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There is a Horse in the Apple Store
- ugh 16y agoI know it’s not the topic of the submission but I would have very much liked to get an explanation. Is it maybe a guide horse? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_horse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_horse
- 10ren 16y agoI wouldn't have expected horses to be as intelligent as dogs. Probably because I have more experience with dogs. EDIT google's only giving me informal discussions: http://www.petqna.com/other/1014-1-other-petqna.html http://www.petqna.com/other/1014-1-other-petqna.html It seems while they are less intelligent than dogs, they can still give effective assistance. Aside: I saw a guide dog on a sweltering day in peak summer last year in Melbourne. It was clearly very uncomfortable, licking its lips. But it was also clear there was no chance it would let down its owner. It was touching to see such faithfulness; now I often donate to the guide dogs.
- qq66 16y agoYes, this is the only way a pony would be allowed in the Apple Store, and probably why people are not going to pet it and stuff -- it's not nice to interfere with the behavior of a guide animal.
- Charuru 16y agoI know this is not the topic of submission here either, but I can't help but feel that picture in the wikipedia of the guide horse is horrible abuse. All those straps and chains, UGH. /shudders
- ptomato 16y agoDoesn't appear to be significantly different then a normal horse harness. How do you consider it abusive in any way that, say, leashing a dog isn't? Or do you consider that abuse as well?
- what 16y agoAt least they gave it running shoes, though it seems to have lost one somewhere.
- qq66 16y agoBlind people generally tend to be so doting on their guide animals that I'm sure the straps and chains are more than compensated by the shower of love he gets from his owner.
- Mz 16y agoMy understanding is that guide animals (and drug-sniffing dogs) are intentionally starved for affection and only showered with loving attention for doing what is needed of them. That is how they are kept useful. Showering them with affection and positive attention at other times actually destroys their usefulness as a guide animal. Or so I have heard.
- ajdecon 16y agoAs I understand it: guide animals are generally trained to know when they're "at work" and when it isn't. When "at work", the guide animal is not given affection because it needs to be focused on its task. This is why seeing eye dogs have "don't pet me" signs on them: any kind of affection is a distraction from the necessary task of helping the owner. When not "at work" (usually there is some signal), it obviously depends on the owner; but most of the disabled people I know pamper and love these animals to death, and they are extremely well treated. They are simply only showered with affection in private, when not expected to be focused.
- naner 16y agoYes it is an assistance animal[1]. It is kind of sad that the guy never figured it out. At least he didn't go and try to pet it or something. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04Creatures-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04Creatures-t.htm...
- 10ren 16y agoThe psychosis assistance-parrot sounds farcical, but the explanation is utterly logical.
- ugh 16y agoAh, that’s were I read about guide horses! Thanks for the reminder. As soon as I saw the photo in the submission the term “guide horse” just popped into my mind but I couldn’t figure out why I knew that term. Now I know.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>Yes it is an assistance animal[1]. It is kind of sad that the guy never figured it out. Are you sure. Why could it not be a pet? The image in the OP doesn't appear to show a harness (as in the NYTimes article) as is usual for an assistance animal. In my country assistance animals usually wear some high-vis in public too.
- naner 16y agoIt could be a pet, I'm no expert. They don't have to have a harness, though, I'v seen seizure alert dogs with just a leash. They do usually have to have some kind of identifying clothing on, though, so you're probably right on that one.
- bnchdrff 16y agoway off topic, but i can't resist: > soon Cox College of Nursing and Health Sciences, where Rose was attending nursing school, refused Richard access, too. Stories started appearing about Rose and her monkey in the newspaper and on TV. “Suddenly,” she told me, “everyone knew I had a mental disorder.” a monkey on one's back! idiom origin revealed!
- rokhayakebe 16y agoGuide for? I hope not blindness since the guy seems to be looking at a computer.
- albemuth 16y agoreal life scenario training perhaps?
- jimminy 16y agoYou don't have to be completely blind, the person may just have a severe visual impairment, and thus can still see a monitor in 1-2ft in front of them.
- frossie 16y agoIt's probably a mobility horse (and the guy is in a wheelchair). You can use the horse to help you transition from a wheelchair to a chair and so on.
- chaosmachine 16y agoWow, I wasn't expecting an actual horse. I thought for sure this was some kind of Trojan Horse metaphor about Ping and the iTunes store...
- ElbertF 16y agoYup, I was thinking an "elephant in the room" kind of thing.
- alttab 16y agoDisplaced "viral marketing?"
- faramarz 16y agoGreat narrative! The picture wouldn't have been the same without it. This is probably explained by the Change blindness phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness
- blahedo 16y agoTHANK you for mentioning that there was a picture there. The page made so much more sense after I loaded it.
- alexophile 16y agoI really like the observations his niece makes, specifically “When I play hide and seek with my friends I have to hide, but if I don’t want to be seen by grown-ups I just have to be quiet.”
- jlees 16y agoChildren are amazing. If you want to refocus your world, talk to one for half an hour. Wait! Not like that, you'll get arrested.
- CamperBob 16y agoI didn't understand children when I was one, so I doubt I'd understand them now.
- mkramlich 16y agoWhen I was a child I wanted to be an adult. Now that I'm an adult I still want to be an adult. Go figure.
- Splines 16y agoWhether you're old or young, you always wish you were 21. Old enough to have responsibility, young enough to have a lifetime of choice in front of you.
- mmorris 16y agoI disagree about there being an ideal age (or, at least that it's 21 -- I'm not quite old enough to make a universal comment!). Are there great things about being young (whether that be 16 or 21)? Sure. But there are a lot of great things about being older too, and it's easy to lose site of those things. I'm 30 now and I'm much more comfortable in my own skin now than I was even 5 or 10 years ago. Generally, I'm happier now than I was back then. I'm definitely smarter and more capable, in work and in life. It's easy to think about how great it would be if you could be 21 again (while still knowing everything you've learned from your experiences since then), but, as they say, youth is wasted on the young. That's just how life works. All we can do is encourage people of all ages to make the most of the opportunities they have right now.
- sbaqai 16y agoGreat article. The author coins the term "tiny pony" to describe the tendency of becoming acclimated to certain exceptional things. ie: There's a pony in the apple store and no one seems to care. Because its always there.. Maybe its because we're so focused on ourselves? I still have a regular brick-type cell phone. So its a lot of fun for me to play with an iPhone or iPad whenever I'm at the store, or when my friends let me play with theirs. I always get an urge to buy one - it could totally make my life better (especially mobile internet). But if I buy it, I know the magic will go away. It's particular exceptional-ness will become an expectation, and even a frustration when it doesn't work correctly. And after a certain period, I'd likely refer to it as just another brick-type object, compared with whatever relatively exceptional technology is out then.
- Qz 16y agoI got an HTC Incredible which is about on par with an iPhone (in between the 3g and the 4g), and it still seems like magic when I use it.
- bruceboughton 16y agoI think this speaks more to your attitude than to the model and brand of phone.
- Qz 16y agoWasn't trying to say anything about model and brand -- if I had an iPhone instead I would probably say the same thing. My point was that getting the thing doesn't necessarily take away the 'magic'.
- famousactress 16y agoThat article brought me more enjoyment-per-paragraph than just about anything in a while. I do wish the photo was revealed somewhere in the middle of the post though. I shared it with my wife that way, and it really has a pretty profound affect to wonder if it's just a metaphor for the first half-dozen paragraphs.
- plorkyeran 16y agoEven with the photograph I thought it was just a metaphor until the end. I assumed he had just photoshopped the horse in to make the article more amusing.
- mkramlich 16y agoWhat I don't--- OMG PONIES! In all seriousness, it may be a trained assistance pet for the blind.
- _delirium 16y agoFor me personally, some of the not-being-that-excited-ness is that I grew up reading sci-fi and cyberpunk, and basically always assumed these things were possible and likely, just a matter of implementation details. A device that can translate any language at a button-push? Sure, I heard about it when I was eight. A device you carry around that instantly connects to some sort of communication network? Yeah, I've probably read about a dozen takes on those. Etc. Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me. The idea of something like a smartphone was pretty exciting when I read about it in the 1980s, and it was interesting to follow early PDA forays like the Newton. But now that they exist and work well, I haven't even gotten around to buying one yet; by the time reality caught up, it wasn't that exciting anymore.
- 10ren 16y ago> The instant gratification provided by being able to have almost any question answered immediately is a tiny pony. Apart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this.
- nl 16y agoApart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this. I'm not clear what you mean, but it seems to me that we're pretty close to the point where most things that have an actual answer can be found by typing a question and clicking a button (using a search engine, with fall back to asking a question in a relevant forum) If you are talking about more philosophical questions, then perhaps - but I think you can gain just as much enlightenment from the click of a button as you used to be able to from months of philosophy classes.
- 10ren 16y agoI see what you mean, but my experience is quite often that I have to hunt a lot to get answers to straightforward questions. After a fair bit of effort (if I keep going, sometimes for a considerable time...) I'll get the answer - but not always even then. (of course, for very common questions, the answer does often pop up immediately - I'm certainly pleased when that happens.) Asking in a forum is great, and usually effective, provided you know enough about the question and know an appropriate forum (eg. stackoverflow for programming questions). I should have included "commonly asked questions" as well as "reference questions". Search engines are great at harvesting this low hanging fruit which would otherwise go to waste. But in the other two cases, the answers are not immediate, which was the thrust of the statement to which I objected - it's quoted above, and includes "instant gratification", "answered immediately" and "almost any question". We're not there yet, we've only got the easy stuff. Wolfram|Alpha is an attempt to go a bit deeper, and it's also part of Google's mission.
- piramida 16y agoTechnically, it is not a pony but a falabella horse which is a miniature horse originating from Latin America. I know that it is somewhat irrelevant :) But many people have them as pets.
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- lionhearted 16y agoRelated: "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
- mattmaroon 16y agoClassic bit. Also see http://comedians.jokes.com/patton-oswalt/videos/dvd---exclusive-patton-oswalt---the-year-2009/ http://comedians.jokes.com/patton-oswalt/videos/dvd---exclus...
- roryokane 16y agoWhen I read this post, I thought the whole thing was a just a weird metaphor. I saw the picture at the top, but since there was no explanation in the article of why the pony was in the store, I thought the author had simply photoshopped the pony in. It was only after seeing all these comments taking the claim so seriously that I realized the guy really had seen a pony in the Apple Store.
- neilk 16y agoI am in love with the title. "There is a horse in the Apple Store". I want it on t-shirts and cereal boxes and in graffiti on highway overpasses. I am not even sure what it really means. I know it's purely literal, but it's almost poetic.
- tel 16y agoIt's not purely literal, Frank Chimeri generalizes the experience to whenever something is naturally astonishing but somehow now impossible to notice. The "tiny horse" effect!
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoMaybe I'm just drunk, having just been kicked out at bar time from the place around the corner[1], but this resonated with me: "When does the magic of a situation fade? When do we get acclimated to the exceptional?...We define a pattern, no matter how exceptional, and acclimate ourselves to it?" I'm surrounded by exceptional situations every day and they just seem mundane. Tonight I congratulated a guy who just signed a record deal with Sub Pop Records. Earlier this week, I landed a development contract for an iOS app that I think will revolutionize its market come early next year. It goes on from there. These sorts of things seem normal to me now. At 15, I would've been, to quote the article, gobsmacked by my involvement—however tangential—in any of them. Are human beings just so easily adaptable to their circumstances that they start missing the depth of these 'big' events after a while? What must it be like to be Bill Gates or Bono? "Had dinner with Queen Rania of Jordan and the food was middling to fair. My Gulfstream's flight to New York was delayed due to weather issues. What a joke. Don't they know I'm supposed to have coffee with Bill Clinton tomorrow morning to talk about his philanthropic efforts?" Where's the magic? What does it take to surprise and delight us? Obviously not a pony. [1] the haagen-dazs ice cream bar I'm chewing on right now doesn't hurt either: having a 24 hour supermarket across the street is the bomb. Get kicked out of the bar, go buy ice cream. Not a bad way to end a Friday night.
- zackattack 16y agoI think that ending every night out at the bar with ice cream would probably make it less exciting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation
- retube 16y agoThere is a well-known corollary here with happiness. People think that if they are million- or billionaires, or have a super-fit girlfriend, or drive a ridiculous car or live in a massive house or whatever they'll be happy, or at least happier. However all studies have shown that rich people are not happier than poor(er) people. And more interesting is people that have suffered catastrophic accidents or contracted disabling diseases: on average these people are no less happy than anyone else.
