he animals are making fun of us. Some of them have started
making political commentary these days. Every day the mourning doves
in my area—there are hundreds of them this year, no doubt caused
by global warming or some such thing—are going “Cooooup,
coup coup coup!”
They're really rubbing it in. So humiliating. But at least, unlike virtually all the news media, they're honest. In the future I may get all my news from little birdies.
Birds give weather forecasts to each other
A week earlier, one day an ominous weather front moved in. Dark clouds were overhead, it started getting breezy, and the barometric pressure dropped. Suddenly the birds changed their tweeting. It sounded as if the bird was warning the other birds that it was going to rain, and sure enough it did. Shortly before it started, the tweeting stopped.
According to the Audubon society, birds can sense changes in atmospheric pressure, and flying in the rain takes more energy. So it makes sense that they would warn each other.
Distress calls
Birds not only seem to give each other weather forecasts. Much of there tweeting is territorial, but they also warn each other about hazards like snakes. When they're trapped in a net, they make distress calls that summon other birds to help. Sometimes they even come to humans for help.
Bird distress calls are quite distinctive. Anyone who hears one knows immediately that a bird is in trouble. Other species of birds recognize them and either fall silent or come around to investigate.
One time while I was outside reading a book, there was a loud crash and I saw something falling out of a nearby tree. It turned out to be a crow. It acted stunned for a few seconds, then got up and, evidently unable to fly, started walking up the hill. That hill was steep and at least two hundred feet up, and the crow could have flown there in a few seconds. But on foot, it was an arduous trek. It did not make a single vocalization the whole time. Just amazing determination and self-discipline. Impressive.
Other bird languages
If there's one bird that needs to cut down on the caffeine, it's the rooster. Rooster language has only one word, but it has an infinite number of meanings that depend on the time of day.
The word, of course, is “Er-er-er-er-errrrrrrr!” The translation depends on the time of day and is shown below.
| Time | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 3 AM | The sun is nowhere to be seen! Everybody wake up! |
| 4 AM | The sun is coming up in two hours! Everybody wake up! |
| 5 AM | The sun is coming up in one hour! Everybody wake up! |
| 6 AM | The sun is coming up! Everybody wake up! |
| . . . | |
| 6 PM | The sun is setting in two hours! Everybody wake up! |
| 6 PM | The sun is setting! Everybody wake up! |
Human languages
"Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it."
Human language is probably the most complex form of communication. That provides ample opportunity to laugh at that primitive species as they try to pronounce their sentences. I'll omit the links to avoid embarrassing the unembarrassable, but rest assured these are real examples. There are millions of these, but here is a small sample.
They filmed a pair of rare Omura's whales which were swimming together in the Andaman Sea and one of them was completely white. They were first seen in 2003 as dead corpses before they were spotted alive for the first time in 2015.
Nature is magical.
The pet dog of the homeowners had noticed the venomous reptile and called Wilkinson at Snake Catchers Brisbane and Gold Coast.
The dog's name was, of course, Lassie.
Dad tricks daughter's teacher into thinking she's gone missing to prove point
A great strategy! Trick your teacher into thinking he or she has gone missing. I should have tried that in school.
Horror as Brit tourist's wife, 43, is killed in freak water sports accident after being catapulted into the air from an inflatable sea raft and landing on her head in the Philippines
The distance from Britain to the PI is about 7,024 miles. Of course it's horrible and tragic, but if you have to go, go out making a world catapulting record.
Nex, who was born Dagny, texted their family to tell them about three 'bullying' girls jumped them in a restroom on February 8. They died the next day.
It's so sad that those three girls died, especially when it could have been the near-illiterate virtue-signaling news reporter who crafted that paragraph instead.
Vulcans
Vulcans are not animals, of course (except technically). They're fictional aliens from outer space, which means they're like humans except they're smart. They possess a unique hand language.
Vulcan salute guide
\\ // \\__// Live long and prosper \ /// \__/// Eat gagh and die \\\ / \\\_/ Three small fries and a diet coke to go
Note that Vulcans are vegetarians, so they won't eat hamburgers.
The last two hand signs are often confused. This may have contributed to the dreadful Vulcan-Romulan war of 2009, when both sides blasted each other with bad plot developments and deadly lens flares.
How many different Vulcan greetings are there? If we only count 4 fingers and 0 to 3 spaces, there are 8 altogether.
0 spaces
||||
There is only 1.
1 space: There are three.
\\ // \\\ / \ ///
Live long Eat gagh Three fries
and prosper and die and one diet coke
2 spaces: There are three.
\ || / \ | // \\ | /
3 spaces: There is one.
\ | | /
This gives a total of 8. It's easier to do this in binary, using a 1 for a finger and 0 for a space.
Thumb
If you count the thumb, the language gets more expressive.
0 spaces
|||||
Again, there is only 1.
1 space
|||| / ||| // || /// | ////
It is the number of zeroes enclosed between five ones.
There are 4:
111101 111011 110111 101111
2 spaces
It is the number of 7-digit binary numbers
that contain exactly 5 ones and start and end with a 1
and contain at most one zero in a row
There are 5 of these:
1010111 1011011 1101011 1101101 1110101
3 spaces
It is the number of 8-digit binary numbers
that contain exactly 5 ones and start and end with a 1
and contain at most one zero in a row
There are only 4:
10101101 10110101 11010101 10101011
4 spaces
There is only 1: 101010101
This means the Vulcan sign language only contains 15 + 8 = 23 unique symbols. To make it more expressive, they'd have to include bent fingers or use two hands. Or they could do what all normal aliens do: use telepathy.
Quiz: What formula can we use to predict these? Hint: permutations of zeros in n−2 positions.
aug 05 2024, 7:42 am
