Fascinating three part CBC Ideas program about dogs:
"Dogs and people have lived together as friends for at least 12,000 years. Remarkably, it's only been in about the last 20 or 30 years that fundamental questions about WHO dogs are, are being answered by detailed research.Take dogs' sensory systems. It used to be said that dogs are colour blind. They aren't.
Dogs see colours less distinctly than we do and their vision, when they're looking at something really close, isn't as good as ours. But they can see distant movement and they can see in dim light much better than we can. Their hearing is better - about 40 times better. And then there's smell. It's a dog's primary way of knowing the world. Ours is vision, theirs is smell. Their noses include what's called a vomeronasal organ, that "holds" and recirculates airborne molecules for analysis like a chemistry lab. Some types of dogs have an olefactory system that's thousands of times more sensitive than ours. Imagine what it would be like to be awash in smells and sounds like dogs are.
And then there's the question of what dogs DO with all this information."
Jeff Jarvis draws an interesting analogy between dogs and Internet (via Andrew):
"Dogs, they say, think in maps informed with their smell. They sniff and resniff a location to find out what has been there and they sniff the air to tell the future: to discover what will be here or where they will go next. Thus, they say, dogs have a different sense of “now.” Unlike our eyes, which take in what is visible and apparent at this moment, their noses can sense the past — who and what was here and what’s decaying underneath — and the future of a place — what’s coming, just upwind. Dogs are microprocessors, they say, and their noses feed their data bases.
It strikes me that the net — particularly the mobile net — is building a dog’s map of the world. Through Foursquare, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Maps, Layar, Goggles, and on and on, we can look at a place and see who and what was here before, what happened here, what people think of this place. Every place will tell a story it could not before, without a nose to find the data about it and a data base to store it and a mind to process it."
It's not possible to understand Max completely. But by the process of modestly anthropomorphizing him, I try to canine-morphize myself. In addition to being the power-house my emotional life; he opened up those intellectual doors in my life which I never knew existed.
In the quest to understand him, I was forced to embark on that futile journey to understand the world. It's immensely difficult comprehend what I saw in the way he sees the world. Other than those trite lessons of life and death; the lessons on how to adapt, be open-minded, find wonder in mundanity and most important lesson of perpetual learning. And thanks to that fallacious memory, there would be more lessons to be learnt in hindsight. It's not about me but yet the only quantified way of understanding Max is to see the change in myself. I can never be a canine but through him I hope to become a better human. My righteousness melts in his umwelt.
"Dogs and people have lived together as friends for at least 12,000 years. Remarkably, it's only been in about the last 20 or 30 years that fundamental questions about WHO dogs are, are being answered by detailed research.Take dogs' sensory systems. It used to be said that dogs are colour blind. They aren't.
Dogs see colours less distinctly than we do and their vision, when they're looking at something really close, isn't as good as ours. But they can see distant movement and they can see in dim light much better than we can. Their hearing is better - about 40 times better. And then there's smell. It's a dog's primary way of knowing the world. Ours is vision, theirs is smell. Their noses include what's called a vomeronasal organ, that "holds" and recirculates airborne molecules for analysis like a chemistry lab. Some types of dogs have an olefactory system that's thousands of times more sensitive than ours. Imagine what it would be like to be awash in smells and sounds like dogs are.
And then there's the question of what dogs DO with all this information."
Jeff Jarvis draws an interesting analogy between dogs and Internet (via Andrew):
"Dogs, they say, think in maps informed with their smell. They sniff and resniff a location to find out what has been there and they sniff the air to tell the future: to discover what will be here or where they will go next. Thus, they say, dogs have a different sense of “now.” Unlike our eyes, which take in what is visible and apparent at this moment, their noses can sense the past — who and what was here and what’s decaying underneath — and the future of a place — what’s coming, just upwind. Dogs are microprocessors, they say, and their noses feed their data bases.
It strikes me that the net — particularly the mobile net — is building a dog’s map of the world. Through Foursquare, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Maps, Layar, Goggles, and on and on, we can look at a place and see who and what was here before, what happened here, what people think of this place. Every place will tell a story it could not before, without a nose to find the data about it and a data base to store it and a mind to process it."
It's not possible to understand Max completely. But by the process of modestly anthropomorphizing him, I try to canine-morphize myself. In addition to being the power-house my emotional life; he opened up those intellectual doors in my life which I never knew existed.
In the quest to understand him, I was forced to embark on that futile journey to understand the world. It's immensely difficult comprehend what I saw in the way he sees the world. Other than those trite lessons of life and death; the lessons on how to adapt, be open-minded, find wonder in mundanity and most important lesson of perpetual learning. And thanks to that fallacious memory, there would be more lessons to be learnt in hindsight. It's not about me but yet the only quantified way of understanding Max is to see the change in myself. I can never be a canine but through him I hope to become a better human. My righteousness melts in his umwelt.
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