The Casual Blog

The photographs here (except for this barred owl) are ones I made using intentional camera movement, or ICM, in eastern North Carolina and Alaska.  I was inspired to try this technique when my local photo club had a program on it.  The results remind me of nineteenth-century impressionist painting, sometimes with more abstraction.  It’s hard to say how far I can get using a camera and software in this way, but it’s fun to try something new.  

We’ve been busy with getting the new house furnished and otherwise organized.  This week I’ve been assembling book cases, which turned out to be a lot more work than expected.  Every time I had to make a guess as to what the directions were trying to say, I seemed to guess wrong, but wouldn’t discover the mistake until quite a few screws were in that had to be unscrewed.  

But I guess it was a learning experience.  Elsewhere on the learning front, I’ve been continuing my language studies, concentrating on Spanish and German.  Lately I’ve been using the Duolingo app, which is surprisingly fun.  The lessons are short and game-like, and it seems like I’m making progress.  The process is absorbing, and afterwards I feel a pleasant sense of having used my brain in a good way.  

There was a fascinating piece by Sonia Shah in the NY Times last week about language and animals.  Shah describes several research efforts that are showing that various animals have communications systems that are much more elaborate than we’ve imagined.  

For those of us with an interest in this, we know that there’s been some progress in appreciating that quite a few species have communications systems, and some of those systems are complex.  Shah notes work with, among others, elephants, birds, dolphins, monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, seals, whales, and mice.  (The work with mice involved rendering a group of them deaf, which, unfortunately, Shah seemed to consider normal and reasonable.)

But we’re still a long way from decoding in depth any of these communications systems.  Perhaps we’re worried about what we might find out.  Understanding more animal languages might undermine our traditional ideas about the superiority of humans as compared to other animals.  We might rather not know whether the animals we torture, eat, and otherwise exploit have complex inner and social lives.  It could make us uncomfortable, and might even require us to change our behavior.  

It’s encouraging, though, that research is going forward.  One of the most interesting points from Shah is that examining animals’ languages is giving us new ideas about how human languages evolved and the function they play.  She points out the possibility of a continuum of language, ranging from the signaling of plants being attacked by insects to the gestural communication of chimps to opera.  This was a thought-provoking piece, and I made a note to keep an eye out for the book Shah is now working on.  

I’ve suggested before that recent advances in artificial intelligence might help us toward a richer understanding of animal communication, and I was pleased to learn that this is in fact happening.  Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in a recent New Yorker describing research on the communication systems of sperm whales.  These creatures are the world’s largest predators, with primary prey being squid.  They are social animals that migrate at least twenty thousand miles a year and can dive downward a mile. 

The main research effort Kolbert described was in the waters of the Caribbean island nation of Dominica.  Sally and I did a diving trip to that beautiful country a few years back and were privileged to get some views of the whales.  We also spent an afternoon cruising with a whale researcher who was recording their clicks, which are called codas, and which the whales seem to exchange in a conversational way.   

Work is ongoing to collect more examples of these codas.  In theory, an app like ChatGPT could decode them, as it has human speech, but it would require many more examples for training.  It doesn’t sound like this is around the corner, but it also doesn’t sound impossible.