h a l f b a k e r yExperiencing technical difficulties since 1999
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they get in your way in the street, they carry dodgy diseases and they crap all over the show, however, your average city dwelling pigeon is actually quite an intelligent and mobile citizen. So I propose that we put them to work.
Litter is a problem that all our cities face and, give them their
dues, the pigeons do get rid of a certain amount of organic matter from our streets, but I suggest we train them to pick up non organic matter and deposit it in specially designed bins.
These bins would be the major part of the training procedure as they would have food dispensers which would 'reward' each correct litter deposit.
A little work would have to be done to train them to distinguish between litter i.e crisp bags, drinks cans etc. and other things, small children etc. <joke> but thats the idea.... I'll get my coat.
(?) smarter than the average bird brain
http://www.scienced...pigeon_intelligence
intelligence going to waste [etherman, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]
(?) Maybe pigeons can be trained
http://www.google.c...ogy/pigeonrank.html
(and maybe not) [theircompetitor, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]
life savers and life takers
http://www.guardian...604,1221363,00.html
[etherman, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]
accidental baking - sorry etherman
http://www.halfbake...Disposing_20Pigeons
i baked this some time ago - but its not your fault cause my account was deleted and only renewed after the crash. . . . . [benfrost, Oct 09 2004]
(?) memorial
http://news.scotsma...test.cfm?id=3797110
[po, Nov 30 2004]
Unicode 65229
http://tinyurl.com/9kxu7
ghain isolated (arabic letter looking a bit like a half a croissant) as per [PainOCommonSense] [zen_tom, Jul 25 2005]
[link]
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its amazing how many limp to get the sympathy vote. |
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at least explain the fishbone PO, instead of just being a grump. |
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its a pigeon, :) grump? moi? |
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i know u didn't vote i just meant the drawing. it is a fish isn't it? |
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It is a pigeon, [etherman]. I like your idea since it will give homeless people a chance at a tasty snack. I fear your birds will get nothing. Oh and who are you gonna pay to refill the bird-snack tray? |
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etherman, you're too late, Google is already using pigeons for the search engine. See link |
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//who are you gonna pay to refill the bird-snack tray?// |
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I would presume that the local city council would be more than happy to feeed such useful workers peanuts, Belfast City Council certainly pay me that. |
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apologies <po> of course its a pigeon, and a beautiful one at that, grovel grovel....any chance of taking ur fishbone back??? |
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I'll have you know that text pigeon was created by myself some time ago. It was a peace offering after I "made" po cry after some awful comments about pigeons were posted by yours truly for which I am truly sorry. That said, the only good pigeon is a dea-, I mean, *dear* pigeon, yes, that's it. Dear pigeon. |
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or a live pigeon trained to make the world a neater place. |
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So I say sentence them to Service Industry, and I like the idea of trash pick up. And if it's baked, I'll have mine with a little dijon to cover the gamey taste. Thanks. |
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recently had pigeon with a nice plum sauce,mmm. |
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recently I had my dear pigeon friends to dinner with a nice etherman sauce. mmmmm |
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good point Zanzibar, once they're on the peanut payroll who knows what control we could have over them. strap webcams on them and get them to spot crime, bad parking, poor dress sense... the possibilities are mindless..emm.. endless. |
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great link <buddha> especcially love the line |
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"if you're adrift in a life raft, and have lost all hope of rescue, look to the sky and pray for pigeons." |
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I guess some of you guys in the uk might have seen the reports of the British Military training pigeons as suicide bombers? <link> |
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This does bring up the possibility of my litter patrol being infiltrated by bad people bent on city centre destruction, though I still reckon its worth the risk. |
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Nah! Kill 'em all! Evil, nasty, disgusting, filthy, smelly, plague-infected vermin.
Apparently, feeding them calcium carbide can be entertaining. |
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angel, angel, you are missing out on the point that these vermin may be able to be useful to us if we just change our perspectives a little. |
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they aren't really any dirtier than your average teenager. |
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you actually raise a good point, if by accident. if we can train these pigeons to retrieve things, then while we are at it we can train them not to shit all over the place. |
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Apparently pigeons have a use (linky), (even if it's not this). |
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A much better use for pigeons was postulated during WW2 they were trained to be a guidance system in missiles, a very weird idea that, and more scarily the idea seemed to work reasonably well. |
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i dont think training pigeons to blow things up is a better idea than getting them to keep the place tidy. |
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Surely an Asci Fish would look more like this |
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I will give you an Asci Croissant ﻍ but only because of Po's entertaining Pigeon.
