this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
54 points (93.5% liked)
Showerthoughts
44246 readers
349 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I seem to recall one of the primates we taught sign language to indicated that they liked cooked food more because it tasted better.
Sign language in primates is dubious at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
The point stands
You are very intelligent
👉 🤱
Especially if they use it to ask for steak well done.
He gets the Children's Chimpanzee Menu
And ask for ketchup!
We tortured a lot of apes to prove Noam Chomsky right: language was an innate human ability and not something other animals can learn. Even the apes that learned English words or sign never once asked a question.
Almost everything you've heard that an Ape "singed" was "interpreted" by a handler or trainer; the actual transcripts are not intelligible. I'm sure some researchers and trainers were acting in good faith, but you can see how much room to fudge there is.
Coco the gorilla was a fraud. (well, her handlers were frauds) for example, her handler often claimed that Coco would use rhymes to indicate what she "really" meant. The problem is that a native sign-language user would have no idea that two English words rhymed. Their are rhymes in sign, where the motions are similar, not the phonetics.
lol no. Not in the absolute sense. Language IS NOT IN ANY WAY, "unique to humans". Period. Ever.
In fact, there have been a few recent studies that show whale language is as complicated as Chinese.
What about the one where the Japanese guy isolated the bird language words for "danger, snake!", then played it on speakers to wild birds, which caused them to panic and start looking around for the snake.
One of the most convincing experiments showing that animals have language that I've seen. The video is on YouTube
A random arrangement of grains of sand is more complicated than Chinese.
A random arrangement of my shit is more complicated than your brain.
Your opinion means less than nothing.
I do agree it's a fraud, but I'd also say "native sign language speaker" is a bit of a misnomer. Comparing it to a human we'd be talking about someone with perfect hearing but born mute. IE if they were taught by someone who spoke out loud as they signed, they would understand ryming in ways that someone who was deaf obviously wouldn't.