Top stories

A New Kind Of Heist: Six Apps For Free

Those crazy MacHeisters are at it again, and this time the deal is even harder to resist.
The first ever MacHeist Nano won’t cost you a penny. You can download, without charge, fully licensed copies of ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, and Hordes of Orcs. If 500,000 people take part (which I think is a pretty safe [...]

Getting More iPhone Home Screens – And Keeping Them

A couple of weeks back, I wrote Temporarily Get More iPhone Home Screens Via Cunning Bug Exploit, but had heard staying away from the iTunes Applications tab within my iPhone was probably a Very Good Idea. Reader Larry Pressnell noted that since the most recent iTunes update, his extra screens have been accessible in iTunes.
Since [...]

Cult of Mac Favorite: MobileStacks Is the Best Reason To Jailbreak. Period.

I really like Stacks on my Mac. Stacks makes it fast and easy to find files, folders and apps right from the Dock. It makes managing a Mac pretty slick with all sorts of little UI tricks. That’s why I recently gave MobileStack a go on my jailbroken iPhone.
I must say that it lives up to the [...]

Gallery: Behind the Scenes From Two Classic Apple TV Ads

Is this Steve Jobs driving a tank in a classic Apple TV spot from the late 1990s? That was the rumor at the time: Jobs was making cameos in Apple commercials.
Ken Segall, the TBWA ad man responsible for naming the iMac and Think Different, reveals the truth after the jump. He also shares some rare [...]

Pigeon Plays Tap Tap Revolution On iPhone — But Sucks

picture-1.png

Blogger Chris Ainsworth tried to get his pet pigeon, Brisby, to play the popular iPhone music game, Tap Tap Revolution, a version of Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. Unfortunately, Brisby wasn’t very good, leading Chris to conclude that pigeons suck at video games. But with the proper operant conditioning, the bird could probably be a killer Tap Tap player.

After all, psychologist B.F. Skinner in 1944 built an experimental guided missile that pinpointed  targets by putting three pigeons in the missile’s nose cone.

The pigeons were trained to peck at an image of the target in the middle of a screen. If the missile wandered off course, the image of the target would wander out of the crosshairs. But when the pigeons pecked the screen to center the target, the missile would correct its flight.

Skinner’s Pigeon Project was judged impractical, but not the pigeons’ pecking skills. The birds performed well, pecking at the target up to 10,000 times in 45 minutes.

About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is senior editor of Cult of Mac, editor of two books about technology culture, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, and has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Observer in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

Email the author | Read more posts by Leander Kahney.

3 comments

    To be honest if he wanted to he could beat any human at that game or any other,

    bit of random info.. Birds see a lot faster than we do, so if they were to go watch a film it would be like watching a very slow keynote.

    In other words there are not enough FPS to fulfill the birds vision and so it has to sit for an age to wait for the next slide which shows only very very slight changes

    make a tap tap bird edition and it’d kick ass although we would never be able to see him d it without slowing it down

    NEEEERRRRDDDD!!!