One of the scientific foundations of dog training is so-called operant conditioning. Going back to Skinner, it’s an extension of Pavlov’s classical conditioning. Operant conditioning means that a dog changes his or her behaviour through reward and punishment. …

March 2022. I finally decide to schedule the surgery for my dog. He has a mass on his left back leg, a growth, benign, as far as we know, but still a growth, and over the past two years it has grown noticeably. He also started licking it obsessively, causing…

The week has 168 hours. Subtracting for each day around twelve hours for sleeping, eating, and other essential parts of life, plus a daily commute, leaves around 80 hours. Over a full year, that’s around 4000 hours that are available. According to my employer’s workload guidance, I am getting paid…

One thing I wish someone had told me when I rehomed the dog was this: Don’t believe what the previous owners tell you. It’s not necessarily that they are lying. But they don’t know this dog. That’s why they want to get rid of him. I was told my dog…

Bunny is a wonderful dog. Please don’t argue with me. And these are his problems. No 10: Settling The transition from excitement to relaxation, from tail up to tail down, from alert level 5 to alert level 1, that is the problem. It sometimes takes him a second to get…

In 2021, my dog developed a capability for happiness. For sure, he had happy moments before, for example, when I dangled a bit of cheese in front of his mouth, or when the wind was blowing through his hair. But when I look back at pictures, his predominant facial expression…

The space telescope that more than anything else defines my career as an astronomer is not JWST. It is Spitzer. I began thinking about the Spitzer Space Telescope around 2001, when I started my PhD in Tautenburg observatory. At that point Spitzer was still SIRTF and JWST was still NGST…

Bunny knows a lot of words. Some of them are English, lots are German. Some are standard stuff for dogs, others are random choices. Many are adjacent to each other. He probably knows a lot more than I want to admit. “Knowing” is a strange word here. It is not…

Pace is the gait between Walk and Trot. In a Pace, the two legs on either side move synchronously. The two legs on the left side move together, and the same goes for the right side. This is different from the Trot, where the front left leg moves together with…