You see, TED used to have an annual prize of a million dollars given to one person – Bill Clinton, say, for his health infrastructure project in Rwanda. This year, they gave away one billion dollars to ten people, each a leader of what it dubs an Audacious Project. It’s money donated by the usual suspects, the Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, and others. And one of those Audacious Projects is, I kid you not, honest-to-goodness translating whales.
I talked to the leader of Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) , a marine biologist who described to me his sperm whale subjects. They spend a few minutes at the surface before they dive down to the depths of the ocean and break all of his listening equipment for hours. Through natural language processing (yes, more AI) his team has been able to decipher the phonetic alphabet of these whales’ combinatorial language – something only humans had been thought to possess. A few minutes into their t
Three weeks ago I came down with the flu. I was sicker than I have been in years. For a full five days, I could only manage to quiver on the couch and binge watch old seasons of Scandal . One episode would end and the next would automatically begin until Netflix asked incredulously, “Are you still watching Scandal ?” I was.
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centauri-dreams.orgCentauri Dreams – Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
Centauri Dreams – Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration