It’s very easy for us, as dog owners, to get into a routine that ignores some of the basic drives of our dogs. Sometimes the desires of our dogs are annoying and inconvenient. Sometimes dangerous. Sometimes they are weird and slow us down. But sometimes they are a necessary form of enrichment.
When we work, our dogs are often shut in the house or kennel to rest. When we sleep, we expect them to sleep. When we take them for walks, we expect them to get moving at all times. When they stop to smell the grass (or graze), a weird rock, or a squirrel trail, we often get frustrated and call them to us. After all, most of us are on a schedule. I find myself forgetting that while I experience stimulation constantly, all day every day, dogs do not get the same opportunity. I propose that when possible, and when a dog expresses interest, we allow them those moments to sniff. To track. To excite themselves and eat the grass. After all, their life experiences are shaped by what we allow, and often what we have time for. Make time to let your dog be a dog! Most of us could use the moment to take in our surroundings and observe the world, too.
because Alexa WILL NOT call for help unless you’ve set it up this way first!
this woman was REALLY smart to do that, because otherwise the Echo thing would’ve done nothing. don’t think your Echo will respond to “call 911″ or “call the cops/ambulance/fire department” unless you’ve set it up with the numbers first, and certainly don’t think it’ll hear sounds of a struggle and call for help without a direct command. otherwise think of how many false reports it would make just from overhearing TV and movies being on!
so instead of this being shared as “Amazon’s AI is going to hear that you’re in trouble and will call for help by itself!” this story should really be shared as “hey if you have one of these things, set it up to respond to a voice command CALL 911before you’re in that kind of situation!”
according to what I’m reading on this, alexa didnt pick up on the struggle, the boyfriend actually was the one who ended up setting it off, yelling at his girlfriend “Did you call the sheriffs?”, and Alexa picked up on “call the sheriffs”, prompting the 911 call
this is actually a small sub branch of botany thats been growing and gaining some recognition in the past 5 years or so called plant cognition! we’ve been thinking about if plants can possibly be intelligent to any degree for centuries, but the main paper that started up this huge discussion in the modern era was one called Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters by Monica Gagliano, a plant researcher in Australia who specializes in it. because the results indicated that plants were possible of learning and retaining information in a kind of memory in response to environmental changes, it received a lot of backlash and denial- generally in science, that kind of intelligent reaction to an organism’s environment is a good indicator of cognitive behavior in the organism. it got rejected by 10 different journals before being published in 2014.
the experiment worked like this. i’ve talked before about mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that curls its leaves back when touched (they go back to normal in a few minutes):
this is to help deter predators among other things. but in this experiment, Gagliano used it as an indicator of stimulus and to test cognitive function. It’s well known that pudica has a rudimentary nervous system that can even be temporarily inhibited using anesthetics (just like ours can!). she hooked up a ton of these plants in pots to identical rail systems that allowed them to be lightly dropped in an identical way, juuuuust heavy enough to trigger the stimulus so all the leaves drop down when they hit the bottom (a piece of foam so they wouldn’t actually hurt the plants). every time the plants would be dropped, they would close up.
but after the plants were dropped about 60 times each, they stopped responding to the drop.
they remembered that no harm was coming from this actionand decided that it was against their best interests to keep expending energy closing their leaves. they 200% learned to stop.
she decided to test it further. she put some of the plants in a shaker and let them receive a more jarring response; the plants closed up as usual. then, she put them back in the droppers and dropped them again. they didn’t close up. they had remembered that response. this dispels the obvious rebuttal to this experiment of the plants just being tired; they still closed up when stimulated differently.
they just chose not to close up when they hit a stimulus they remembered.
it turns out that not only could they remember to keep their leaves open when dropped on the apparatus, but they remembered after28 days when she kept testing it!! apparently by the end of the experiment, all the plants had decided to keep their leaves open when dropped!!!!
how do they do this?? we literally dont know. they have no central brain, only a basic nervous system. can other plants do this???
well, adding onto that, venus fly traps can count! like. they have three hairs inside their traps, and all three must be touched within 20 seconds for the trap to close. once closed, those three trigger hairs must continue to be stimulated by thrashing prey, or the trap will reopen.
so yeah like. basically ‘are they sentient’: apparently to an extent???? we dont know exactly why or how but they are??? maybe???? sort of????? at least some of them are?? but they dont have a brain so everyones like????????????????????? maybe its through a signaling network????????????????? but like how would that even work?????????
plant consciousness is still new enough to be dismissed as crazy by a lot of biologists but like. the evidence is there. we don’t know a whole lot and its clearly a radically different kind of intelligence than we know in animals, but it’s there and we 200% dont know how it works yet or even the full extent of how plants use this intelligence (for example: does a redwood have the same intelligence as a venus fly trap?? how does it learn things and use that knowledge???)
national geographic wrote an awesome article visualizing the experiment here if you want to read more!
