The New York Times has more on the bellbird, and the jokes write themselves:
Dr. Podos hopes to see whether such behavior actually helps male birds get mates.
“We never saw copulation — we never saw what a really good male does,” he said. “The ones we saw might have just been losers.”
Dr. Podos?
The bellbirds are being studied by one of the ferrets from Beastmaster?!
I mean having had ferrets the only reason they don't all get PhDs is that if given that much leeway to study they will inevitably get themselves killed.
+3
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Werewolf2000adSuckers, I know exactly what went wrong.Registered Userregular
When Tyler Moon opted to have “Jesus Saves” printed on his Twin Cities Marathon racing bib instead of his name, he had no idea how prophetic those words would be.
As the race progressed, he was running eight-minute miles, just as he’d expected. He knows that not because he remembers it, but because it’s recorded on his watch, which tracked his progress. He can’t remember anything after the first mile.
By the eighth mile, something went wrong. Doctors would tell him later he experienced ventricular tachycardia, a fast, irregular heartbeat. For about 10 seconds his heart was not pumping blood. He had a heart attack and fell to the pavement, fracturing bones in his face and suffering a concussion.
Behind him was a man named Jesus Bueno.
This is your reminder that bears are smart, and will find a way in.
That was not the first car that bear had broken into, I think. It did not fumble or bite at the door, it smoothly went for the handle in a way that was kinda creepy, to be honest.
Alternate headline, "Smarter than average bear raids car, disappointed in the lack of pic-a-nic baskets"
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I'm pretty surprised at how unphased it was by accidentally hitting the horn.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges.
After learning of the team's dilemma, Russian mobile phone operator Megafon offered to cancel the debt and put the project on a special, cheaper tariff.
The team had started crowdfunding on social media to pay off the bills.
The birds left from southern Russia and Kazakhstan.
The journey of one steppe eagle, called Min, was particularly expensive, as it flew to Iran from Kazakhstan.
I can't help but wonder what Verizon would have done in that situation.
Tried to sell the eagle a new phone?
With a new plan that has cheaper roaming charges but is more expensive over all cause of the new data charges. And your old plan is discontinued so you can't go back to it.
+1
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
When Tyler Moon opted to have “Jesus Saves” printed on his Twin Cities Marathon racing bib instead of his name, he had no idea how prophetic those words would be.
As the race progressed, he was running eight-minute miles, just as he’d expected. He knows that not because he remembers it, but because it’s recorded on his watch, which tracked his progress. He can’t remember anything after the first mile.
By the eighth mile, something went wrong. Doctors would tell him later he experienced ventricular tachycardia, a fast, irregular heartbeat. For about 10 seconds his heart was not pumping blood. He had a heart attack and fell to the pavement, fracturing bones in his face and suffering a concussion.
Behind him was a man named Jesus Bueno.
If I were God this is the kind of coincidence I would arrange.
When Tyler Moon opted to have “Jesus Saves” printed on his Twin Cities Marathon racing bib instead of his name, he had no idea how prophetic those words would be.
As the race progressed, he was running eight-minute miles, just as he’d expected. He knows that not because he remembers it, but because it’s recorded on his watch, which tracked his progress. He can’t remember anything after the first mile.
By the eighth mile, something went wrong. Doctors would tell him later he experienced ventricular tachycardia, a fast, irregular heartbeat. For about 10 seconds his heart was not pumping blood. He had a heart attack and fell to the pavement, fracturing bones in his face and suffering a concussion.
Behind him was a man named Jesus Bueno.
If I were God this is the kind of coincidence I would arrange.
Sometimes God moved in mysterious ways and sometimes she's running late and just spells it out for you.
That guy couldnt have acted more suspicious even if he tried.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
Back in January, Google's DeepMind team announced that its AI, dubbed AlphaStar, had beaten two top human professional players at StarCraft. But as we argued at the time, it wasn't quite a fair fight. Now AlphaStar has improved on its performance sufficiently to achieve Grandmaster status in StarCraft II, using the same interface as a human player. The team described its work in a new paper in Nature.
