Dolphin Whisperer Could Help Us Speak To E.T.
Photo: Auntie Rain (CC)
Could talking to animals guide us to talking to extraterrestrials? Discovery News reports:
For 27 years, marine biologist Denise Herzing and colleagues have been regular visitors in the Atlantic Ocean home of a 200-member pod of spotted dolphins living north of the Bahama Islands.
Understanding the relationships between the members of the pod is key to unraveling what their dozens of whistles, clicks and other signals mean.
“The large goal of this project is to tell the story of what it’s like to be a dolphin,” Herzing, a researcher with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and the founder and head of the Wild Dolphin Project, told Discovery News.
[Continues at Discovery News]
“One True TOPI Tribe” Compilation
The One True TOPI Tribe, thee OTTT, or simply TOPI (said like Hopi, see TOPI mission statement one), as you already know is a coum-Unity, a decentralized proccess network, founded by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.(Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Dust La Rock for Frank151 from Frank151 on Vimeo.)
You will at once notice at least two unfamiliar terms, TOPI and COUM. Let us start with COUM or coum and see if we can then speak a little more about this One True TOPI Tribe. It’s hard not to notice, how coum is spelled (but how does it sound?), COUM (the capitalization is just to draw your attention to) or coum can be pronounced ‘cum’ or ‘com’. Yet we do not stop at that level. The term also resonates with the word ‘come’ as well as ‘cum’ (like in your face).
This portmanteau word, this phoneme/morpheme, coum invokes other terms that it may combine with, such as communication and all other (dot) com- related terms, even…
‘Herd-Like’ Financial Reporting Could Predict Stock Market Bubbles
Via ScienceDaily:
When the language used by financial analysts and reporters becomes increasingly similar the stock market may be overheated, say scientists.
After examining 18,000 online articles published by the Financial Times, The New York Times, and the BBC, computer scientists have discovered that the verbs and nouns used by financial commentators converge in a ‘herd-like’ fashion in the lead up to a stock market bubble. Immediately afterwards, the language disperses.
The findings presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Barcelona, Spain, on July 19, 2011, show that the trends in the use of words by financial journalists correlate closely with changes in the leading stock indices.
“Our analysis shows that trends in the use of words by financial journalists correlate closely with changes in the leading stock indices — the DJI, the NIKKEI-225, and FTSE-100,” says Professor Mark Keane, Chair of Computer Science in University College Dublin, who was involved in…
Evolver the Podcast: Rediscovering Plant Magic
In this extended clip from the Evolver Intensive Awakening the Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby talks with Kathleen Harrison about her extensive research with the Mazatec shamanic tradition of Mexico, what they taught her about plants and the “energetic carrying capacity of nature,” psilocybin mushrooms, Tobacco and ways for those addicted in the West to heal this relationship with a misused sacred plant.
Next up we have Erin Shaw talking with Naada Guerra. Naada holds workshops on the power of language and how to change our realities by changing the way we use it. In this interview Erin and Naada get into some of the ways we can move towards Empowering Language and more towards the next evolutionary shift.
If you would like to hear more from Jeremy Narby, you can check out his book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. If you would like to gain more knowledge from Kat…
Luntz and Counter-Luntz: The Word You’re Looking for Is “Dissent”
In recent weeks I’ve had number of interesting discussions with friends, Facebook and otherwise, about the bizarre shift towards totalitarianism in American politics. Of course, no political movement is possible without a corresponding cultural alignment, and the most lamentable trend in this regard seems to me to be the ascendancy of misanthropic polemical whores like Frank Luntz, who function more or less as the shock troops against the American tradition of anti-ideology, perverting our traditional inclinations into a cult of Mammon.[1]
Wisconsinites, whom I believe to be reasonably typical victims of Luntz et alia, demonstrate some pretty mixed reactions to the word “protest”, judging by some friends’ anecdotes surrounding pre-recall canvassing going on in this state. One friend’s story particularly resonated with me: a man who angrily turned a canvasser away from his door saying that he was tired of all that protesting going on in Madison, and thought the “Wisconsin 14″ had shown bad…
The Media’s Language Of Persuasion
Parapolitical notes the contrasting linguistic framing used by the Associated Press in two stories five decades apart:
How does the Associated Press choose which unanimous votes to dismiss as the slavish resolutions of a rubber-stamp parliament and which to praise as examples of bipartisan cooperation?
Woman Leaves Dentist Office With Foreign Accent
Photo: Heinz Hirndorf (CC)
When we leave the dentist after oral surgery it’s common to talk a little funny while the novocaine wears off, but Karen Butler left with a foreign accent. While this isn’t the first incident of its kind, it’s still a mystery as to why individuals develop accents or lose is From Jane Greenhalgh via NPR:
When Karen Butler went in for dental surgery, she left with more than numb gums: She also picked up a pronounced foreign accent. It wasn’t a fluke, or a joke — she’d developed a rare condition called foreign accent syndrome that’s usually caused by an injury to the part of the brain that controls speech.
