Something Silly

Reference

This is just ridiculous, but I can’t help it. A few days ago, just for fun, I decided to search for “kitten” at Wikipedia (Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit). Here is their entry for ‘kitten’. Totally adorable. What I love the most, though, is the subsection entitled “Perceptions of Cuteness.”

Entries as yet unwritten are marked in red. So I spent some of Saturday morning writing a needed entry on the Blue Bayou restaurant at Disneyland!

“It’s time for us to go fly.”

Space

You bet it is. Good luck to the “next crew of the shuttle Discovery”:http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=650513.

(I still get a kick out of the fact that the average age of the 7-person crew is 45. The “youngster” is 8 years older than me. Mission Specialist Charles Camarda is making his first flight into space at 52. Maybe I’ll do something as cool in 20 years…)

whistle click beep

Language

A recent study has shown that a whistling language developed by shepherds in the Canary Islands is “processed by the brain in the same way as ordinary speech”:http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=598140. It implies that the brain can process other non-verbal communication as language, too.

If you’ve read David Brin’s “Startide Rising”:http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue154/classic.html, this should ring a bell. (If you haven’t, consider this a recommendation.) The book has neo-dolphins and humans communicating in a common language, developed to allow either species to make the appropriate sounds.

[Deana points out an "earlier post about Silbo":http://www.globalspin.com/mt/archives/000184.html, the language in question. The new article is more about how the language is processed in the brain. ~c]