I have, as has been tediously pointed out in the motto above, a cinnamon cockatiel who named himself “Squeak”. He has all sorts of cutesy behaviors, and my theory was that some of his odder mannerisms came from having too much input and too little brain with which to process it. If you’ve ever seen a toddler get excited and suddenly stop, shiver, and then go on, you’ll know the idea. Just too much stimulation.

Now, however, science is dripping cold water over my cherished myth of birdie bétise. Apparently these little guys can do more than we give them credit for.

Certainly, for something with a brain scarcely larger than a green pea, my little guy can do some fairly adroit things. He understands the command “flap” and can do all sorts of mimicry. But smart? At what point does mimicry imply intelligence?

One of my problems with certain types of liberal arts student has been the language majors who think because they are fluent in a language, they are therefore experts on the politics and culture of the language’s home country. However, linguistic ability does not always correlate with analytic or empathetic ability, which are necessary traits. True, they have an easier time digesting materials in the home language, but there are plenty of people who can read a paper perfectly well in English who nonetheless have nothing valuable, or indeed apposite, to say about US politics. Parroting (if you’ll forgive the semipun) what you hear on NPR does not make you an intellectual.

However, it has been fairly well demonstrated that the larger parrots can develop fairly sophisticated ways of interacting with people that are, if not metaphysically intelligence, sufficiently indistinguishable from intelligence as to render the distinction moot. You never know–except for you, Skinner could be right and the rest of us are just incredibly sophisticated meat puppets that happen to pass the Turing test.

You were conditioned to believe you read it here first.

Could there be a god? Is my lack of faith misplaced? This report made me question my non-faith:

Scientists at Okayama University in Japan have rather agreeably discovered that unidentified compounds in lager and stout may help to prevent DNA damage leading to cancer.

Oh, wait, if there is one, it is a capricious and unjust god:

Since the mice were refreshed with non-alcoholic beer, the scientists cannot confirm that “moderate consumption of normal beer has any anti-cancer benefits”.

Instead of banning such, religions could attract converts by promising spiritual redemption through high states of intoxication, gratuitous sex, and trash-TV-watching. Hey, the Christians appropriated Saturnalia, so why not?

Update: I need to post when less “intoxificated”.

In that hopping fun-o-land known as Utah, the Mormon Church has “disfellowshipped” a member for writing an allegedly historically accurate portrayal of Joseph Smith’s founding of the Mormon Church. This smacks much of other recent religions, such as Scientology and their efforts to suppress dissent or critical reviews of their claims.

Then again, just literally reviewing, say, what the Crucifixian Bible says about marriage can cause discomfort in true believers. Reality, like the moon, is a harsh mistress.

Don Boudreaux makes a cutsie analogy about trade deficits by comparing country or state deficits with hair color deficits. After all if random group X has to worry, why not random group Y? However, this part gave me pause:

Now suppose that you’re a blonde, but one of the relatively few blondes who is not currently spending more than you’re earning.

It’s like he’s writing directly to me.

OK, not all blondes are spendthrifts, but I sometimes feel like the lone blonde saver in a nation full of blondes. To wit, the other day on the radio a conservative was droning on about how schools were terrible, and those that wanted to blame parents were out of line. Something to the effect of “You tell the parent who comes home tired for their one 15 minutes of quiet today from their ten hour job and extra job on weekends just to make ends meet that they’re the problem, yeah right.” Um, if you are that stretched, you think you should have waited on the kids, or maybe moved someplace cheaper and taken the longer commute? Or rented? Or bought a smaller house? Or lived for a year without HBO? And yes, folks, that was an (alleged) conservative, which tells you a lot about the causes of the current Administration’s spending-to-income ratio.

I love the trend of making illegal anything that looks like something naughty, but isn’t. One example from Louisiana is small cups of Jell-O being distributed (unclear whether they were sold or given away from various reports) looking too much like Jell-O shots. All a teacher had to do to tell whether they were alcoholic or not is try a random one. Unless you’re going to tell me that the graduates of the lowest-SAT part of the university never tasted real Jell-O shots…

The point being, if you show up a school official by revealing that they can’t tell marijuana from oregano, you get treated as if you brought the real thing. I once had to learn the Polish and Russian for soap because I was taking a bag full of powdered detergent to Russia and on to Poland (myd?o in Polish, ????? in Russian, if memory serves) because I was afraid otherwise I’d get grilled by ex-KGB with a grudge over coming out on the down side of the Cold War. That was fine, but trying the same trick in a school will get you brought up on charges.

Now, think about it before your reflexive but-what-about-the-children instinct kicks in. What, essentially, is different about school than work? If you brought in little cups of Jell-O that looked like shots, would you be arrested? Perhaps a more retentive boss might frown a bit–it might not be politic. But would you be suspended? Fired? If you work outside of a company founded by Ross Perot, likely not. Could you have a small bag of powdered detergent? Probably.

Now for those who say “but what about school shootings and safety (for the children)”? Well, what about workplace shootings and safety? Somehow generations of kids managed to get out of school without metal detectors, and guns were if anything more prevalent, as were drugs.

