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Animal Communication
Mar. 23rd, 2006 08:42 amGrammar in Whale song
Really interesting article -- how long till this ends up on Numbers? Heh.
About the only thing I had issue with was the conclusion that the average amount of information carried by each song was about constant regardless of length....The amount of information expressed, however, can't compare to humanspeech. Whale songs generate less than one bit of information persecond, while people convey about 10 bits of information per wordspoken.
That seems like a hugely human-centric statement. If the researchers admit that we have no clue what the songs are about or anyway to actually translate them, how do we know that they convey less information? Granted, I'm sure their mathematical analysis means something, but still --- it's a black box. Statements like that are why it's a revelation when someone discovers that elephants actually have emotions and can do art and stuff. It's trying to force human communication into something special when we can't understand their communication.
More interesting to my mind would be efforts to decode whale songs much like has been done to understand dolphin sounds. I think that exercises like that would set us up to someday be able to do similar things with alien life, if it exists.
Still, interesting, even if I want to go and smack the reporter for being arrogant.
Really interesting article -- how long till this ends up on Numbers? Heh.
About the only thing I had issue with was the conclusion that the average amount of information carried by each song was about constant regardless of length....The amount of information expressed, however, can't compare to humanspeech. Whale songs generate less than one bit of information persecond, while people convey about 10 bits of information per wordspoken.
That seems like a hugely human-centric statement. If the researchers admit that we have no clue what the songs are about or anyway to actually translate them, how do we know that they convey less information? Granted, I'm sure their mathematical analysis means something, but still --- it's a black box. Statements like that are why it's a revelation when someone discovers that elephants actually have emotions and can do art and stuff. It's trying to force human communication into something special when we can't understand their communication.
More interesting to my mind would be efforts to decode whale songs much like has been done to understand dolphin sounds. I think that exercises like that would set us up to someday be able to do similar things with alien life, if it exists.
Still, interesting, even if I want to go and smack the reporter for being arrogant.