Butler was born in Bloomington, Ill., and moved to Oregon when she was a baby. She’s never traveled to Europe or lived in a foreign country — she’s an American, she says, “born and bred.”
But she doesn’t sound like…
Crikey! Aussies To Be Fined For Swearing
What the f*#^? The Sydney Morning Herald reports:
Australians may have a love of plain speaking but new laws are set to curtail some of their more colourful language with police issuing on-the-spot fines for obnoxious swearing.
The country’s second most populous state Victoria is due to approve new legislation this week under which police will be able to slap fines of up to Aus$240 (US$257) on people using offensive words or phrases.
Victorian Attorney-General Robert Clark said the penalties, similar to those issued for speeding or parking illegally, would free up police time.
“This will give the police the tools they need to be able to act against this sort of obnoxious behaviour on the spot, rather than having to drag offenders off to court and take up time and money in proceedings,” he said.
But even the state’s top lawyer admitted to swearing sometimes. “Occasionally I mutter things under my breath as probably everybody…
Translation Machine To Make Human-Dolphin Conversations Possible
What secrets of the sea have dolphins been waiting to tell us? We may soon find out (hopefully not just tuna jokes). New Scientist reports:
A diver carrying a computer that tries to recognize dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins.
Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between “bring the surfboard to the man” and “bring the man to the surfboard”, for example.
But communication in most of these…
Inability to Detect Sarcasm & Lies May Be Early Sign of Dementia, Study Shows
Via ScienceDaily:
By asking a group of older adults to analyze videos of other people conversing — some talking truthfully, some insincerely — a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco has determined which areas of the brain govern a person’s ability to detect sarcasm and lies.
Some of the adults in the group were healthy, but many of the test subjects had neurodegenerative diseases that cause certain parts of the brain to deteriorate. The UCSF team mapped their brains using magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which showed associations between the deteriorations of particular parts of the brain and the inability to detect insincere speech.
“These patients cannot detect lies,” said UCSF neuropsychologist Katherine Rankin, PhD, a member of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and the senior author of the study. “This fact can help them be diagnosed earlier.”
The finding was presented April 14, 2011, at the 63rd Annual Meeting…
Last Two Fluent Speakers of Dying Language Refuse To Speak To Each Other
Jo Tuckman writes in the Guardian:
The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it’s at risk of extinction.
There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other’s company.
“They don’t have a lot in common,” says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco. Segovia, he says,…
“Liberals” Take Over The Media
As far as memes go, “liberals control the media” seems pretty prevalent. People who long for the days of school spankings shriek it at the top of their lungs – actual liberals believe it if only so they can believe they control something. But as we slowly descend back to Earth we realize The Media is a business.
And the point has been made that you could look long and hard through the board of directors of any of the media giant(s) before you find an honest-to-God Liberal. Liberals are tolerated in the media to the extent that they can make their bosses money.
All these points became clear to me in light of a new propaganda film (made by Citizens Against Government Waste) making the rounds where we see a group of Chinese circa 2030 cackling over America’s demise. Maybe you’ve seen it too – where some communists attribute America’s immanent doom…
Genpatsu-Shinsai: The Language of Disaster That Stalked Japan
Interesting article from Leo Lewis in the Times from 2007, about how Japan nearly avoided a “nuclear power-quake disaster” back then. It always seems when these great disasters happen there was the one lone expert who no one took seriously. Leo Lewis writes”
Japan’s turbulent history of war and natural catastrophe has already given the world a terrifying vocabulary of death: tsunami, kamikaze, Hiroshima.
But the country now stands on the brink of unleashing its most chilling phrase yet: genpatsu-shinsai — the combination of an earthquake and nuclear meltdown capable of destroying millions of lives and bringing a nation to its knees.
The phrase, derived from the Japanese words for “nuclear power” and “quake disaster”, is the creation of Katsuhiko Ishibashi, Japan’s leading seismologist and one of the Government’s top advisers on nuclear-quake safety. He said that the world may never know how close it came to its first genpatsu-shinsai this week. Luck, as much an anything else, helped to avert it.
How Anything May Signify Anything: William Friedman And The Biliteral Cipher
Cabinet Magazine has a fascinating and mysterious article on William F. Friedman, perhaps the greatest code-breaker in modern history. Friedman became a hero of World War II by breaking Japan’s PURPLE code and inventing the Army’s best cipher machine. He did it all using the ‘biliteral cipher’, a simple but powerful encoding technique invented in the sixteenth century, which allows for hidden messages to be conveyed by anything from flower petals to musical notes to faces in a photograph:
It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850, it set the world of literature on fire.
