Interesting Facts

Wikimedia, has refused a photographer’s repeated requests to stop distributing his most famous shot for free – because the photograph of a monkey was a selfie - the monkey pressed the shutter button and therefore should own the copyright. ( Gloucestershire-based photographer David Slater was in Indonesia in 2011 attempting to get the perfect image of a crested black macaque when one of the animals came up to investigate his equipment, hijacked his camera and took hundreds of selfies. One of those selfies is now famous. Understandably Mr Slater is less than pleased. Probably because one of his best images, was taken by a monkey. Copyright law, which is a minefield in itself, says that the person who takes a photograph owns the copyright (regardless of who owns the camera it was taken on). Of course monkeys aren't people - yet, but it's an interesting grey area. BTW - if you can't take a better selfie than this one, please don't bother.)

Paignton Zoo in Devon has banned its monkeys from eating bananas. (Seemingly, the natural sugar content of the kinds of bananas grown for human consumption is bad for the monkeys' health and can rot their teeth. Over the years the banana has been bred to be sweeter and sweeter, and now there can be up to 12g of sugar per 100g of banana, and the sugar counts for 53 percent of a bananas 105 calories. Monkeys without bananas! Whatever next: squirrels with nut allergies or    +Aladdin Pasha    at the movies with no popcorn?) Source: The Wright Stuff - Channel 5

Well, virtual monkeys. Seemingly a computer programmer, Jesse Anderson, programmed a few million virtual monkeys to randomly bash keys on virtual typewriters in an attempt to re-create Shakespeare. (He set out to prove or disprove the long-standing saying of how an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time could write Shakespeare.   The virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. They regularly pump out random sequences of text nine characters long, each string of text is checked to see if it appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard.  Using these constraints, mathematicians say it would take “far, far longer than the age of the Universe” for monkeys to write Shakespeare. I haven't got that long, so I'll stick with the original.)

"Hok-oo" means "watch out, other monkeys about!" in monkey language. (I know you don't need to know this to improve your English, but you'll thank me if you ever meet a troupe of monkeys.)

Scientists at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, say that monkeys learn more from females. (The monkeys were better able to learn a task when it was demonstrated by a female, who in monkey society are core group members with higher social status than males. Quite right too.) Full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8571318.stm

Monkeys can recognise 'bad grammar'. (In research carried out at Harvard University cotton-top tamarins were able to spot if the order of syllables in a word was "wrong". The monkeys were familiarised with two-syllable terms, and their reaction recorded to words that were not consistent with that syllable. See a monkey can do it.)