news and comment
behaviour and intelligence

site map
C O L O U R K E 'Y

bees are intelligent animals!

" “Our work and that of other labs has shown that bees are really highly intelligent individuals. That they can count, recognise images of human faces and learn simple tool use and abstract concepts.”

"He thinks bees have emotions, can plan and imagine things, and can recognise themselves as unique entities distinct from other bees. He draws these conclusions from experiments in his lab with female worker bees. “Whenever a bee gets something right, she gets a sugar reward. That’s how we train them, for example, to recognise human faces.” In this experiment, bees shown several monochrome images of human faces learn that one is associated with a sugar reward. “Then, we give them a choice of different faces and no rewards, and ask: which do you choose now? And indeed, they can find the correct one out of an array of different faces.”

"It takes them only a dozen to two dozen training sessions to become “proficient face recognisers”, he said."

Quotation from Lars Chittka, The mind of a bee

related reading

swarms and beehives

logicians, 'logic' and madness

Several famous logicians, mathematicians and philosophers are said to have been, or become mad

intelligence and madness

detailed discussion on IQ and IQ tests

Is Intelligence Distributed Normally?

By Cyril Burt, 1963

The mind of a bee by Lars Chittka
	Princeton University Press, hbk, 2022 ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691180474 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691180472 Basic Books,, 2012, hbk $26.95 [amazon.com] {advert} £19.99 [amazon.co.uk]	Aubible audio book Narrator Michael Butler Murray 7 hours and 55 minutes Publisher Tantor Audio ASIN B0B6QDX2TH $0.00 [amazon.com] {advert} £0.00 [amazon.co.uk] with Audible trial Kindle edition ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09NCLMHVM Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press, 2022 File size ‏ : ‎ 37414 KB $20.41 [amazon.com] {advert}

christmas carols - dirge or joy!

Just finished watching Lucy Worsley's BBC2's prog on Christmas carols. It's time for a rant from your humble Yak.

During this programme, many of the carols were first played as instrumentals. These versions were "at pace" and lively. By the time the words were added and sung (the exception probably, just about, being that sung in the pub), the carols degenerated into dirges of varying degrees of misery, emotional face distorting, hand waving and wringing, and direness.

Why? I suspect the Puritan/Protestant/Socialist need to remove joy is one part, another is a drive to show some misguided display of personal sanctimoniousness. Certainly, there were many expressions of primness and priggishness.

But Christmas is a time of cheer and, as I said, joy in Jesus's birth and all its significance, even to the non-religious and the non-Christian. Two thousand one hundred years has embedded Christian precepts, ethics and morals throughout much of world society, despite the current and previous attempts by Islam and Socialism to return society to more primitive attitudes and behaviours.

abelard asked what is it that they're doing. I said, I reckon they have slowed the carols down to half the original pace. I'd need to see the scores from when the carols first became widespread to be sure.

There is another reason not to sing carols as dirges. It gets bl***dy freezing when carol singing, so fast-moving is needed for everything!

"Fresh and lively", though not perfect!

This music for 'Tomorrow shall be my dancing day' was written for the girls of Saint Paul's Girls' School (SPGS) by its then director of music, John Gardner who died ten years ago. Many choral groups have since attempted to sing this carol, mostly as the famous dirge, as singing correctly requires mathematical self-discipline.

Here's a dirge version:

Note this carol can even be raced, and be too fast, as here!

email email_abelard [at] abelard.org

© abelard, 2021, 24 december
all rights reserved

variable words
prints as increasing A4 pages (on my printer and set-up)