Tenpudo

Hmm... a welsh corgi. Perhaps Pennings has stumbled upon another data dog?

Pyrrho

What you are doing is no more than what people do with other people. People typically read into what is going on in other people's minds, as if there were something significant going on there. It is just as likely that your dog was thinking just what you said, as it is that many people ever have a rational thought.

Has your dog ever been stupid enough to go to a church and sit through a boring and tedious lecture of convoluted nonsense? If not, your dog is obviously more intelligent than many thousands, if not millions, of people. So stop bothering your dog when he is trying to do difficult calculations!

capsaicin67

My dog is more verbal, and not into the whole quantitative thing. Thus he avoids calculus when possible. But he's written some pretty funny haikus and has a screenplay that he's *this close* to selling..........

LymanLover

Well my dog is Jebus.

Big Spoon

My hamster's a differential topologist.

Godless Dave

The smartest thing I've ever seen a dog do was figure out that if her lead was wrapped around a tree, she could free herself by walking backwards.

For a dog, that's advanced cognition. Our previous dog never figured that out in 12 years of wrapping herself around trees.

Pyrrho

Maybe your dog just liked playing mind games with you. Besides, since you obviously regard dogs as stupid, perhaps they resent this and don't wish to share their opinions on advanced mathematical problems with you.

Now I ask you, as I asked Baloo before: Has your dog ever been stupid enough to go to a church and sit through a boring and tedious lecture of convoluted nonsense? If not, your dog is obviously more intelligent than many thousands, if not millions, of people.

NonHomogenized

Your post reminded me of an article I read a couple years ago (probably '98 or '97). It was about scientists using DNA to analyze complex data sets (not sure of the proper term). Essentially, problems like "you need to provide pizza that's acceptable for everyone at a party. There are 25 possible toppings, and each of the 30 people has different likes and dislikes.". The way they would do this is use a strand that represents each possible combination, and use a "filter" which eliminates incompatible strands. You end up with (gasp) only the strand(s) which meets all criteria. Sounds like optimization to me.

Dumbass creationists. How can they say such idiotic things?

Tenpudo

Because as far as they're concerned, your example "proves" that their Intellegent Designer must have explicitly made DNA to act as a computer -- "You don't find a Mac lying on the beach and assume it came together from seaweed, do you?"
Of course, they gloss over the fact that, by trying to twist it into yet another Watchmaker argument, they've implicitly accepted the process of natural selection.

Marduk

“The smartest thing I've ever seen a dog do was figure out that if her lead was wrapped around a tree, she could free herself by walking backwards.



Onetime I was playing ball with my dog and the ball bounced into a drain gutter, rather than try to pluck the rolling ball from the gutter he went to the end of the gutter and waited for the ball to roll into his mouth.
He has also trained me to give him a treat whenever he comes back into the house after doing his “yard work” sometimes the big weasel will barely get his furry butt out the door before turning right around and coming back inside to get his ‘reward’.