Interesting Facts

Yesterday while reading newspaper (The Hindu) one particular news in the last page caught my attention. It was titled "Elephants know their sums"



Below is the article from hindu:

Tokyo: Asian elephants can do mathematics, and have proved their skill at addition in an experiment with their favourite food, a Japanese researcher said on monday.

One elephant was 87 percent correct and the other was 69 percent right in months of addition exercises involving single digits, says Naoko Irie of the University of Tokyo.

In one test, researchers dropped three apples into one bucket and five into another bucket and then added two apples to each. Five times out of six, Ashya, a 30 - year old female elephant at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo, chose the bucket with seven apples rather than five although see or feel the inside of the containers.

The other elephant, 38 - year - old Mito from Kyoto, was also right five times in a test involving oranges.

Ms. irie; a doctal candidate in cognition and behavioural science, said she was surprised at the elephants' mathematical skills. "I couldn't believe it at first," she said. "They could instantly compare numbers like six and five."

Each animal was tested using their favourite food. Elephants have roughly the same life span as humans.

Many animals are known to be able to choose te bigger of two numbers. Their perfomances, however, usually decline if the numbers are big or the gap between the two numbers is small.

I believe all animals know maths. Only human beings are proud of it because they have conventional methods in maths.

The following picture describes how software engineers jump from one job to another.
This is a really cool picture.

In literature, a red herring is a narrative element intended to distract the reader from a more important event in the plot, usually a twist ending.



The term "red herring" originates from the tradition whereby young hunting dogs in Britain were trained to follow a scent with the use of a "red" (salted and smoked) herring (see kipper). This pungent fish would be dragged across a trail until the puppy learned to follow the scent. Later, when the dog was being trained to follow the faint odor of a fox or a badger, the trainer would drag a red herring (which has a much stronger odor) across the animal's trail at right angles. The dog would eventually learn to follow the original scent rather than the stronger scent.

In literature, the most commonplace use of a "red herring" is in mystery fiction. One particular character is described or emphasized in a way that seems to throw suspicion upon that character as the person who committed the crime: later, it develops that someone else is the guilty party.

This is used in cryptography as well!

In cryptography, a red herring is a second hidden message that is intended to be discovered more easily so that the real message remains hidden to anyone who might intercept the transmission and break the red herring code. Only the intended receiver would know the key to unlocking the real message.