It’s very hurtful to see people responding to us in regards to this eugenics conversation & the topic of people with genetic illnesses having children and saying stuff like “I generally agree with you but I really hope that people with ___ don’t have children.”
We get it you don’t believe in eugenics from a moral standpoint but if you could you would like to make sure we couldn’t breed. Like I said, I have a genetic blood disorder and I suffer from depression which is a problem for both my parents and other family members as well. You tell us that you understand and then lecture us about why we shouldn’t have children. As if this isn’t something that doesn’t cross all of our minds. Trust me. I probably wouldn’t even want kids anyway but that doesn’t mean the fear of what might happen to my hypothetical child doesn’t cross my mind constantly. You don’t have to tell us what you think about it all, we’ve heard it all before and we’ve thought about it numerous times.
And you’re not really convincing me when you go on and on about how you don’t think there’s anything wrong with us BUT you pray that we don’t have kids. You say it’s about the possibility of passing on our traits to an innocent, but all I’m hearing is that you don’t think people like us should exist. It’s just hard to see that you’re coming from a place of support or kindness or whatever when you’re butting in with some opinion that nobody asked for about our lives and our worth.
In my psychopharmacology class we had a paper & discussion on taking medication for mental illness while pregnant. It very quickly turned and several people started to bring up “Well should people with mental illnesses even have kids?” And one guy, I shit you not, said that doctors should secretly lace medication for mentally ill women with something that sterilizes them so they wouldn’t breed. Like, these conversations almost always get bad VERY fast and it’s amazing how many people hold these beliefs.
I still don’t understand people who think it’s perfectly acceptable to outright torture “unpleasant” animals. I’m not saying you can’t smack mosquitoes, but pulling their wings off alive, going out of your way to make sure they die slowly, is creepy and horrible to do no matter what. They aren’t bloodsucking parasites specifically to spite you, they aren’t being cruel or mean. Any animal deserves at least a quick death if it has to die, and you can’t say “that’s just a bug” because I’ve definitely seen almost everybody come together with rage over cruelty towards butterflies or ladybugs..
People show the same attitude towards reptiles, rodents, anything they don’t like, as if an animal being dangerous or inconvenient is an actual act of “evil” on that animal’s part and they have to suffer some kind of karmic punishment for …….the way they evolved I guess?
I’ve even heard of people getting stung by a jellyfish and going out of their way to leave it in the sun to dry up and die. We don’t know what if anything jellyfish can “feel” but that doesn’t make an act like that any less twisted. That overall senseless, spiteful obsession with vengeance is just creepy as shit.
I am deeply uncomfortable with anyone who does this kind of vengeance cruelty under the banner of ‘it’s just a __’. Just the pure intent and anger shown through such cruel action will make me immediately, deeply not trust a person.
I remember hearing people i met talk about drowning pest animals in their yards or torturing insects and idc if they can feel pain or not, it’s so cruel that I can’t even imagine being that compassionless and vindictive. I’ve never been able to put it into words before but that’s what it is, an immediate and deep lack of trust.
Another appearance-related post My eyes are mostly dark green. With a small circle of brown in the center. Like this (yes I was opening my eyes wide so you can see them better):
Or this for a more fuzzy example:
With rare exceptions, people assume I have brown eyes, and sometimes argue with me at length about it. Sometimes if they get up close they’ll admit they’re hazel, sometimes they insist they have to be brown.
Most people are not red-green colorblind. What’s happening here?
I am guessing it might be because hazel is basically 2 colors at once. The clue I think is people changing their mind up close because
multiple colors mixed together from far away read as one color, what I am guessing is that they aren’t making out there are two colors, your eyes are darker so it reads more brownish.
Like I apparently have hazel eyes now? I did not like 10 years ago 100% positive they were brown and I didn’t notice until I was being attacked by my own eyelashes and had a light and mirror up close and noticed there is green now. I doubt people notice mine aren’t brown anymore either.
That sounds like a possibility, especially with people looking at them from more of a distance. Besides what someone else mentioned, with maybe lumping all darker eyes into the brown category.
I would definitely describe that as more of a dark hazel. My mom’s had pretty much the opposite color pattern going, with chinquapin brown on the outside and a green ring around the pupil. That looked a lot more brown overall.
Mine are actually very grey, with a darker bluer looking ring around the outside (and the same green around the pupil from her). So of course that usually gets read as blue, probably from the contrast of that outer ring catching people’s attention. The color contrast doesn’t look as obvious with yours from a distance, though, so I doubt people are just focusing on the brown ring the same way.
Hard to tell what’s going on with any of it, though. Perceptions…
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 