Can you whistle in 80 different languages?

August 24, 2021 Davi Ottenheimer Leave a comment

Whistling can be a language, and there are still many to learn around the world.

Whistled languages are almost always developed by traditional cultures that live in rugged, mountainous terrain or in dense forest. That’s because whistled speech carries much farther than ordinary speech or shouting, says Julien Meyer, a linguist and bioacoustician at CNRS, the French national research center, who explores the topic of whistled languages in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics. Skilled whistlers can reach 120 decibels — louder than a car horn — and their whistles pack most of this power into a frequency range of 1 to 4 kHz, which is above the pitch of most ambient noise.

Makes sense and brings to mind that nobody that I know of has an app yet so a phone can translate text or speech to whistle.

Wouldn’t a phone be an excellent whistler?

Turns out it’s really easy to do for humans. One can shift from speech to whistle and be fluent in just eight months.

Learning to whistle a language you already speak is relatively straightforward. Díaz Reyes’s Spanish-language whistling students spend the first two or three months of the course learning to make a loud whistle with different pitches. “In the fourth or fifth month, they can make some words,” he says. “After eight months, they can speak it properly and understand every message.” This articulation of speech within a whistle only works for nontonal languages, where the pitch of speech sounds isn’t crucial to the meaning of the word. (English, Spanish and most other European languages are nontonal.)

I still think a phone app would be a logical augmentation so humans wouldn’t have to learn whistling at all if they wanted to instead use technology.

That also brings to mind that there is no whistling translator. Imagine having a microphone hear a whistle in one language and then a speaker (pun not intended) would whistle it in another language. Or a phone app could be fluent in all whistled languages…

Sorely missing from these narratives is the American experience. Whistling can be found in outlaw stories such as the one describing how the legendary Bass Reeves caught two wanted men:

As the sun was setting, Reeves heard a sharp whistle coming from beyond the house. Shortly afterward, the woman went outside and responded with an answering whistle. Before long, two riders rode up to the house…

History, Security

Rambo Attempts to Understand Afghanistan

August 23, 2021 Davi Ottenheimer Leave a comment

John Oliver points out how Afghanistan’s political instability was “literally a plot point in Rambo III” from 1988, and then suggests what could have been done to improve the dialog (spoiler alert):

Afghan: This is Afghanistan. Alexander the Great tried to conquer this country. Then Genghis Kahn. Then the British. Now Russia. […] Ancient enemy make prayer about these people. […] It says may god deliver us from the venom of the cobra, teeth of the tiger and the vengeance of the Afghan. Do you understand what this means?

Rambo: That you guys don’t take any shit?

Afghan: Yes, something like this.

John as Afghan instead: Sure, but also our political system has long been defined by other countries’ imperial self interests. You understand what that means?

John as Rambo: No, no I don’t.

John as Afghan: Yeah, I didn’t think so. Yeah, you know what, I’m getting we’ll see you guys in roughly fifteen years.

The whole thing is worth a watch.

John’s not wrong about most of it. He nails the point that America “disastrously intervened” (going back to 1980) and has an obligation to get people out. Thus he’s right there’s a lot of responsibility.

However, he could have taken a harder look at what that responsibility means. It’s going to be more than just accepting refugees.

A new chapter is about to unfold in Afghanistan where political moderates aspire to take control back from extreme right-wing religious militias that the US extreme-right had pushed into power (Mujaheddin then Taliban).

If the US can survive the January 6th attempts to seize its own capitol in DC, perhaps it will learn how to help Afghans survive Kabul being seized by similar tribes (and have some freedom to do something about it).

Or let me put it another way, a nuclear Pakistan overrun by extremist right-wing religious militas is the kind of regional effect that the US, Russia and China aren’t going to just sit back and ignore.

History, Poetry, Security

Tesla’s Black-Face Robot: Promoting Slavery as Fantasy?

August 23, 2021 Davi Ottenheimer 4 Comments

An infamous blackface performance by Tesla indicates to me the company is promoting a fantasy of robots that invokes a discussion of slavery.

What do you see here?

Source: Internet image search for “Tesla slave”

Does a white man dressed all in black seem odd standing next to a robot made to appear like a black woman dressed all in white?

I mean if the robot is supposed to represent humans, why not also have that robot dressed all in black just like every man who gets on that stage?

And why not have the robot appear with a white face like the man standing next to it?

More to the point, is this a mock-up for a petite black woman standing next to her white male owner (e.g. why did Tesla announce 5’8″ and 125 lb with large hips as their ideal robot form when not even a prototype product exists)?

Several white men have reacted to me with shock and disgust when I bring up these simple observations.

One man literally sent me a message of black text on a white screen trying to tell me this robot face HAS to be black because a white interface doesn’t work.

I wrote back with black text on white interface “can you read this”?

Let’s go even deeper and take a look at some history of racism. It’s curious to me because those most familiar with the tragedy of blackface have NOT objected my comparison of the Tesla vision to slavery.

The influence of minstrelsy and racial stereotyping on American society cannot be overstated.

Thus I humbly ask that the sad and painful experience of a blackface performance be viewed by everyone, such as the following one, to learn real American racism history and gain perspective on harms today:

Now watch Tesla’s product pre-pre-announcement (no technology or product actually exists, it’s all just theory) in context of blackface dance, as it appears to have little purpose other than to use a product launch to put on a blackface stunt.

The surrounding commentary from Tesla doesn’t help move my impression in any way about the connections here.

…designed to eliminate “dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks,” like bending over to pick something up, or go to the store for groceries, Musk said. “Essentially the future of physical work will be a choice.”

That is slavery talk. Creating a robotic black woman “bending over” for him, getting groceries, making physical work optional for him… all of that is consistent with the narrative of slavery.

Bending over? Seriously. Musk is trying to say he is building a feminine robot to bend over for him, and wants to pass that off as something safety related?

In a seemingly like-minded comment, Musk emphasized an odd definition of how he expects to remain in control.

“We’re setting it such that it is at a mechanical level, at a physical level, you can run away from it and most likely overpower it”

They are shackling it so it can’t run too far, making it easy to leave it behind, and also be overpowered? Come on.

None of this makes any sense in terms of actual market needs, let alone actual security and safety controls (e.g. the “you” in his statement seems to imply a large white man). Musk claiming there will be “no shortage of labor” due to this robot announcement while in the next sentence saying “not yet though, because this robot doesn’t work ha ha ha” has to be evidence of an unhealthy mind.

It’s so far outside actual robotics and instead a sad display of tech-driven fantasy of white men with enslaved petite black women being physically dominated… it’s no wonder no women were on stage during such a presentation, or alone anyone black. On top of all that, I have to wonder who thought I was a good idea to have the petite blackface robot symbolically standing behind all these men, obscured by them.

Again, a bunch of men dressed in black in front of a black scene doesn’t make sense when the robot is supposed to be the focus. Might as well dress the robot in all black too? Something is just totally off with the disconnect, the clear dehumanization of a machine that is meant to appear as human as possible.