Yesterday Joshua Klein gave a talk at SICS Open House. Joshua is an unusual hacker in that he also hacks other things than computers and networks. One of those things are crows.

One day a friend called and told him that he had a problem with crows in his garden and wanted get rid of them. Klein thought that instead of killing them there should be some way to make the crows do something useful...

Crows are synanthropes (species that are adapted to human ecology), and are seldom found more than 5 km from areas populated by humans. They are also very clever and are able to solve difficult problems. Even more spectacular are that they have an ability to cultural adaptation, which means that they pick up behaviors from their kin and so create patterns of behavior that can be unique to a particular area or population (this behavior is for example only done by crows in a suburban area outside of Tokyo).

Klein studied crows and their behavior for 10 years and created the crow vending machine. Basically what it does is train crows to collect coins and return them to the vending machine in exchange for peanuts. The whole process on how the crows learn this behavior is explained on the projects website. The goal of the project is to teach crows to collect other stuff, like garbage, to create a mutual beneficial system between crows and humans.

The main point of Klein's talk was not the crow vending machine, but rather showing that as an example of hacking in a context where you usually don't think of hackers. He argued that hacker philosophy is something that is important for innovation in all areas, not just computing. Hacking is about breaching the rules and that means thinking in new ways and finding alternative ways to solve problems (or even redefining the problem space itself).

We live in what he called a “post-web world” where the web has become a medium that is widely spread and very much intertwined in our daily life: “It's no longer about the technology but it's about the possibilities it can give”.

In this world everybody can be a hacker, mixing knowledge from different disciplines to create something new, because the necessary information and communication tools are out there free for anyone to use.

Joshua's talk shined light on how important internet and the web are for many of the new innovations that are taking place. Our business, as most others, is dependent on it, and much of my personal life as well. It has already in a radical way changed they way we live and we are only in the beginning.

It's also amazing how little we know about animals and their capabilities. I have posted some videos below on animals and their behavior, be sure to check out the Bower bird video, the bird with a design sense. Alot of qualities that was thought to be unique to humans are now being found in other animals, especially among the big apes. I'm wondering how our views on animals and other species will change when we better understand how they think and what their emotional life is like.

Other smart animals
Bower bird - The bird with a sense for design.
Lyre bird - Beautiful singer.
Ants - I don't like how they conducted this experiment, but I'm glad it got filmed, because it's spectacular.
Deep sea creatures - Don't miss the Phonema, the inspiration for the Alien movies
Dolphins - Playing with bubble rings

Not so smart animals
Bullterrier and cat

Title photo by grendelkhan