![]() (Okay, 50 people, but still-cake for days.) Like, if you ordered a fancy cake from a fancy patisserie and it tasted like a Costco cake, you'd say, "Oh yeah, that was worth the $$ I just paid." Only at Costco, you'd get that delicious of a cake that would feed a thousand people for just $25. I don't even like cake that much and I can't stop eating a Costco cake. ![]() They are the trifecta of awesome-huge, cheap and utterly delicious. If you've never had a Costco cake, I'm so sorry. This article originally appeared on 12.23.22Ĭostco is known for many things-their employee satisfaction and retention, their amazing Kirkland Signature generic brand, their massive (and addictive) $4.99 rotisserie chickens, their never-going-to-raise-the-price $1.50 hot dog and soda meal and more.īut one favorite Costco feature that might just top them all? The Costco cake.Ĭostco cakes are legendary. We could all use that little extra measure of grace as we strive to figure out what a true and healthy "normal" feels like. So let's be gentle with one another and ourselves as we roll our harried selves into another new year. The overwhelm of our brains and hearts as we try to process it all is real. The grief and trauma of those who have experienced the worst of the pandemic are real. The uncertainty, the precariousness of "normal," the after-effects of everything that upended life as we knew it are real. Of course, life can't just stop, but we do need to allow some time for our bodies, minds and spirits to heal from what they've been through. We tried to fling ourselves into life, desperate to feel normal and make up for lost time, without taking the time to fully acknowledge the impact of the past two years or to fully recover and heal from it. We're like a person who thinks they're feeling better at the end of an illness so they dive fully back into life, only to crash mid-day because their body didn't actually have as much energy as their brain thought it did. “And it was at that point that I emailed Federico Rossano at UC San Diego and said ‘Hey, we’ve got this really large subject pool,” Trotter said “We’ve got these really remarkable dogs that are doing things we never would have expected.Putting it like that, of course we're exhausted. He said he started a conversation with Bunny’s owner, and they began recruiting people to use the FluentPet board to collect data for a possible study. The dog communication study had its origin with the company FluentPet, which designs and sells the soundboards many dogs - including Bunny - use.įluentPet Chief Executive Officer Leo Trottier has a background in cognitive science. After that, Bunny comes to her owner who finds the wooden spike of a foxtail stuck in the dog’s left paw. Bunny responds by pressing the button that says “paw.” “Where ouch?” asked Alexis Devine, Bunny’s owner. She presses the soundboard buttons for “mad” and then “ouch.” In one very well-known video, Bunny tells her owner something is wrong. She’s a sheep-a-doodle in Washington state who has millions of followers on TikTok. Of all the dogs who’ve become stars on social media, Bunny is the biggest. "She’s saying, ‘I want the cat that is sitting up there to come down.’ And she would literally push all those buttons, one after the other.” “So, for example, Bunny, the most famous participant in our study, would say things like ‘dog want cat down,’” Rossano said. So, as long as she has a need to communicate or a need for new words, we’ll continue."īased on the evidence he’s seen so far, Rossano gives a qualified “yes.” He said it has become his working hypothesis. "Our goal was just to improve her quality of life. “So our goal was never to hit a certain word count or a certain number of followers," Arco said. Arco said her dog Mila, who now uses 31 different words, has more than 240,000 followers on Instagram. Some of the dogs in the project have become stars on social media. Dogs use soundboards, whose buttons they press with a paw or a nose, to communicate humans words, thoughts - maybe even sentences. Scientists at UC San Diego are leading what they call the biggest community science project ever done on animal communication. Taylor Arco is one of 1,200 people in 47 countries expected to provide data about their dogs' ability to communicate. The buttons say things like 'play,' 'potty,' 'outside,' 'eat' and 'scritches,' which are scratchy caresses dogs like. The soundboard is an array of buttons set into plastic tiles that owners can arrange however they want. So, ‘eat’.”Īrco is talking about the word-buttons Mila pushes with her nose on her soundboard at home. ![]() “She also likes to ask for ‘walk’ and she never lets us forget when it’s time to eat. ![]() “She uses attention words like ‘scritches’ and ‘love you’ a lot,” said Taylor Arco, Mila’s owner.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |