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[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
I am here to report to y'all today an important development in the War on Terror.

We now have got squadrons of highly trained birds -- like lil' Hootie here -- ready to go to Iraq and find those weapons of mass destruction.

S_A_M

• In 1942 behavioral scientist BF Skinner came up with the idea of using rained pigeons to guide weapons. The system worked by training pigeons to earn a food reward by pecking at the image of a ship. Three of them were then placed in the nose of a missle. Once launched, the pigeons would see the ship in their window and peck at it, triggering a corrective mechanism linked to the missle's guidance system.
  
  The closer the ship got, the bigger it appeared in the screen, and the more the pigeons pecked, so that just before they hit the target and were obliterated, [the pigeons] were being showered with grain.
  
  The systems worked well in simulations but the navy eventually balked at putting it into practice.

-- John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, The Book of General Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know is Wrong, p. 69