March 31, 2007: Panda porn

[Undertoad]

Axlrosen sent the full story and 20minutos.es daily gallery has the shot of this, Chuang Chuang the panda, who has been watching panda porn on a big screen television for days and days. Tapes of pandas getting it on. Because Chuang himself isn't taking to the concept, and they hope he'll figure it out by watching.

"Chuang Chuang seems indifferent to the videos; he has no reaction to what he's seeing on TV," Kanika said. "But we're continuing to show him videos and hoping they will leave an impression."

Maybe he's gay, and they're showing him the wrong tapes. More likely pandas take in information differently than people, and the images he sees are so obviously NOT pandas that the whole thing doesn't matter to him.

We see television images as representations and can make that extra step to understand that what we're seeing is a moving image of something else, but that's a pretty complicated process. The animals I've known have not been able to process non-moving pictures, never mind moving ones. My dog doesn't care what's on TV, until the audio is meaningful - something barks - which is a more realistic representation of another dog, to her.

Our brains are set up to recognize patterns and to associate them with the abstract concept of what we are looking at; instead of saying this is a picture of UT, you might just say this is UT and the complicated process that got you from one notion to the other is so quick you don't consider it.

This obviously leads to Magritte's "This is not a pipe", actually titled "The Treachery of Images". But I don't want to digress too much further.