(note great effort was made to find a unicode character that resembled half a croissant but sadly it comes through with the code # grrr!) |
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I think with this rebirth of the HB finally people might wake up to the might of pigeon power!! maybe. |
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Well, out of all the animals Noah stuffed into that ark he trusted a Pigeon as the news bringer. (I'm sure it was the female pigeon of the set ;) ... Anyways, my point is, those flying rats are somewhat smart. |
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Don't get me wrong. The little buggers disgust me. Let's put them to work. [+] |
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baked - yet unbaked by the crash. maybe its illegal to link your own bake. maybe im not really me. i'll check. |
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darnnit. i loved this idea, I cant believe its baked ahhhhhh!!!! |
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although the automated bins, which are the real invention here folks, are a much simpler way and more practical than the suggestions in benfrost's thread. |
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Referring to use of pigeons as weapons: if you equipped a large number of pigeons each with a small amount of nuclear material, and trained them to gather at a certain point, maybe you could create critical mass leading to explosion. As for the original litter clearing suggestion: great idea! You can't eat the buggers (too many diseases) and they do s*** every where so this is one useful thing they can do for society. If a small amount of nuclear material was added to their feed excessively large colonies would automatically explode, preventing pigeon epidemics! |
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Interesting idea about the nuclear pigeons. Can anyone gimme some advice on how you train pigeons to home to certain areas? I suppose retrain is the word as the naturally home to the place the live. |
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I think pigeons navigate using a mix of magnetic fields, polarized light and visual terrain following (studies have shown they follow main roads and rivers). I don't know if you could train a pigeon to follow a map but you could use a GPS controlled helmet to mimic the pigeon's natural magnetic and polarised light inputs that would guide it home but alter them to direct it toward the target. |
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Regarding the issue of preventing the litter picking pigeons from depositing their do-do everywhere, they mostly poop where they sit so just train them to roost at certain selected sites. I think they should be issued with uniforms such as smart caps and waistcoats. |
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indeed the collection points could have rows of roosting bars, with self cleaning poop trays beneath. |
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Or just feed the pigeons something to make their poop taste like McDonalds (shouldn't be hard). That way, the pigeons clean up after the kids and the kids clean up after the pigeons. |
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Hmmmm I fear mad pigeon disease may result. |
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That is a great idea! A disposal bin with a treat food dispenser! I am sure they can learn from each other after you've taught one. |
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Maybe fast food containers could be made out of a material that pigeons eat instead? Maybe something that is tightly packed, but turns into food after getting wet? (Insides of cups and things would still be coated with wax, but after a rain, the outsides would expand into something similar to bread as far as birds are concerned.) |
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Then again, pigeons don't really dispose of the litter they eat. They just convert it into poop. |
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This is really a great idea. I wish I could double-croissant it. I will double-annotate it, instead. |
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Pigeons can be trained to play ping pong or pilot missiles. Crows are smart enough to make hooks out of wire to retrieve treats with. Why can't they be trained to pick up litter? I don't know how smart sea gulls are... |
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You really only need to teach one to do it, maybe a domesticated one, and the rest will learn by example. |
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1. The treat has to be accessible only by the bird that brought the trash. Otherwise they'll quickly figure out how to wait by the treat dispenser while another drops the trash in. |
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2. Obviously the machine has to differentiate between different types of objects. Otherwise you would have the downside of birds picking up things that shouldn't be picked up, like stones or parking tickets or paper money from people's hands. But at least you would know where things ended up. Maybe run the trash down an assembly line after collection and have humans pick out things for the lost and found. For a first implementation, you could make it easy and have it recognize only one type of trash, like cigarette butts or aluminum cans. They already have machines for recognizing cans. Maybe anything with a bar code? |
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theyd be great workers. and maybe later if we become
theire friends, we could train them to do other stuff. Like
stop global warming!! YAY! |
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