmare of physics for the characters, but a laugh for us! Two hapless mechanics attempt to protect a customer’s vehicle from disaster when the garage gets a little out of hand.
As an adult, you might still love to play with LEGO blocks, but there’s a little voice telling you that you should be doing something useful. Here’s your chance to feel both clever and resourceful!
Use LEGO bricks to make all kinds of things that you’ll actually use around the house, or solve some household problem. A second benefit will be how your guests say “Cool!” when they see what you’ve done. The LEGO chess set would be perfect for a game of Coaster Chess. -via Viral Viral Videos
Redditors who drive for a living outdid themselves with a one-upmanship series of posts over the weekend. It all started when redditor 060789 posted a picture and said, “I know it's not the most interesting pic in the world, but here's the inside of my garbage truck, for all your inner kids who wanted to see one.” Yes, people wanted to see the interior cab of a garbage truck! But that started a chain of events as other people started posting interior shots of the vehicles they drive for a living.
Redditor corey_m_snow admitted, “It's not *quite* as cool as a garbage truck, but here's the driver's area of my school bus, where I sit for up to six hours a day, sometimes more.” Yes, there are a lot of people who did not ride a school bus while they were growing up.
How about a fire truck? Redditor polak187 gave us the cab of his fire department command vehicle. Oh, it gets better. You can actually say "that escalated quickly."
When a guy tries to write a nice love letter, or poem, or comic describing what a lovely sight a lady is, he can get all emotional and clever. Or he can end up on some overly-literal tangent because he’s just that observant. And if he’s lucky, she’ll understand and take it as he initially intended. This is the latest from Grant Snider at Incidental Comics.
Five years ago, we told you the story of how Geraldine Doyle was identified as the inspiration for the Rosie the Riveter poster. Doyle died in 2010 at age 86. Now evidence has come to light that she wasn’t the model for Rosie at all! Dr. James Kimble of Seton Hall University followed the story of how Doyle was identified as Rosie and was bothered by how little fact-checking went into it. So he decided to investigate himself. He began working on tracing the provenance of the photograph that Westinghouse used when their graphics department designed the poster. None of the available copies of the photo had any information on them, and the identification was made by Doyle herself.
So he called all the various wire services and stock photo collections that might now own the photo. He called naval bases and photo experts. He did endless Google searches. He leafed through endless issues of WWII-era magazines, looking for the photo in question in the hope it might be captioned with a date or a place. This took months, and got him pretty much nowhere — though a particular naval base in California kept popping up, a location that piqued Kimble’s interest because Doyle had worked at a factory in Michigan.
And then, in a feat of both persistence and luck, yet another Google search led Kimble to a Memphis company that sells old newspaper photos. The company just happened to be selling the photo he was looking for, the photo of the woman leaning over the lathe. He bought it, and when it arrived in the mail he realized it had the caption information he had been searching for on the back.
The photo was taken March 24, 1942, in Alameda, California. That pretty much eliminated Doyle as the photo’s subject, because she worked in a plant in Michigan and hadn’t even started there by that date.
Besides, the woman in the photo had a name.
Not only that, but Noami Parker Fraley is still around at age 94 and living in California. Read the story of how Kimble found the real Rosie at the Omaha World-Herald. -Thanks, Dr. Kimble!
Not all heroes wear capes. Sonia Ulrich, Marla Saltzer, and Monica Kenyon were celebrating Happy Hour together Thursday at the Fig restaurant at the Fairmont Hotel in Santa Monica, California. Kenyon saw a guy slip something from a small vial into the drink belonging to the woman he was dining with. The women found his date in the restroom and told her about it. They also told the management, who contacted the police, gave the woman a different drink, and delayed the couple with "computer problems" on their bill. Meanwhile, hotel security found video evidence. The police arrested Michael Tsu, who is being held on a million-dollar bond on charges of administering a drug with the intent to commit a felony and intent to commit rape. They also confiscated the drink and the security recording as evidence. You can read the entire story in Sonia Ulrich’s Facebook post.
This little chipmunk thought he had stumbled on the perfect treasure trove of food when he found a full bird feeder. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling he was doing something wrong by taking all those seeds. When confronted by the guy who loaded the feeder, he did the only thing a thief with a conscience would do. He gave it all back.
Under enough pressure, a criminal will cough up the goods. Of course, it’s probably just a fear response, but look at how much he had stuffed in those cheeks! -via Arbroath
Redditor devgal graduated from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania with a degree in environmental engineering. When the time came to decorate her mortarboard, she had the perfect idea, because she’s heard all the jokes since she was four years old and her leg was amputated. She explained that she has two prosthetics: one for everyday use, and one with a foot made for high heels that she can switch out for a running blade. Oh, that 45K? That's per year. -via reddit
Society has gone from bartering to trading with gold, then cash, then checks, credit cards, debit cards, and now digital transactions. The idea of money is now less physical and largely just a construct that goes from one entity to another in exchange for goods and services. Charlie Warzel wrote an extensive article on the future of financial transactions in the cashless society, after he spent a month using digital transactions only. There are myriad ways to pay digitally: Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Square Cash, M-Pesa, and apps that only work at certain retailers. There are so many that it’s a real pain for vendors to keep up, although history tells us that some will rise above others and become the default way to pay.
There are, of course, legitimate reasons not to trust these new forms of payment. Anyone who’s been mugged or lost a wallet knows cash is far from perfect, but this constellation of new digital payment products introduces a whole new category and scale of ways to get robbed, hacked, scammed, and screwed. Venmo — the social payment service that’s now transferring over $1 billion per month — may, in some ways, be the truest glimpse at a mobile payment future, but it’s not exactly entirely secure. Smartphones can be as easily lost and stolen as wallets, but they’re also eminently breakable, orders of magnitude more expensive, and obsolete after two or three years. And the payment-apps landscape is still such that living cashlessly in 2016 means entering your credit card information or routing number into dozens of stand-alone apps, some of which look as if they’ve been built overnight by a high school computer science class.
One way to get around the physical stealing or breakage of phones is to have a chip implanted in his hand to use for transactions, which is what Warzel ultimately did. This is not common, and he had to make some upper-level arrangements to get it to work.
What could possibly go wrong? I can think of a few drawbacks to paying with an embedded chip.
1. How does one actually give permission for such a transaction? Like credit card skimmers, you can imagine someone being able to draw money from your account (and body) without you even knowing it.
2. How much personal information can be stored on a a chip, and how can outside entities (government, advertisers, information traders, scammers) access this? Would someone be able to find out where you live just by being near you?
3. The more removed from the physical act of financial transactions we are, the easier it is to spend it all. Using actual cash keeps you aware of how much you are spending and how much is left.
4. You would no longer have the freedom to deliberately leave your wallet at home.
5. Of course, there is Revelation 13:16-17. That’s over two billion people who will never get aboard with implanted chips.
6. It’s a lot of hassle for both small businesses and for people who just plain don’t have enough money. Wouldn’t it be better for the future to be the Star Trek model?
I’m sure you can think of other reservations, not the least is the pain involved. While the hook is Warzel’s chip implant, the article has a lot to say about the current state of flux in our digital transaction system. Read the whole thing at Buzzfeed.
