So my friend’s kid has celiac and dyslexia and reading labels is difficult for them (also they’re like 7) so he’s teaching their pigeon, Grey Boy, to read the labels and identify ingredients with gluten. It’s going well, other than Nick thought it would be a good idea to make the behavior when the pigeon does find a bad ingredient to just fucking…wing slap the box. Just beat the shit out of it like, “no! BAD gluten! BAD!”
I see a lot of “they taught a pigeon to read?” comments and thought I’d explain a bit more.
So it’s not really like their friend’s pigeon now knows how to read. He’s not going to be terribly interested in a novel you hand him (unless he decides it looks like a good nest.) However pigeons are remarkably good at pattern recognition, especially visual patterns. They out-perform humans when it comes to things like identifying artwork/distinguishing between different artist’s works. So it is pretty easy for them to recognize a visual arrangement of ink, such as a printed word, and be taught to respond to that particular pattern. So when looking at an ingredient list the pigeon learns to pick out the specific pattern(s) he’s been taught to react to among the other patterns (words.)
So he sees “wheat” and doesn’t read it the way humans do (w-h-e-a-t spells wheat), but rather sees the arrangement of pigment that he has been trained to slap. So he slaps it.
He will have to be taught every single gluten containing ingredient for it to be super useful, but it is definitely possible, which is super cool! Plus it makes a little kid’s life easier, and enriches Gray Boy.
Skinner did experiments with pigeons that showed how a pigeon can learn to respond to a visual pattern cue, if your interested more in the science behind it.
Oh yeah wasn’t there a study a while back about pigeons recognizing cancer cells from photos of cell close-ups better than doctors could?
Yeah, I shared a version of this post earlier, and this is a nice succinct explanation of how a pigeon is supposed to be “reading.” Pigeons are really good at pattern recognition, and they have great eyesight! And they’re very trainable. There was actually a coast guard search and rescue program for years that used trained pigeons mounted in capsules under helicopters to locate shipwreck survivors in turbulent waters. They were trained to peck a button if they spotted rescue orange in the waters below the helicopter, and they did it faster and more accurately than humans by a substantial margin. The program was only discontinued when digital camera tech surpassed both humans and pigeons.
abstract and modern art haters are sooo snobby like klein literally Created an entirely new pigment and then painted a canvas in a way where the brush strokes wouldn’t be visible. the insinuation that people with no skill could reproduce that is so annoying because unless you are skilled at color mixing and painting you definitely couldn’t lmao
i hope it’s okay to add this because i think it hits the nail directly on the head
Honestly, it’s like picking up a book and saying “I know all these words, I can type, I could have written this” like there’s no middle step between the technical ability and the finished work.
“we need less sanitized queer stories” yall keep saying fucking she-ra romanticizes abuse. you couldnt possibly handle less sanitized queer stories
“we need less sanitized queer stories” youre the one saying the locked tomb series is bad because you dont like the prose. based off of a quote from goodreads of all places. that was dialogue, not even the actual prose.
people keep reblogging only the first half of the post when the addition was the original post. ok
girl help. 4k notes
“she-ra fumbled its message” no! crucially, it didnt! it had the same message as the original she-ra show, which is “this lady is a superhero and is going to do superhero things like save the planet” and she did do that!
“oh but catra never apologized for what she did and they just let her join the good guys” thats a perfectly normal thing in childrens media, and the only reason yallre calling it out is because its queer and you want the perfect unproblematic queer media to exist. except that even if it did you would all find ways to nitpick it, which is the whole point of this post!
Also, notably, she did apologize. They just think it wasn’t good enough.
They absolutely could not handle more nuanced media.
can we please pretty pleasr reblog this version,
people are missing the point again
“i didnt like gideon the ninth, as a book” ok? nobodys forcing you to read it??? the point is that people are far more likely to judge queer books (gideon the ninth is undeniably a queer book) without reading them than they are to do so to a non-queer book
also stop pontificating about “the q slur” or whatever, i literally couldnt care less. get blocked
This is why I get so tired about “whose a real women” and “are transgender people real” and the like because it’s so irrelevant. We have group or people that have an insane suicide rate and we have a solution that reduces that by an insane amount.
No matter how you slice it no theoretical reason nor gender rhetoric can change the gender affirming care is improving more lives than it’ll ever hurt
i think this belongs here too
all the statistics are massively in favor of gender affirming care no matter how you slice it.
Adding to that last one bc that statistic made me feel nervous post top surgery- post surgical depression is an extremely common response to ALL SURGERY. You feeling really bad in the weeks after gender affirming care does NOT mean you made a mistake or even that you’re part of the regret statistic. Those knee surgery and back surgery folks also got it too!!
The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can’t post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren’t getting laid enough. I feel like I’m losing my mind.
I still vividly remember sitting at a bus stop downtown scrolling through endless Tumblr discourse about kink at Pride and whether leather daddies were appropriate. To my left, there was a giant ad that took up the whole side of the bus stop advertising a bag collection for some high-end brand. It was a black and white shot of a model who was completely nude, sitting on a chair, her legs spread wide open while she clutched a bag in front of her crotch and positioned her arms in just the right way to cover her nipples.
Nobody even batted an eye. No discourse was made about this. Life just went on.
Hi, my name is James ☆ Nonbinary (they/them) | 32 | Grey-Asexual | Panromantic ☆ My top fandoms are Harry Potter (fuck Rowling though fr), Stargate, Percy Jackson, Pokémon, and Good Omens.
ALT