A passion for puzzles, codes, and conspiracies fueled a widespread suspicion that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, and professional and amateur scholars of all sorts spent extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and money combing Renaissance texts in search of signatures and other messages that would reveal the true identity of their author. Even after the recent publication of James Shapiro’s comprehensive history of the authorship controversy, Contested Will, it is difficult for us to appreciate the depth of conviction — among writers as diverse and as distinguished as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Henry Miller, and even Helen Keller — that Shakespeare’s texts contained the secret solution to what was widely considered to be “the Greatest of Literary Problems.”…
‘Democracy’, ‘Extremism’, ‘Stability’: Decoding The Code Words In News Media
Terms such as “stability”, “democracy”, and “religious extremism” in political discourse are generally used in a way that is different or opposite to their generally understood meaning.
Metadeniz presents a quick, amusing, and insightful primer on what Noam Chomsky calls “words with a technical meaning.” Including:
Promoting Democracy verb installing a government friendly to our interests in another country.
Freedom Fighters noun a proxy terrorist army that we support
National Interest noun the interests of the ultra-rich, particularly those in the U.S.A.
Stability noun (used referring to other countries) subordination to US power interests -> Usually achieved through war against the population.
Example: “We should promote democracy by supporting the freedom fighters in Nicaragua because it is in America’s national interest to promote stability in Central America.”
Translation: “We should send weapons to a proxy terrorist army that murders civilians to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, for the benefit of U.S investors and to intimidate other countries into doing what we say.”
How ‘OK’ Took Over The World
BBC News reports:
It crops up in our speech dozens of times every day, although it apparently means little. So how did the word “OK” conquer the world, asks Allan Metcalf.
“OK” is one of the most frequently used and recognised words in the world.
It is also one of the oddest expressions ever invented. But this oddity may in large measure account for its popularity.
It’s odd-looking. It’s a word that looks and sounds like an abbreviation, an acronym.
We generally spell it OK – the spelling okay is relatively recent, and still relatively rare – and we pronounce it not “ock” but by sounding the names of the letters O and K.
Visually, OK pairs the completely round O with the completely straight lines of K.
So both in speech and in writing OK stands out clearly, easily distinguished from other words, and yet it uses simple sounds that are familiar to a multitude of languages.
Almost…
Experts Determine The Age of A Book That ‘Nobody Can Read’ — The Voynich Manuscript
Really fascinating. I think the conventional wisdom is the book is a prank, but a truly elaborate one. Daniel Stolte writes on PhysORG:
While enthusiasts across the world pored over the Voynich manuscript, one of the most mysterious writings ever found — penned by an unknown author in a language no one understands — a research team at the UA solved one of its biggest mysteries: When was the book made?
University of Arizona researchers have cracked one of the puzzles surrounding what has been called “the world’s most mysterious manuscript” — the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and writings nobody has been able to make sense of to this day.
Using radiocarbon dating, a team led by Greg Hodgins in the UA’s department of physics has found the manuscript’s parchment pages date back to the early 15th century, making the book a century older than scholars had previously thought.
This tome…
Hidden Messages Woven Into Birds’ Nests
Just more evidence that non-human animal species have deeper intelligence than we give them credit for, and communicate in ways to which we are oblivious. Wired Science discusses a secret form of bird-language, which we should probably learn if we hope to foil the coming avian takeover:
The discovery of messages in raptors’ nests has raised the possibility that many bird species encode signals into these structures, with seemingly decorative flourishes actually full of meaning.
Among black kites, scraps of white plastic are used to signal territorial dominance. To other kites, the scraps are a warning sign. To humans, they hint at an unappreciated world of animal communication.
“It’s probably very common that other bird species decorate their nests in ways compatible with what we found,” said Fabrizio Sergio, a biologist at the Doñana Biological Station in Spain. “And not only birds, but fish and mammals.”
A few species, such black wheateaters and bowerbirds, are…
The Personal Is Not Political
Via The First Church of Mutterhals:
The phrase ‘the personal is political’ always bugged me, but I could never articulate why. There’s just something off about it, like conflating religious belief and science, or the mixture of church and state. I was recently reading the Christopher Hitchens autobiography and I came by this quote regarding the inception of the phrase:
“At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was — cliché is arguably forgivable here — very bad news.”
He goes on to say that now you only needed to flout your attachment to whatever arbitrary delineation (as he brilliantly puts it, “a member of a sex, or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,”) to be considered a revolutionary. This is coming from a person who wears his arrest record proudly, having been done in for…
Six Easy Theses – Tools for Cosmological Discussion
Enjoy as I have the recent posts concerning God and the New Atheists (great band name btw), and there is nothing as comical to me as reading atheists argue for the futility of engaging in these arguments, I do think that the ground needs a little clarifying so that these discussions, that I believe have value in the platonic sense, can gain some traction given a few tools to help the language.
The dichotomy between theism and atheism is perhaps a step of generality too far, and leads one to engage in those kinds of circular arguments that both sides find frustrating. So I propose the following terms, in order to help us identify our beliefs, or non-beliefs, in a way that fosters informed discussion.
1. There are at least 2 types of atheists. One I will call the Micro-Atheist, that type of person who approaches the cosmos without the need to…
