I gotta get this off my desk. For a month, I’ve wanted to talk about this amazing video, Swallows Suss Out Motion Detectors, Learn to Open Doors. Some college campus added motion detector doors to their “Campus Bike Centre.” There were swallows who nested in there, but they still needed to get in and out. Almost immediately, they learned how to activate the doors. In the video below, you will see them. They fly past the detector and then do small circles until the doors (which are slow) open.
What bugs me about this is that a lot of scientists say, “Oh, this is just stimulus and response. They aren’t necessarily learning the way humans do.” I used to accept this kind of thinking. You hear the same thing about Koko, the sign language using gorilla. It sounds Very Serious to make such pronouncements, “We can’t know that they are really doing what we are!” But then two things occurred to me.
First, this is an anti-evolutionary idea. It is the idea that somehow humans aren’t just yet another great ape that has a large brain and an over-sized frontal lobe. This is just a dressed up version of what you read in the Bronze Age Bible. Yes, we are so different from other animals. But if you accept evolution, you can’t think there is some kind of quantum leap between us and swallows, much less us and gorillas.
Second, this is a weird form of solipsism. The normal kind is where we can’t know if anything outside of yourself exists. But this form is that we can’t know what’s going on in a bird’s brain. Well, that’s true. But I also can’t know what is going on in other humans’ brains. Maybe they actually think like I do, or maybe it’s just stimulus-response. Maybe other humans seem to think like I do, but they are really more like alligators without as many teeth. Who can say?
The truth is, we can’t say for certain. And as Bertrand Russell noted, we can’t say for sure that there isn’t a teapot orbiting the sun between the earth and Mars. We have to take some things on faith, like the idea that there is an external reality. But I tend to think things are actually the opposite of what I’ve been arguing. Swallows opening doors is just stimulus-response. And so was Rodin’s actions when he was carving the first version of The Thinker. I’m more than willing to believe that. But there is something in the wiring of brains that tricks us into thinking that we are actually, you know, thinking. And I don’t see any reason to “think” that swallows don’t suffer from the very same delusions.
See also: Monkeys Do Math as Expected.
Jonathan Chait wrote a very thorough and important article today, 
The anti-corruption group 
PolitiFact seems determined to demonstrate that they are completely stupid and useless. Consider the history of the whole “fact checking” industry. People looked around and noticed that there was a problem with reporting, which tended to just provide what both “sides” were saying in a conflict. So the fact checkers were going to get out there and make actual judgments. But they ran into the same problem that reporters suffered from: how could they be seen as objective, if they didn’t find both “sides” equally to blame for everything. So PolitiFact, along with every other major fact checking source, has bent over backwards to find false equivalence. This isn’t just done with nitpicking liberal claims, it also involves picking really minor liberal claims. Even still, conservatives hate the fact checkers, because even with all the false equivalence, they come off looking worse.
In general, I don’t do politicians for the birthday post, but 
The Chris Christie administration has put out a fake movie trailer for, No Pain, No Gain. It apparently has to do with a tour Christie will be doing this summer to push for ever more cuts from public employee benefits. 
Here is the great artist at the age of just 22. It seems a bit insecure in the sense that almost his whole face is out of the light. He’s certainly not an ugly man, but I’m sure he didn’t drive the girls wild either.
Just two years later, he looks quite the artist. A big difference is that at this point, he had been “discovered” and was getting real work to do with the good feelings and cash that it brings. If you ask me, he looks a bit smug, but I can hardly blame him.
At 34, Rembrandt was firmly established as a painter. He was rich too, having just purchased an expensive house. Still, like Mozart at this time of his life, he managed to spend at least as much money as he brought in. When this painting was made, he and his wife Saskia had had three children, all of them dying within about a month of their births.
As far as I can tell, Rembrandt didn’t paint himself for over a decade. Here he is at 46. Ten years earlier, Saskia gave birth to a boy, Titus, who managed to live to adulthood. But soon after giving birth, Saskia died.
At 54, I think Rembrandt looks sadder but wiser. He had continued to spend beyond his considerable means—mostly on works of art. He was forced to sell pretty much all of it and move into a much more modest home to avoid bankruptcy, shortly before he painted this self-portrait.
Finally, we see Rembrandt at 63—the year he died. This was one year after the death of his one surviving son, who died at 27. There is speculation that Rembrandt made himself look better—more healthy—than he was, because earlier self-portraits looked worse. I don’t find that a very compelling argument, since I have looked much worse than I do today. Anyway, he looks his age.
Today is unusual, because I’m kind of going to write two birthday posts. But this is the real one. Or the regular one.
Since I seem to have been ensnared by 
Normally, I wouldn’t post something so quickly, but I just had to share this. I got it via Paul Krugman, 
There has been a lot of talk recently about how young Americans are going to turn against the Democratic Party because the economy is so bad under President Obama. Jonathan Chait provided a good rundown of it,