It’s that time of the year again!
You: a discerning reader of books about unconventional information technologies (unusual marks of punctuation, say, or pocket calculators). Your friends and family: the same, naturally. But what gifts to give them this holiday season?
Having dispatched punctuation and book news, we’re on to pocket calculators! Incredibly, half a century or more after their appearance, there is still news to be had on the subject.
In the introduction to Empire of the Sum, I mention that like some other animals, ravens and other corvids are known to be able to count. Not only that, but they understand the concept of zero, which is something that humans struggled with for quite some time.1 Now, though, a study in Science shows that not only can crows count, they can count out loud. In the words of the paper’s authors,