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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • Sonic is designed to be highly recognisable and interacting with Sonic media necessary means you see Sonic a whole lot, even seeing just a few adverts for the franchise is already enough to make you remember it. Shakespeare’s looks are known only on the basis of a couple of portraits, most of which are probably not even based on Shakespeare’s looks directly, and they’re all completely irrelevant for interacting with Shakespeare’s work.




  • It’s new evidence that cows are capable of what we (humans broadly) previously thought them incapable of. It’s important because it’s a concrete indicator that there’s more going on in cow brains than humans have generally assumed.

    As I said, perhaps this is surprising only because we understand brains overly mechanically. As if it’s assumed that there’s a hard “can/can’t do” switch for particular mental actions, while in reality any ability may be a result of various factors within the individual brain and outside of it aligning together (including, of course, the cow in question being a pet, so having a very comfortable lifestyle). If people can vary wildly in their mental abilities and inclinations, why wouldn’t animals?





  • Doesn’t the fact that this is news also kind of diminish its importance? We’ve lived with cows for so many generations, there are millions of cows out there, and there’s just one single cow that we’ve seen being this smart. Most of them would still count as stupid, if this is proof of intelligence.

    OTOH I also get the impression this is news in part because we(?) kind of overrated the trait of using tools and doing basic planning as a sign of substantial intelligence, assuming a large technical/biological gap between being and not being able to do it. Animal brains are, I would suppose, not so hard-wired and predefined as we thought, and individual specimen can be more or less creative and smart.