COLUMBUS, OH – One Ohio zoo-owner is slicing costs in a unique way.
Rockford Park Zoo owner Dave Bell, like any businessman, has faced some tough choices in recent years. As economic woes threatened the zoo he spent a lifetime building, Bell found salvation in an unlikely source: pizza.

“One of the most expensive parts of running a zoo is buying specialized food for each species of animal we have,” Bell said. “but then I thought, ‘Hey,why not just let them eat pizza? I love pizza.’”

Rockford Park Zoo saved nearly $130,000 in 2011 by switching over to the new, all-pizza diet for the zoo’s varied inhabitants. Forming a partnership with Fabio’s, a family-owned joint located only two blocks away from the zoo, Bell created a feeding system of “4 slices for every 10 pounds, twice a day” at a discounted cost per box. Though many have lauded the financial savvy of the decision, the zoo’s move has not gone without criticism.

“It’s horrifying,” said one animal expert. “You have hundreds of different creatures with different needs, appetites and digestion processes. What happens when an animal becomes sick? What if this baboon doesn’t like pepperoni?”

Bell maintains that the zoo’s detractors are not “seeing the big picture.”  He likens the process of acclimatizing the animals to their new diet to his own childhood.

“My mother always said to eat my peas. And after a while, I started to like them. So, there you go.”

As hundreds file into the Rockford Park Zoo daily, many have cited an improvement in the customers’ experience as yet another advantage to Bell’s plan. Bell claims its due to a common bond created by seeing another species consuming their favorite meal.

“People love seeing different animals enjoy what they enjoy,” Bell said. “Look at that tiger — he loves that pizza!”

A team of monkeys finally written the complete works of Shakespeare!

It’s the great intellectual hypothesis that, given enough time, a monkey with a typewriter would reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare.

Mathematicians have created an army of millions of computerized monkeys, bashing away at virtual typewriters.

The software apes type random prose – in an attempt to mimic real primates – and a computer program compares the trillions of lines of gibberish they produce with the output of the 16th-century Bard.

Any letters matching small portions of Shakespeare’s writing are plucked out and formed into his plays, poems or sonnets.

Scientists say their digital monkeys have recreated 99.99 per cent of Shakespeare’s works – although clearly not typed in order.

The first fully completed piece was the poem A Lover’s Complaint.

The concept, known as the infinite monkey theorem, can be traced back more than 2,000 years to the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

It is based on the theories of probability and the suggestion that any simple action repeated enough times can eventually lead to a complex result, however unlikely.

The monkey-generating software has been designed by U.S. computer programmer Jesse Anderson.

To make the task easier, he has removed all punctuation and the space bar after starting the project on August 21 using Amazon’s cloud computing service.

Mathematicians say using the computer program to pluck out the details and removing punctuation will make the task easier, otherwise it would be nearly impossible.

Dr Ian Stewart, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick, suggests it would take the age of the universe – estimated at around 13 billion to 14 billion years – for monkeys to randomly produce a flawless recreation of the 3,695,990 characters in Shakespeare’s works.

And who can blame them for needing all that time? After all, there are 5.5 trillion combinations of any nine letters from the English alphabet, according to mathematicians.

That means mistakes are an inevitability.

‘There would be untold numbers of attempts with one character wrong; even more with two wrong, and so on,’ Dr Stewart said. ‘Almost all other books, being shorter, would appear before Shakespeare did.’

An experiment that was conducted in 2003 highlights just how improbable the idea is.

Known as The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, it set a huge virtual monkey population to work to see how long it would take to reproduce one of the Bard’s plays – and the answer was a very big number indeed.

In fact, they never got as far as producing a complete play, just several short lines, the longest of which matched Henry IV, Part 2.

The line was ‘Rumour. Open your ears’ –and it took a mere  2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey years to appear.

Along the way the simulated simians conjured up ‘Theseus. Now faire’ which matches part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – ‘…us. Now Faire Hippolita’ and they also bashed out ‘Poet. Good day Sir’, which matched part of Timon of Athens – ‘Poet. Good day Sir Pain’.

A slightly cruder version of the experiment also ran in 2003 at Paignton Zoo, Devon.

Researchers from the University of Plymouth left a computer keyboard in an enclosure of six macaques for a month to test the theory.

They produced five pages of mainly the letter S, before attacking the keyboard and relieving themselves over it.

Simon Neville
Ted Thornhill
Daily Mail

LONDON – Psychologists have proven that monkeys are the world’s first racists.

Yale graduate student Neha Mahajan, along with a team of psychologists, traveled to Cayo Santiago, an uninhabited island southeast of Puerto Rico also known as “Monkey Island,” in order to study the behavior of rhesus monkeys. Like humans, rhesus monkeys live in groups and form strong social bonds. The monkeys also tend to be wary of those they perceive as potentially threatening.

Their conclusion:  monkeys don’t like outsiders.  They make fun of them, throw banana peels at them and try to get them to leave their “neighborhood.”

To figure out whether monkeys distinguish between insiders (i.e. those who belong to their group) and outsiders (i.e. those who don’t belong), the researchers measured the amount of time the monkeys stared at the photographed face of an insider versus outsider monkey. Across several experiments, they found that the monkeys stared longer at the faces of outsiders. This would suggest that monkeys were more wary of outsider faces.