"This is a dream come true," said DeepMind co-author Oriol Vinyals, who was an avid StarCraft player 20 years ago. "AlphaStar achieved Grandmaster level solely with a neural network and general-purpose learning algorithms—which was unimaginable ten years ago when I was researching StarCraft AI using rules-based systems."
. . .
This latest version of AlphaStar goes a long way toward addressing those issues, combining deep reinforcement learning with multi-agent learning and imitation learning directly from game data, honed once again via a virtual league. Per a blog post by Vinyals and fellow DeepMind co-author Wojciech Czarnecki, the new, improved AlphaStar was subject to the same constraints under which humans play, and it played on Battle.net "using the same maps and conditions as human players."
"The key insight of the league is that playing to win is insufficient," Vinyals and Czarnecki wrote of the improvements to this latest incarnation of AlphaStar. "Instead, we need both main agents whose goal is to win versus everyone, and also exploiter agents that 'take one for the team.' focusing on helping the main agent grow stronger by exposing its flaws, rather than maximizing their own win rate. Using this training method, the current league learns all its complex StarCraft II strategy in an end-to-end fashion—as opposed to the earlier incarnation of our work, which stitched together agents produced by a variety of methods and algorithms."
The AI can also now play as or against the three races in Starcraft II: Protoss, Terran, and Zerg. (The earlier version only played Protoss vs. Protoss.) DeepMind pitted AlphaStar against human players in a series of online games. The AI was rated at Grandmaster level for all three StarCraft II races and above 99.8% of officially ranked human players. It's the first AI to achieve that status in a popular professional e-sport, without using a simplified version of the game. That's a strong indication that these types of general-purpose machine-learning algorithms could be used to solve complex real-world problems such as personal assistants, self-driving cars, or robotics—all of which require real-time decisions on the basis of imperfect information.
. . .
And this time around, it appears to have been a fair fight. "I've found AlphaStar's gameplay impressive," Wunsch said of this most recent incarnation. "The system is very skilled at assessing its strategic position, and knows exactly when to engage or disengage with its opponent. And while AlphaStar has excellent and precise control, it doesn't feel superhuman—certainly not on a level that a human couldn't theoretically achieve. Overall, it feels very fair—like playing a 'real' game of StarCraft."
Why I Love My Fucking Home State, Bear Is Raiding Edition:
This is your reminder that bears are smart, and will find a way in.
That was not the first car that bear had broken into, I think. It did not fumble or bite at the door, it smoothly went for the handle in a way that was kinda creepy, to be honest.
Ages ago I got caught stealing flowers from a display outside of the office of the apt building I used to live in, via hidden camera. I don't even recall what for. It set off a ridiculous chain of events; the building manager was pretty decent about it and said "just replace it and we're cool". I did so... and the replacement was stolen a few days, but this time by someone who didn't live in the building so they went uncaught. Still feeling guilty (and deservedly so), I replaced it yet again and sure enough not only was it stolen, but the manager told me it was stolen within 5 minutes of me leaving it on the display, by yet another party. She ended up just giving up on the whole 'trying to make the lobby look nice' thing.
Bad news: oops a middle school transposed two numbers for a suicide hotline on the back of their student IDs and the resulting number was a sex line instead.
Gone right: everything has been corrected and in the mean time the owner of the sex line, after being informed of the issue, routed all calls to their number to the suicide prevention hotline instead.
There are plenty of 'weird news' sections out there, I'm sure we'll be fine.
It was briefly touched on in a podcast I heard this morning, hopefully the Gone Right there will be another site picking up the now loose Deadspin writers/staff/etc.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
Bad news: oops a middle school transposed two numbers for a suicide hotline on the back of their student IDs and the resulting number was a sex line instead.
