Sunday, April 08, 2007
Reindeer Pause!
A 12-year old boy in Michigan has collected 150 vacuum cleaners and has learned to tell most of them apart by the sound they make when they are turned on. He is practicing to identify them blind-folded on national TV. Not bad!
I once knew a mechanic who tuned cars by pitch. He was a music major and could easily identify a correctly tuned car by the noise it made. My car always seemed to run well after he had worked on it. I never bothered to buy a tuning light to see if he was completely on the up and up or not.
It is a well know fact that animals can pick up certain sounds quite easily, such as a can of cat food being opened by an electric can opener. Of course that was before the recent pet food scare. But I am certain that in no time they will pick up the sound of vittles being rustled up. I once had a cat that I had trained to come on demand by shaking her dry food that we kept in a jar. I eventually started whistling whenever I would shake the jar, and soon she would come simply whenever I whistled.
Then there is the case of the Emperor Penguins who must learn to sing a unique song so that whenever their mate returns after weeks of feeding while he shivers the whole time the mate can recognize him. Imagine being able to pick out a song from thousands of voices pleading to be recognized and taken off baby sitting duties. I bet that they could do quite well with vacuums and cars as well as long as there was a sufficient reward for them.
Now comes the hard part—human hearing. When we get older, our hearing starts to deteriorate, sometimes rather drastically. I was out walking the other day, when my wife said, “We have got to stop killing our reindeer!” Since we do not have any reindeer that we can call our own, I thought she was taking about the reindeer in Alaska that are killed for reindeer sausage. After further contemplation and a clue or two that I picked up from more conversation, I realized that what she had actually said was, “We have to stop carrying our rain gear with us.” At this point in my life I think that I can forget the cars and the vacuum challenge.
A 12-year old boy in Michigan has collected 150 vacuum cleaners and has learned to tell most of them apart by the sound they make when they are turned on. He is practicing to identify them blind-folded on national TV. Not bad!
I once knew a mechanic who tuned cars by pitch. He was a music major and could easily identify a correctly tuned car by the noise it made. My car always seemed to run well after he had worked on it. I never bothered to buy a tuning light to see if he was completely on the up and up or not.
It is a well know fact that animals can pick up certain sounds quite easily, such as a can of cat food being opened by an electric can opener. Of course that was before the recent pet food scare. But I am certain that in no time they will pick up the sound of vittles being rustled up. I once had a cat that I had trained to come on demand by shaking her dry food that we kept in a jar. I eventually started whistling whenever I would shake the jar, and soon she would come simply whenever I whistled.
Then there is the case of the Emperor Penguins who must learn to sing a unique song so that whenever their mate returns after weeks of feeding while he shivers the whole time the mate can recognize him. Imagine being able to pick out a song from thousands of voices pleading to be recognized and taken off baby sitting duties. I bet that they could do quite well with vacuums and cars as well as long as there was a sufficient reward for them.
Now comes the hard part—human hearing. When we get older, our hearing starts to deteriorate, sometimes rather drastically. I was out walking the other day, when my wife said, “We have got to stop killing our reindeer!” Since we do not have any reindeer that we can call our own, I thought she was taking about the reindeer in Alaska that are killed for reindeer sausage. After further contemplation and a clue or two that I picked up from more conversation, I realized that what she had actually said was, “We have to stop carrying our rain gear with us.” At this point in my life I think that I can forget the cars and the vacuum challenge.
