cute story

click on the image to see this cute animation... i'd like to dedicate it to those dependent people who believe that they can only find themselves through someone else... i think they're totally wrong: they will only find someone, when they have found themselves first... i.e. when they have created themselves... anything else will be nothing but dependence, i.e. false love, friendship, paternity, etc... please, remember erich fromm: i don't love you because i need you, i need you because i love you

kanzi

Kanzi is a male bonono (species also known sometimes as Pygmy chimpanzee). He was born in October 28, 1980 at Yerkes field station at Emory University and moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. Kanzi was stolen from her mother and adopted shortly after birth by a more dominant female, called Matata. According to his trainer, the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (both in the picture, here; Kanzi's the one with the Michael Jordan's jersey), Kanzi exhibits advanced linguistic skills. The interesting thing about this story is that Kanzi was never taught language explicitly. As an infant, Kanzi accompanied his mother to sessions where she was taught language through keyboard lexigrams. Kanzi, apparently, showed little interest in the lessons, and seemed to be paying no attention whatsoever. However, to the big surprise of researchers, one day where her adoptive mother Matata was not present, Kanzi began competently using the lexigrams, becoming not only the first observed ape to have learned aspects of language naturalistically rather than through direct training, but also the first observed bonobo to appear to use some elements of language at all.

In this video we can see Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Kanzi showing off. Whether this means that language is not specifically human but rather shared with other species, as she claims, it's controversial, i think, but this video is at least surprising and nice.

How did ancient egyptians multiply numbers?

painting by the Austrian artist Franz Miklis


A really cool thing I've read in a restroom in the public library, while sitting there.

"Suppose you're and old Egyptian and you wanna multiply 36 · 43. Remember that you don't have the zero. What can you do? Do the following: Take one of the two numbers, and factorize it out (row (a)); then, take the other number and double it as many times as steps your factorization in row (a) took (do this in row (b)). Finally, add up the numbers in row (b) that have the same step number of an odd number in row (a). For example, if step (iii) in row (a) contains a 10, which is even, then don't add up the number in step (iii) in column (b). Do the addition in row (c). Look at the example we started with, i.e. 36 · 43. Let's factorize the number 43, and double 36 as many times as steps the factorization of 43 has (i.e. 6 times, in this case):

ROW A: (i) 43 ; (ii) 21 (forget about the residue) ; (iii) 10 ; (iv) 5 ; (v) 2 ; (vi) 1

ROW B: (i) 36 ; (ii) 72 ; (iii) 144 ; (iv) 288 ; (v) 576 ; (vi) 1,152

ROW C: (i) 36 + (ii) 72 + (iv) 288 + (vi) 1,152 (we don't add steps (iii) and (v) of row (b), because steps (iii) and (v) in row (a) contain an even number).

That is row (c) amounts to the following addition: 36 + 72 + 288 + 1152 = 1,548.

Do the math, and check that this result is correct, i.e. that 36 · 43 = 1,548.
Try the system with any other numbers."

Isn't it awesome?

darwin's day February 11 2009

the bell house

the bell house, a new venue in gowanus industrial zone, between carroll gardens and park slope, a thursday night out with emilie and rob...

martini pub

One of my favorite commercials ever!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhTSrQbJDI8

charlize theron was the awesome girl, and a not very well known american actor called max parrish was the martini man, a mixture of jean paul belmondo and pierce brosnan that lots of people in europe loved in the mid-90s.

the case of the mysterious clitic

What the fell is the clitic pronoun 'lo' doing in the following sentence, appeared in El País on February 1st 2009? (click here to see the original text):

Pudo ser una final más bonita, pero no lo hubiera podido ser más tensa y llena de alternativas.

Interesting fact, or mistake?? I'll think about it

Montmartre in January 2009.
Photo by Robert Landrito.