@Stefan Jones

Thanks for pointing that out! I agree, perhaps that last statement was a slight exageration! :) However I'm just extremely pissed at the arbitrary nature of the censorship here.

I absolutely agree with MGR72. This sort of ridiculous censorhip of reasonable comments is pathetic. Take a leaf out of the Guardian's blog and stop being so defensive. It's worse than China...

@antinous

"If there were a species smarter than us, we would just adjust the definitions to render them inferior."

If that were the case, they'd be doing the adjusting, surely?

Seriously though, the difference between human and other animal cognition is not just a matter of definition; it can be (and is) studied experimentally. Although several species show remarkable cognitive abilities, they don't have capacity for anything like the complex problem solving and reasoning that humans do. Their cognition has evolved to enable them to adapt to their environments, which is fine. But to say that "We manipulate the definitions to maintain our aura of specialness" and that "Many of the arguments in favor of our superiority boil down to our very efficient vocal apparatus and manual dexterity, which are really just a structural aptitude for expressing complex language" is to ignore the basic facts about the significant differences that exist between the cognition of humans and other animals.

@antinous

"Viewing humans as qualitatively 'special' turns our type of intelligence into something mystic".

I don't think that necessarily follows at all. Our intelligence may be qualitatively special (because of our relatively large frontal cortex, use of language etc.) without it being seen as 'mystic' in any way. It's all still based on computational processes being carried out by nervous systems. It's just that human brains may have evolved qualitatively special ones -- and that's why we're able to discuss these things on the internet while dolphins and chimpanzees aren't.

Although I guess it depends on what one means by 'rudimentary math' but I suspect this is probably more to do with basic subitization mechanisms than any higher level processes.

@MALCOLMCASS "Psychology ... is really a very soft science". That statement's waaaaay too general bro! Psychology covers many subdisciplines, some more 'scientific' than others. Cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, for example, use the same rigorous methods as used by the natural sciences.

Given the alternative meaning of 'cupcake' in the UK and the well known properties of Guiness, the title of this post had me spraying tea over my keyboard :)

Couldn't they have got it to carry something other than bags of wasps? That buzzing would really start to annoy me after a couple of miles...

Thanks Cory for taking that transatlantic flight again ("every year, for most of a decade now") in order to report on how we can reduce our carbon footprint...

I seem to remember that situations like this can be described accurately by stochastic process models, particularly 'hazard' functions, but I can't for the life of me remember how. Some hardcore stats BBer help me out!