After one does the dog-to-human-year conversion, that puts him at exactly twice my age. Here’s hoping I’m as spry, convivial, good-natured, and slightly deranged when I reach his years. Happy b-day, l’il buddy.
A Decade of Berk.
Category: Hounds
Snowpocalypse Now.
Snowpocalypse last December was only the beginning. Now, it’s Snomageddon. (And unfortunately, I uncorked all my tauntaun jokes back in 2003.) Anyway, yeah, we in DC have taken a massive snow hit — at least 2 feet already — and it’s still coming down strong.
As you can see from the pics above and below, at least Berk‘s been having great fun with it, although he may feel differently if I take him to the 2pm Dupont shootout.
Update: It’s all fun and games until somebody bruises their brain. While the snowball fight was great fun (and a hearty gratz to New Awlins), slipping on the ice while walking Berk later that evening was less so. So I’ve been suffering a (hopefully) minor concussion since Saturday, which mainly means I’ve been lying on the couch with a headache, playing low-intensity xBox games like Lego Batman and Mass Effect while the snow falls. Only one night of nausea, fever, and other nasty symptoms, tho’, so hopefully by this point, I’m on the mend.
A Theory of Justice (and the Dog Park.)
“That traditional view of morality is beginning to show signs of wear and tear. The fact that human morality is different from animal morality — and perhaps more highly developed in some respects — simply does not support the broader claim that animals lack morality; it merely supports the rather banal claim that human beings are different from other animals…Unique human adaptations might be understood as the outer skins of an onion; the inner layers represent a much broader, deeper, and evolutionarily more ancient set of moral capacities shared by many social mammals, and perhaps by other animals and birds as well.“
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, bioethicist Jessica Pierce and biologist Marc Bekoff suggest what apparently agreed-upon rules of canid play teach us about animal morality. (via FmH.) “Although play is fun, it’s also serious business. When animals play, they are constantly working to understand and follow the rules and to communicate their intentions to play fairly.“
Pointing to the Bacon.
“The chimps did badly, able to learn the meaning of a pointed finger only after lots of training. The apparent explanation for these results was that pointing — and the social smarts behind it — required a humans-only level of intelligence and evolved in our ancestors only after they branched off from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 7 million years ago. When Tomasello suggested this idea to Hare, however, Hare demurred. ‘I said, “Um, Mike, I think my dogs can do that.”‘”
TIME’s Carl Zimmer “probes “the secrets inside your dog’s mind.” And what he finds is much like the articles here and here. Like babies, dogs (including Berk) understand pointing because it was evolutionarily advantageous for their ancestors to comprehend our behavior. Put another way, the dogs that watched us verrry carefully in the scavenger days, and ingratiated themselves accordingly, were the ones that often fared better than their more feral (and unobservant) friends.
Back on the Grid.
So, after a deep-end immersion into the Capitol Hill throng (as you might expect, it’s been busy ’round these parts, particularly by grad student standards) and a slow but steady establishing of a new home base here in the Beltway (I’ve secured a dog-friendly 1BR apartment in downtown Dupont, done 99.44% of the unpacking, acclimated the sheltie, and made the requisite investment in Swedish modular infrastructure — hat-tip, IKEA), I think I’m about at the point where I can officially log back on the grid.
All of which is to say, tho’ I’m jumping the gun by a day here — the Comcast guys come tomorrow to wire the new pad, which should greatly facilitate posting — I expect normal updates at GitM should now resume. Hey y’all, good to be back.
So, since the Comcast powers-that-be have posited the existence of a deep and unbreakable connection between having a screen to show a TV signal and the Internets, another week of relative quiet, I suspect. But back soon.
Will you still feed me, when I’m 63*?
TRANSFORM.
Get yer agitprop on: By way of DCoE (and with a tip of the hat to Shepard Fairey), Paste Magazine gives you the chance to make your own “Obamacon” posters. I could waste a lot of time with this.
Dog Days of Summer.
Pets versus Bots.
“Sympathetic owners sometimes just retire their new purchases. In other cases, the pets take matters into their own paws. Peter Haney, a university administrator in Lethbridge, Alberta, twice found his Roomba in pieces after letting it clean while his flat-coated retrievers, Macleod and Tima, had the run of the house. ‘No one is talking,’ he says.” They’re only trying to save us from our future cybernetic overlords…From the bookmarks and by way of a friend, the WSJ broaches the thorny issue of the canine-robot divide. As I noted earlier, the Battle for 122nd St., 5D went to Berkeley, whose fearsome arsenal of dog hair apparently convinced my Roomba to give up hope.
Outside, it’s America.
Hello all. After a long week of moving, cleaning, filling up a nearby storage unit, and unpacking the mobile dissertation office, Berk and I are back on the grid: He’s acclimatizing (again) to my parents’ house, and I’m acclimatizing (again) to the strange and seemingly unsustainable environment that is late-stage car culture. In order to procure a bag of dog food, we drove along the highway for two exits, pulled into one of an endless sea of strip-malls with parking lots the size of Morningside Park, and entered a super-air-conditioned palace, brimming over with a cornucopia of All Things Pet-Related. Now, I understand this is highly normal, but it seemed really bizarre at the time. Hey, it’s been awhile.
At any rate, the move out of New York is complete. And, notwithstanding a few more occasional moments of in-transition disorientation, I expect my southern roots will soon reassert themselves (particularly after several more visits to Chick-Fil-A, Cracker Barrel, and the like.)