Wed. 04/21 - Translating Whales' Conversations Using AI

Cool Stuff Ride Home

Reggie Risseeuw and Marques Pfaff

News, Tech News, Science, Society & Culture

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2021

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A few newly-announced NASA funded projects, including one to build a radio telescope in a crater on the moon. A Welsh farmer shares his secrets to ultimate contentment. And can machine learning help us understand what whales are saying to one another? Sponsor: StartMail, Get 50% off your first year at StartMail.com/kottke Links: Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language (National Geographic) NASA Selects Innovative, Early-Stage Tech Concepts for Continued Study (NASA JPL) Experience: I’ve had the same supper for 10 years (The Guardian) Russia mulls withdrawing from the International Space Station after 2024 (Science Mag) NASA Updates Launch Date, TV Coverage for Crew-2 Mission (NASA) Kottke.Org Jackson Bird on Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:28.7	welcome to the katki ride home for wednesday, April 20th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird.
0:41.9	A few newly announced NASA-funded projects, including one to build a radio telescope in a crater on the moon.
0:51.6	A Welsh farmer shares his secrets to ultimate contentment. And can machine learning
0:58.1	help us understand what whales are saying to one another? Here are some of the cool things
1:03.5	from the news today. Understanding what animals are saying to each other, if indeed they're saying anything at all,
1:13.6	has been a dream of humans for generations. But thanks to some breakthroughs in machine learning,
1:19.1	building on decades of additional research studies, we might be close to figuring out the shared
1:23.9	language of sperm whales, if indeed it does exist at all. First, some background on
1:30.5	sperm whales from National Geographic. Quote, sperm whales have the animal kingdom's biggest brains,
1:36.7	six times larger than ours. They live in female-dominated social networks and exchange codas
1:42.9	in a type of staccato duet, especially when
1:46.2	near the surface. They segregate into clans of hundreds or thousands which identify themselves
1:51.8	using different click codas. In a sense, clans speak different dialects. The whales also
1:58.3	identify one another by specific click patterns, which they appear to
2:02.7	use like names, and they learn their codas much as humans learn language by babbling clicks
2:08.4	as juveniles until they pick up their family's repertoire, end quote. Now, some linguists say that
2:14.7	no non-human animals have a communication system we would actually classify as language.
	...

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