Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Jungle babble is anything but

There's a fascinating article in The New York Times detailing the way some animals not only possess an animal-specific vocabulary for sounding the alarm about predators (e.g., one cry for a leopard; another for an eagle), and listen to each other's warnings (across species), but are able to filter out irrelevant alarms (e.g., a bird ignoring a monkey's shriek of "Leopard!", but taking note when it warns "Eagle!").

Olivia Jones/ The Wild Side - "Leopard Behind You!" (The New York Times, Oct 6, 2009)

This isn’t a complicated vocabulary, with thousands of words. Nonetheless, it’s clear that for many animals, alarm calls are more than simple squawks of fear. Vervet monkeys, for instance, use different sounds to warn of different types of predator. “Leopard!” is not the same as “snake!” or “eagle!” If you hide a loudspeaker in the bushes, and startle unsuspecting monkeys by playing recordings of “snake!” at them, they will look around at the ground. “Eagle!” makes them look up. “Leopard!” sends them scampering to the trees.

Masha'Allah, simply amazing.  I wonder how easy this is to explain using using natural selection.

Romulan technology on the way

Good news:  We're one step closer to warp drives and photon torpedos.

BBC NEWS |  'Cloaking device' idea proposed

The cloaking devices that are used to render spacecraft invisible in Star Trek might just work in reality, two mathematicians have claimed.

If I could have one imaginary technology from ST, it wouldn't be obvious ones.  Not the cloaking device.  It's not the transporter, either.  Not the warp drive. Not the tricorder.  Not even the phaser.

Give up?

Perhaps this shows what a hopeless nerd I am, but what I really fantasize about is getting my hands on one of those universal translators!