Bosco the great ape has found
a new line of work after being rescued from a lab for cosmetics testing. He’s
now got a new lease on life teaching AP Calculus to a home-schooled girl in
Evansville, Indiana. 16-year old April Janelle Furst has been
trying to get a handle on her AP Calculus for the past five months, to no
avail. Her parents have since begun to home school her, and have recruited
Bosco – an accomplished math ape - to assist.
According to April’s Mom, May, Bosco has his
own office in the unused garage extension, including access to a computer and monitor
that enables him to not only use the standard symbols of calculus –including
integral signs, and summation symbols, but also to export them into computation
programs like Mathcad, and transmit the results to April, sitting at her
computer inside her bedroom. There, April also has a transparent screen on
which she can work out the calc problems assigned by Bosco.
“Sometimes his problems are
really, really hard!” she chirps. “But if I run into a road block, he’s always
happy to help me out! And all I need to do is pay him a few bananas and
coconuts a day!”
Bosco’s abilities in math first came to light at
the lab where he underwent assorted frontal lobe experiments, including injecting human neurons into Bosco's neocortex. Soon after, when a sheet of paper
accidentally got pushed under his cage, he scratched in what looked like
derivatives, and integral signs. His handlers, amazed at the discovery,
believed that the chimp had way too much math talent on offer to be subjected
to painful injections of assorted chemicals for the cosmetic industry. So they
put out ads on his abilities, and offered him for sale to the first kind owner
who could pay $100. Harvey Furst saw the ads, and arrived within a day after
their initial appearance, to bring home the math ape genius. He hasn’t regretted
it yet.
According to Harvey:
"I must say, he also has marvelous hygiene
habits and knows how to use the toilet in the garage. This is one exceptional
ape!"
What does all this mean for standard evolutionary
theory? Maybe that it will have to be revised to account for some great apes (namely chimps of a certain genetic pedigree) having
at least as much brain power (or more) as certain quasi-political humans who follow a bipedal orange maggot that lives in Florida.
Harvey adds:
“Bosco is also terrific at games of strategy,
including chess and GO. I am sure he could wallop most Americans' behinds without
even batting an eyelash! Besides whenever he sees a picture of the orange guy from Mar-a-lago, Bosco
goes bonkers. He rips it up then defecates on it. Go figure!”
In the meantime, April has now returned to work on
her latest problem from Bosco: to find the minimum of a third degree curve,
f(x) = x 3 - x 2 + 2, and show how she obtained it (see middle image).
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