- greengarstudios 16y agoThis reminds me of the time I saw Steve Jobs in the Apple Store, Palo Alto. No one was looking at him, except me. Eventually, I walked up to him and said hello. Then, I showed him Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing, the iPad app I developed, on the new iPad I had just bought. To modify part of the article to fit my experience... I asked one of the Apple Store employees: "Do you realize Steve Jobs is behind you?"He sighs at me and says, "Yes, he’s in here all the time."
- scotth 16y agoWhat did he think of your app?
- DavidSJ 16y agoBut there are no children in the Apple Store, for the same reason you would not see a child in a jewelry store: things are small and fragile and expensive and shiny. In my experience, there are usually quite a number of children in Apple Stores.
- FraaJad 16y agoOur local apple store even has kid accessible iMacs for them to play with. And there are always kids during "normal" hours.
- ladon86 16y agoIn all this talk I think you guys might be missing the most remarkable thing of all. There was a horse in the Apple store.
- josefresco 16y agoA whole thread about a mini horse and not one mention of Rob & Big? I miss Big Black.
- moondowner 16y agoI like how the author of the post explains his emotions and conclusions, it's like reading a mini drama :)
- timf 16y agoWhen the tiny pony is a negative thing, many call it Creeping Normalcy [1]. Sounds like the same phenonmenon to me: adjustments that come slowly enough do not get appreciated. Louis CK has a funny bit about it [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
- nhebb 16y agoA black president, whose father is from Kenya and mother is from Kansas, being elected President of the United States is a tiny pony. When does the magic of a situation fade? I guess that guy hasn't seen any poll numbers lately. It's still pretty cool that we elected a black president, but the magic faded a while ago.
- marstall 16y agoAlso, in the hospital.
- jeberle 16y agoHad he been paying attention, he would have noticed there's also a man in a kilt.
- philwelch 16y agoThat's probably a "Utilikilt": http://www.utilikilts.com/ http://www.utilikilts.com/ They're not that unusual--I've met at least two people who have one.
- joshbert 16y agoI loved the article. Like someone said above, it's like reading a mini-drama. What really made it for me is how I can relate to it. I'm constantly taken back and think things like 'So many people are trying to take the world into new directions, myself included, and some are successful. The rest of the world gets the end results and we get accustomed to them so incredibly fast. Often times ignoring all the work done or the brilliance of the piece itself.' Like, for example, I can literally work on my idea for a business, listen to virtually any record that has ever existed that I want to listen, watch any movie that I could possibly want to watch and thousands of other activities all in a single day and without leaving my house. I could witness the huge developments that other people are making all around the globe and watch some of the most brilliant minds the world has, often the developers themselves, give feedback on said events. And yes, I'm talking about HN. All in all, it's a great age to live. I'm only 20 and not particularly wealthy, but boy has the trip thus far been incredible.
- albertzeyer 16y agoIt reminds me on a passage in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by D.Adams. He basically says that people unconsciously ignore / blind out strange not-explainable things. He also had a funny term for that but I forgot it...
- edanm 16y agoAre you talking about "Somebody else's problem"? From the books: "An SEP [somebody else's problem] is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye." Apparently, this term is now actually used in Psychology to describe actual phenomena, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_elses_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_elses_problem
- albertzeyer 16y agoAh thanks for linking it, that is what I meant. :) Btw., your link was broken. Here is the correct one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem
- yuvipanda 16y agoBoth links are wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem
- edanm 16y agoOK this is getting ridiculous, we all posted the same link and they're all broken. Maybe it's a problem with HN? Here's another attempt, I want to see what happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem EDIT: OK, the problem is HN removes the apostrophe (') from the word "Else's". Not sure why.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agoOff-Topic: Most stories about... cute animal pictures. On-Topic: ...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Perhaps it is only me, but that things are amazing certainly does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. That things are amazing is a given.
- verisimilitude 16y agoThe picture on this post likely depicts a seeing eye horse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_horse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_horse Here's the advantage: both dogs and horses require years to train in this capacity. However, horses then live much longer than dogs, maximizing the value of the training time invested in them. Plus, they're extremely cute.
- WalterBright 16y agoI grew up with airplanes being old hat. But still prickles run down my spine when I look at that old photo of the Wright Flyer's first flight. What an incredible achievement that was, and how long man had dreamed about flying!
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- Enlightenment 16y agoThat isn't a horse...it is a magical unicorn!!!