Mahajan and her team also devised a method for figuring out whether the monkeys harbor negative feelings towards outsiders. They created a monkey-friendly version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). For humans, the IAT is a computer-based task that measures unconscious biases by determining how quickly we associate different words (e.g. “good” and “bad”) with specific groups (e.g. faces of either African-Americans or European-Americans). If a person is quicker to associate “bad” with African-American faces compared to European-American faces, this suggests that he or she harbors an implicit bias against African-Americans.

Overall, the results support an evolutionary basis for prejudice.  The fact that prejudice often occurs automatically doesn’t mean we can’t find ways of overcoming its negative effects. For example, there is evidence that when people are made aware of their automatic prejudices, they can self-correct. And when we are encouraged to take the perspective of an outsider, it reduces our automatic prejudice towards that person’s group.

Given that most of the difficult conflicts we face in the world today originate from clashes between social groups, it makes sense to devote time to understanding how to reduce our biases. But our evolutionary past suggests that in order to be effective, we may need to adopt a new approach.

Often we focus more on political, historical, and cultural factors rather than the underlying patterns of thinking that fuel all conflicts. By taking into account the extent to which prejudice is deeply rooted in our brains, we have a better chance of coming up with long-term solutions that work with, rather than against, our natural tendencies.

Excerpts from article by Daisy Grewal

NEW YORK, NY – Mary-Kate Olsen, tired of being a celebrity, is heading off to Oz to find the Wizard.

After years of media silence following her public battle with anorexia and the death of her friend Heath Ledger’s, Mary-Kate Olsen is talking again.  She recently gave an interview to Marie Claire and described her life as childhood star as being like “a little monkey performer.”   She said she “wouldn’t wish her upbringing on anyone.”

Mary-Kate, the billionaire, told Marie Claire that she was finally grounded in reality and had a new mission in life – to go to Oz and find the Wizard.  She cut her interview short, hopped on her bicycle and headed off to say goodbye to “Auntie Em.” She picked up her sister, Ashley, along the way and put her in the basket on her bike.

M-K, who has been spending most of her time working on her fashion line – The Row – feels that if she can just get to Oz then she can eventually find her way back home, wherever that is. M-K was last seen pedaling her bicycle toward Kansas in hopes of getting sucked into a tornado.  “Here’s hoping,” said Sal Pappalado whose two daughters made him watch The Adventures of Mary-Kate and Ashley over-and-over. “Those videos drove me nuts. I hate those twins!!…. But I really loved The Case of the Fun House.  That’s a classic.”

Stopping to eat a few peas on the way through Ohio, M-K talked about her journey to Oz. “I’m not really worried about the munchkins or the flying monkeys because I feel that I understand them both.  I am excited to meet The Good Witch of The West because she reminds me a lot of my best friend, Paris Hilton.  Paris has a crown and magic wand, too.”  Hilton helped M-K pick out her ruby shoes before she left.

Most M-K fans assume that Mary-Kate will hook-up with a lion, scarecrow and tin man and then head off to find the wizard.  But, M-K detractors think she’ll actually turn out to be the Wicked Witch of the East – and will eventually melt away.

So, is she Dorothy?

Or the Witch?

Either way, WWN will be waiting for her, when she returns from Oz.   She stole our bike!

ROME, Italy — Following the announcement of the discovery of the Gnome of St. Peter, the Vatican has recently uncovered a trove of unknown Renaissance sculptures deep within the vaults of St. Symian’s Cathedral.

“The popes from the past hid many things,” said art archivist Julian Angeline. “They never knew when greedy or desperate rulers might try to sack the Vatican.”

Among the statuary was a vellum scroll signed by none other than Pope Julius II and Michelangelo. Renaissance historian Herbert Chissel was given access to the find.

“This document is a contract between the two men,” said Chissel. “It is commonly known that the pope was frustrated by how long it took Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. With this scroll, His Holiness bet that he could teach a monkey to create works of art more quickly than Michelangelo.”

There were three sculptures in the vault.

“The first one appears to be an attempt to recreate Michelangelo’s David,” said Chissel. “The figure is upright, with something slung over his shoulder. That’s where the similarity ends.

“There’s a big screaming hole of a mouth, the feet are the size of clown shoes, and the midsection is just a flabby mass of marble.”
The second work seemed to be a sculpture of Moses.

“The monkey didn’t bother sculpting the body, face or the horns that Michelangelo’s Moses has,” said Chisel. “Indeed, it is not even clear whether this Moses has a head. It’s just a lumpy slab with a beard.”

The third statue was the Pieta, a depiction of Mary holding Jesus in her lap.

“It’s difficult to tell where one figure ends and the other begins,” said Chissel. “It looks like a pyramid with feet sticking out and the top of a head from the side.

“While the monkey may have created the statues more quickly than Michelangelo, the poor workmanship — or rather, workchimpship — proved that Michelangelo’s method was superior,” Chissel said. “And though the wager is not explicit in the scroll, the outcome is not in doubt.”