In case anyone is confused, the camel calf’s body is facing the camera head-on; we’re looking at its forelegs. Its neck is curved upwards sharply and slightly to the viewer’s left, but the fur colors make it blend in (you can see the back of its neck slightly).
That angle makes it look very different from what it normally looks like.
Same camel:
https://www.zooborns.com/zooborns/2010/03/little-camel-cuddles-with-mom.html
Discworld brainwashed me on camels. Every time I see one I now wonder what math is going through it’s head.
“The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins. They are so much brighter that they soon realized that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don’t find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human’s eye and get away with it.”
“Lack of fingers was another big spur to the development of camel intellect. Human mathematical development had always been held back by everyone’s instinctive tendency, when faced with something really complex in the way of triform polynomials or parametric differentials, to count fingers. Camels started from the word go by counting numbers.”
While Vicious Brute, Bloody Stupid, and Evil-Smelling-Bugger stand around stinking, spitting and otherwise looking stupid:
“You Bastard was thinking: there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty-five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what’s causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Tau equal Chi/4. cudcudcud Let Kappa/y be an Evil-Smelling-Bugger (* Renowned as the greatest camel mathematician of all time, who invented a math of eight-dimensional space while lying down with his nostrils closed in a violent sandstorm.) differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin co-efficients. . .”
― Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
I regret the decades I missed out on reading Discworld. I’m through it twice and I’ll never catch all the jokes and references. Some say 5 readings gets you close. Those novels are the funniest, hardest hitting, most genius fiction I’ve ever read. Laughed, cried, “better than Cats”, all that. Do not sleep on these books! (Ignore all the suggested reading order crap and simply start with #1.)
GNU Terry Pratchett
Oddly reminds me of those really furry spiders.
future home robot, fetch me a beer.