So, despite US efforts to eradicate their crop, Colombian farmers are growing as much coca as ever. So if you’re in Europe, looking for a new angle on the Drug Menace, what do you do? Conflate it with the ‘Frankenfood’ scare.

The gist of the article is: they’re getting more yield per plant on less farmland, so a leaked dossier speculates that may mean they’re using genetically modified plants–or perhaps fertilizer, but scary…scary! Even now they’re probably becoming non-sessile and forcing themselves into processing vats and transporting themselves into your house to shove themselves up your children’s noses! Scary! After all, it’s the genetic modification aspect of the plant that’s frightening, not the dime-sized hole in your septum after prolonged use…

Over at the ever-interesting Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen notes the widely-reported story of a woman who put her father’s ghost on eBay. This sparked the realization in me that market behavior can explain children’s bad behavoir. Here’s the woman’s rationale for auctioning the ghost (with metal walker as a bonus): “Mary Anderson said she placed her father’s ‘ghost’ on the online auction site after her son, Collin, said he was afraid the ghost would return someday.”

This is perhaps an Internet equivalent of pretending to sweep out monsters from under a bed. However, the results of the auction are what triggered my thought: “The proceeds from the auction will go to buy Collin a special present, she said.”

So basically the woman is paying the kid to have unreasonable fears rather than educating them out of existence. Furthermore, she’s being clever and pushing the cost of this bit of bribery onto a third party by auctioning off the ghost (and her father’s metal cane in an attempt to avoid eBay’s anti-fraud policies). However, look at the market she’s just created: by rewarding the child’s behavior, she has instilled in him an incentive to invent new and more elaborate fears in an attempt to gain more rewards. In the child’s view, demand for that behavior has just gone up, and, as a rational maximizer, he’ll try to fulfill that demand.

Now, if the woman is a good parent future behavior not associated with something as traumatic as the death of a grandparent will not result in a reward. But such behavior explains how parents who seek to palliate children who demand toys in stores end up with uncontrollable children: by rewarding the behavior, they create a market for it. Eliminate demand, and the supply will eventually go away.

Similarly, government price supports for agricultural products can be seen as bad parenting. So George W. Bush is not just poor at domestic policy planning, he’s also a bad parent…and from the stories about Jenna…

OK, it’s well-known that I’m not a fan of the (indirectly) government-subsidized U.S. Postal Service, but they warmed the cockles of my libertarian heart this week.

Apparently an indie/electronica band used the name Postal Service, and the usual protection-money types (lawyers) sent the usual unthinking trademark infringement notice. Then, things got weird:

[T]his week the United States Postal Service – the real one, as in stamps and letters – signed an agreement with Sub Pop granting a free license to use the name in exchange for working to promote using the mail. Future copies of the album and the group’s follow-up work will have a notice about the trademark, while the federal Postal Service will sell the band’s CDs on its Web site, potentially earning a profit. The band may do some television commercials for the post office.

I just have to ask. Has someone at the USPS been reading the Cluetrain Manifesto? Have the last remaining pro-free-market Republicans somehow been shuffled off to administrative jobs there, much like out-of-favor Communists were sent by Stalin to “count trees” in Siberia? Did Joan Baez quit her blackface routine long enough to spike the tea there, trying to one-up Grace Slick?

Whatever it is, it’s working. Although Postal Service (the band) still has an uphill battle with convincing me to use snail mail for anything other than, say, a cheap way to send books around. But seriously, guys, keep it up. With this attitude you will survive when Congress removes your monopoly.

I hope I’m missing some key piece of information, but it looks like Darwin has claimed three women who called a friend instead of 911 when their SUV (natch) went into a river. OK, panic reaction, you call the first person you can once you get out and get to shore if you’re not knocked unconscious, right?

Au, contraire. The stupidity went further than that. They did this IN the car instead of, you know, trying to get out in waist-deep water.

Rafael Miranda said he saw the Jeep go off the road and into the water. He grabbed a flashlight and ran to the vehicle, banging on its roof and windows as he attempted to free the victims.

“I tried and I tried and I tried, but I couldn’t do it,” Miranda said. “They were conscious. They were screaming, screaming ‘Help me, help me!”‘

So they sat around and waited for somebody to help them instead of just rolling down the windows or breaking the glass and getting out.

Apparently, they had just come from a party, and one of their number works as a drug counselor, so I’m thinking that psychoactive substances were involved. Whether alcohol or THC, just ‘cuz I think they should be legal doesn’t mean use of them in all situations is smart. And I’m thinking there was a hefty hurdle of “stupid” to overcome here.

According to CNN:

LONDON, England — A 1,200-year-old Anglo-Saxon penny has sold for �230,000 ($409,000), setting what the auction house said was a new world record for the most expensive British coin.

Curious, I put in a penny in a compound interest calculator at an APR of 3% for 1,200 years, which I thought would be fairly conservative for the range of time. The result?

That original penny, had it been invested, would be worth $25,390,406,045,714.81, which is considerably more than the net worth of the planet as near as I can tell. $25,390,406,045,714.81 is slightly more than $409,000.