Gone right: everything has been corrected and in the mean time the owner of the sex line, after being informed of the issue, routed all calls to their number to the suicide prevention hotline instead.
Crisis Tex Line? More like Crisis Sex Line, amirite?
Rats that learn to drive are more able to cope with stress. That might sound like the fever-dream of a former scientist-turned-car writer, but it's actually one of the results of a new study from the University of Richmond. The aim of the research was to see what effect the environment a rat was raised in had on its ability to learn new tasks. Although that kind of thing has been studied in the past, the tests haven't been particularly complicated. Anyone who has spent time around rats will know they're actually quite resourceful. So the team, led by Professor Kelly Lambert, came up this time with something a little more involved than navigating a maze: driving.
If you're going to teach rats to drive, first you need to build them a car (or Rat Operated Vehicle). The chassis and powertrain came from a robot car kit, and a transparent plastic food container provided the body. Explaining the idea of a steering wheel and pedals to rats was probably too difficult, so the controls were three copper wires stretched across an opening cut out of the front of the bodywork and an aluminum plate on the floor. When a rat stood on the plate and gripped a copper bar, a circuit was completed and the motors engaged; one bar made the car turn to the left, one made it turn to the right, and the third made it go straight ahead.
. . .
The subjects were 11 male rats, five of whom lived together in a large cage with multiple surface levels and objects to play with, and six who lived together in pairs in standard laboratory rat cages. Although both groups of rats learned to drive the car, the ones that lived in the enriched environment were quicker to start driving, and they continued to be more interested in driving even when there was no reward on offer beyond the thrill of the wind in one's fur.
. . .
Serious scientists usually refrain from imputing any further emotion onto research animals, but I'm no longer a serious scientist, so I'm happy saying that learning to drive made the rats more well-adjusted. And the study has further value; these complex activities may be more useful tests in rat models of neuropsychiatry than those in current use.
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#DNDGoals
Bell bird...
...or Bro Bird?
I mean having had ferrets the only reason they don't all get PhDs is that if given that much leeway to study they will inevitably get themselves killed.
EVERYBODY WANTS TO SIT IN THE BIG CHAIR, MEG!
Gone right: Dad's "You bring enough for everyone?" look.
This is your reminder that bears are smart, and will find a way in.
That was not the first car that bear had broken into, I think. It did not fumble or bite at the door, it smoothly went for the handle in a way that was kinda creepy, to be honest.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
high quality bear
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Tried to sell the eagle a new phone?
With a new plan that has cheaper roaming charges but is more expensive over all cause of the new data charges. And your old plan is discontinued so you can't go back to it.
If I were God this is the kind of coincidence I would arrange.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Sometimes God moved in mysterious ways and sometimes she's running late and just spells it out for you.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Yeah this is why Black Bears are considered S-Tier:
Ages ago I got caught stealing flowers from a display outside of the office of the apt building I used to live in, via hidden camera. I don't even recall what for. It set off a ridiculous chain of events; the building manager was pretty decent about it and said "just replace it and we're cool". I did so... and the replacement was stolen a few days, but this time by someone who didn't live in the building so they went uncaught. Still feeling guilty (and deservedly so), I replaced it yet again and sure enough not only was it stolen, but the manager told me it was stolen within 5 minutes of me leaving it on the display, by yet another party. She ended up just giving up on the whole 'trying to make the lobby look nice' thing.
Gone right: everything has been corrected and in the mean time the owner of the sex line, after being informed of the issue, routed all calls to their number to the suicide prevention hotline instead.
Geth is going to require us to only post sports-related gone right stories.
It was briefly touched on in a podcast I heard this morning, hopefully the Gone Right there will be another site picking up the now loose Deadspin writers/staff/etc.
Crisis Tex Line? More like Crisis Sex Line, amirite?
One way or another, it’s crappy.
You haven't met the puppy, maybe it's kind of a shithead.
At the very least it has shit for brains
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772