Two unrelated things I felt like posting about.

One, as you all probably know, crows are smart. If you read BoingBoing, you’ll probably have heard about the guy that built a vending machine for crows. Here’s a video of the ten minute little talk he gave about it. Some of the anecdotes in the comments below are nifty, too. The part that I find compelling, though, is the on-the-face-of-it quite simple notion that you don’t have to domesticate a species, or even really communicate with it very well, to work with it productively.

Two, I’m looking for more authors to read (preferably ones my local library has. In the process of searching, I stumbled across Gnooks. It’s an adaptive learning widget that shows you authors that other people who like the authors you like also like. (I’ll give you a second or two to parse that). There are similar tools for music and movies. You can either type in a single name, in which case it will spit out a little cloud of “you might also like” names (with the closer ones supposedly being more likely matches to your tastes), or you can type in three names and it will pop up a single suggestion. At this point, you can tell it if you agree, if you think it’s completely off base, or if you’ve never read its suggested author. That’s how it learns.

I typed in “Robin Hobb”, “Bernard Cornwell”, and “Richard Adams” (in part just to be difficult). It suggested Sharon Penman, an author of thick historical fictions. The Central Library had some of her stuff, so I got out The Sunne in Splendour, a War of the Roses era piece featuring Edward the IV, Richard the III, etc. It’s a bit dry so far — I blame Richard Adams — but we’ll see how it goes.