Art and Fear -
A good book about the internal and external challenges to making art, along with the rewards.
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Sunday, 12 August 2018
quote [ Six crows trained to pick up rubbish will be put to work next week at a French historical theme park. "The goal is not just to clear up, because the visitors are generally careful to keep things clean" but also to show that "nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment", said Nicolas de Villiers of the Puy du Fou park, in the western Vendee region. The birds will be encouraged to spruce up the park through the use of a small box that delivers a nugget of bird food each time the rook deposits a cigarette end or small piece of rubbish. ]
Not to be outdone, Disneyland Paris has hired a real giant rat to mingle with the guests.
Puy du Fou's French blog post on the project with pictures: Une escouade de corbeaux nettoyeurs au Grand Parc!. "Christophe Gaborit, project manager at the Academy of Falconry, decided to educate and personally raise two rooks to collect rubbish. Judged "crazy" by his entourage, he persists following an unlikely encounter with ... a magician!"
Besides employing birds for janitorial services, the park is also employing Neopter drones as stage hands (in French). Previously on SE: The Cig Economy For Crows about Crowded Cites' Crowbar device for trading cigarette butts for crow chow.
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Comments
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Hugh E. said @ 12:37pm GMT on 12th Aug
[Score:2 Good]
Pay people to train crows or pay people?
A program to pay homeless people to pick up trash in an Ohio neighborhood Albuquerque mayor: Here’s a crazy idea, let’s give homeless people jobs San Diego launched a new program that will pay homeless people to pick up trash off the city's streets Fort Worth is paying its homeless citizens to pick up trash Granted, crows are cuter. |
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Dienes said @ 8:21pm GMT on 12th Aug
[Score:1 Good]
I mean, it makes me all tingly to see them implement this. I've said before - you can't just slap a feeder and assume you can effectively autoshape litter removal. Its not realistic. But you can train a crow to do this in an afternoon if you know what you're doing. Extrapolating from working with pigeons, anyway. Introducing pre-trained birds is clever. They are smart little buggers - it'll be cool to see how long this maintains and if other birds imitate it as I expect they might.
But it is a bizarre take to me. Yeah, the birds are cheaper to pay, but they also will get a lot less work done compared to a human (there's an effective size limit of what they can remove) and you're disrupting naturally-occurring behaviors. Hiring homeless makes so much more sense, but crows don't trigger NIMBY in people, I guess. |
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Hugh E. said @ 9:37pm GMT on 12th Aug
I suggested a false dichotomy - my bad. Let's train birds and give homeless people jobs (oh, and also homes).
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steele said @ 10:04pm GMT on 12th Aug
[Score:1 Underrated]
Let's just give homeless people homes.
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rylex said[1] @ 10:20pm GMT on 12th Aug
[Score:1 Underrated]
Having a home doesn't assure they will be able to afford/maintain said home.
Might as well add UBI for safe measure. |
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foobar said @ 4:03am GMT on 13th Aug
We should do that anyway, but there will always be some people that just can't hack it in society.
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mechanical contrivance said @ 1:12pm GMT on 13th Aug
Let's give birds homeless people.
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Ankylosaur said @ 8:25am GMT on 12th Aug
The booming business of luxury chicken diapers:
Julie Baker never intended to become a figurehead of the luxury chicken-diaper industry. Before she launched her brand Pampered Poultry in 2010, she had never even heard of chicken diapers. |
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cb361 said @ 4:01pm GMT on 12th Aug
Before she launched her brand Pampered Poultry in 2010, she had never even heard of chicken diapers.
What? "I'm launching my new brand tomorrow, so I should really find out what it is. Nah, I'll just wing it." |
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Headlessfriar said @ 4:09pm GMT on 12th Aug
Get it? Chicken, wing it? Eh? Eh? I'll be here all night, try the veal.
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steele said[1] @ 10:06pm GMT on 12th Aug
Way ahead of y'all.
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Menchi said @ 12:24am GMT on 13th Aug
Now I'm remembering the research on how birds can recognize people and respond to remembered behavior, and hope that there's somebody out there doing some avio-social engineering to train them to hate people in MAGA hats as much as the rest of us do.
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Dienes said @ 1:26pm GMT on 13th Aug
I'll start applying for grants.
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steele said @ 2:32am GMT on 14th Aug
Go on....
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