Baloo

Well, according to my former professor / good friend, Dr. Tim Pennings, they do...

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...d/dyehard.html

I'm proud to say I had the honor of "peer-reviewing" the paper, and have actually met (and scratched the belly of) the enlightened canine featured in the article. Anyway, I thought everyone may enjoy something from the "lighter" side of mathematics...


I should add, the story isn't a completely positive one - his article, intended to stimulate interest in math (with a healthy dose of the scientific method), has already been hijacked by... guess who...

http://www.creationsafaris.com/crevnews.htm

(search page for "pennings")

Marduk

My dog is into functional analysis.

Abacus

:banghead:

Wyz_sub10

Ahhh....so intelligence keeps us from decaying into dust?

How does intelligence counter entropy?

Does the rate of decay correlate to "amounts" of intelligence?

(These are directed at the site comments, of course)

How incredibly ignorant. What kind of fool posts this as if to be proud of it?

Abacus

A creationist fool!

Baloo

I know what you mean. When I gave the article to my dog to read, he looked at me as if to say "Holy shit, that dog can do CALCULUS? Thank you so much for interrupting my efforts to crack this 3rd-degree nonhomogenous ordinary differential equation for THAT update. Asshole.", which he followed with a rather disrepectful punctuation of sentiment involving a lifted hind leg...


Or maybe I read too much into my dog's psyche.

faust

Ahh, I was confused by the headline, but I am familiar with this "problem" and "solution". The sort-of analogy that I heard (sort-of b/c it actually takes place as well) is that of light at a diffraction boundry, i.e. the crooked looking stick in pond.

Why does the light follow such a path instead of going in a straight line? Well, it turns out to be the optimal speed route between the object and the viewer taking into consideration the speed light goes through water and air (Elvis swimming vs running.) Does this mean the light itself is "intelligent" b/c it picks the shortest time-wise route? Nahhh.. that's silly. All the other paths are taken as well, only the diffraction bends them to where you can't see them from your position. Move a few steps in any direction and you'll see -those- paths, which are now optimal for your position. Smart how those particle/waves do that.

It's not the easiest thing in the world to understand, but how you get from that to "evidence of how great our creator was when he made all this," is just beyond me. We need a smarter dog and Elvis to figure out wtf is wrong with those people. Didn't he stop to think that maybe natural selection would -select for- the trait of taking the optimal path to a goal in animals? I mean come on! Let two dogs go after some food in the water, one taking straight path, one taking optimal... which dog is gonna starve to death? Even a creationist like safarti should be able to figure that out. God indeed. sheesh.

WRONG! Of course I would say Nature selects for organisms that find as close to optimal solutions as possible, otherwise they are outcompeted.

Duh.

Goober

I've got some mould growing that can do a pretty good proof of Fermat's last theorum.

ps418

There was an interesting article in Science a while back about the social cognition of dogs. Basically showing that domestic dogs, even as puppies with no training and very little human contact, are far more adept than both chimps and wolves at accurately reading and approporiately responding to human visual cues. It would be interesting, as the article says, to see if this also holds true for Belyaev’s silver foxes. You can find a nice article on Belyaev's foxes here (PDF file).

Hare, B. et al. The domestication of social cognition in dogs. Science, 298, 1634 - 1636, (2002). Free PDF

Patrick

Bumble Bee Tuna

This had me cracking up. It sounds like something you'd read on Landover Baptist!

-B