rba — LessWrong

rba15d

"I think for your speed argument to be relevant, you need to show that the whales are switching between sounds at a biologically implausible speed". Yes, this is exactly right. Look at Fig 6 above.

The spectral pattern switches from "a" clicks to "i" clicks in at most 100 ms (there might be 30 ms between clicks and each of those click samples is 5 ms). That's really fast. It rivals the human motor system governing our articulation. It's ambitious to claim whales have such capabilities without detailed anatomical references that the authors don't make.

rba15d

As I noted elsewhere in these comments, the intracoda timescale is borderline as well, and would rival human abilities. A huge claim.

I hadn't considered the overtone issue. I need to think about that...

rba15d

The intraclick and intracoda "adjustment by muscles" is precisely what I'm disputing.

rba15d

There are several possibilities that I hope sharpen this up.

The whales have motor articulatory control at the intraclick level, which is why you see the different spectral "vowels" in a single click. Since you see this in 5 ms intraclick samples, they must have control on those timescales or smaller. As the bird people I cite above state, this seems completely implausible, possibly by several orders of magnitude in time. For what's it's worth, my correspondence with the authors on pubpeer makes it clear they're not claiming this.
The whales have motor articulatory control at the intracoda level, which is why you see the mixed coda types (Fig 6.). However, the spectral change

rba16d

The mixed codas seem like strong evidence against this view, or at least strong evidence against the claim that the "a"/"i" are an example of what you're describing.

-4

rba16d

This is a great point with regards to how plausible the various scientific animals communications claims actually are, but to my eye, the CETI people look motivated in the same way as the Koko people or your local crazy cat lady.

-1

Does Pentagon Pizza Theory Work?

16d

I was at a party a few years ago. It was a bunch of technical nerds. Somehow the conversation drifted to human communication with animals, Alex the grey parrot, and the famous Koko the gorilla. It wasn't in SF, so there had been cocktails, and one of the nerds (it wasn’t me) sort of cautiously asked “You guys know that stuff is completely made up, right?”

He was cautious, I think, because people are extremely at ease imputing human motives and abilities to pets, cute animals, and famous gorillas. They are simultaneously extremely uneasy casting scientific shade on this work that’d so completely penetrated popular culture and science communication. People want to believe... (read 1791 more words →)

I tried reproducing that Lancet study about USAID cuts so you don't have to

22d

As soon as modern data analysis became a thing, the US government has had to deal with people trying to use open source data to uncover its secrets.

During the early Cold War days and America’s hydrogen bomb testing, there was an enormous amount of speculation about how the bombs actually worked. All nuclear technology involves refinement and purification of large amounts of raw substances into chemically pure substances. Armen Alchian was an economist working at RAND and reasoned that any US company working in such raw materials and supplying the government would have made a killing leading up to the tests.

After checking financial data that RAND maintained on such companies, Alchian deduced... (read 1248 more words →)

134

Did the Army Poison a Bunch of Women in Minnesota?

7mo

“There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.”

—Robert Conquest

The current administration’s rollup of USAID has caused an amount of outrage that surprised me, and inspired anger even in thoughtful people known for their equanimity. There have been death counters. There have been congressional recriminations. At the end of last month, the Lancet published Cavalcanti et al. which was entitled Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis.

This paper uses some... (read 3089 more words →)

8mo

The 1950s were crazy times. Human experimentation in the US was normalized in a way that would make modern IRBs implode from shock. After the Soviets tested their first nuclear bomb in 1949, war planners in the US, both civilian and military, were interested in accelerating alternative and unorthodox methods of warfare, including and especially biological weapons.

White picket fences and Leave it to Beaver, indeed.

If you’re interested in this history, I’d recommend Nicholson Baker’s Baseless or Leonard Cole’s Clouds of Secrecy.

The latter describes various experiments that the army did starting in the 1950s that involved spraying tons of actual biological agents or proxies thereof on US cities in an attempt to measure... (read 1176 more words →)

How Gay is the Vatican?