News from Atlanta

I was pleased to see on the news tonight that my former abode continues to make headlines. From Atlanta we learn today that elephants are self aware.

Although I think they are sort of overstating. It could as easily be the case that he elephant was not self-aware until that moment, which then triggered an existential crisis of, well, elephantine proporations. I mean, there was that poor elephant, munching on some hay, looking at that New Elephant while peacefully contemplating the Reimann Hypothesis (or possibly remembering dreamily the time she stomped that hapless keeper to death) and idly wondering what that thing was on its forehead, when the reality slowly dawned...why, that was, not another elephant. That was, hmmm, poke about with trunk a bit, Zeta(z) = SUMk, look, that other elephant is poking about also...=1 to infinity, hey, that itches, (1/kz) ohmygoodness, that's me! Trivially zero at the negative even integers, but where are all the other zeroes? And oh, dear, the other two elephants here are wearing the exact same thing as I am, The only other zeroes known all lie on the line in the complex plane with real part equal to 1/2. I could just sink into the floor. Maybe if I take it off nobody will notice....

I mean I suppose this is one up on "damn, it's cold out here" which was I think the conscious thought most of us had first, but still.

Or maybe this is simply the only self aware elephant in the world and they just lucked up on the first go. Right out of the box they got the Da Vinci of elephants. Wel, it could happen and it isn't reported whether this elephant had any unusual habits, like taking notes or bemoaning the absence of opposable thumbs.

Of course half the chimpanzees fail the self awareness test; I wonder how many people do?