Thoughts float through my mind like clouds on a sunny day... there goes an elephant on a bicycle!

[capri0mni]

• If there are twenty-four hours in a day, why do we say "At the eleventh hour" to mean right on the brink, before something terrible happens? "The eleventh hour" is 11:00 am! What sort of scary thing ever happens just a bit before noon, except that we feel like having a little bit of something, as Pooh did? Why don't we say "The twenty-third hour," instead?



• As I was typing the above bit, I realized that I did, in fact, have a case of Pooh-like Elevensies. So I went into the kitchen to get a roll and some peanut butter. While I was there, a little bird flew off the branch of a nearby tree, and bumped into the kitchen window. She (or he) wasn't going fast enough to get hurt, but she (or he) was surprised, and hopped down to the edge of the window and looked in, for a bit, at my kitchen table. And then, flew away to the roof when Trixie jumped onto the sill. I don't know what kind of bird it was. It was about the size of my thumb, and was kind of buff colored, with dark, reddish brown stripes/streaks, and a longish, slightly curved, beak. I wonder what she (or he) thought about the clutter on my table.



• Yesterday, on Jeopardy, one of the answers questions (whatever) was: "What is Abecedarian?" for a form of poetry confined to the alphabetic order. But I've never been able to find out why the alphabet is in "alphabetic" order. Why alpha first, then beta, and so on, till we get to omega, or zed, or whatever? Why not start with queue or jay, or doubleyew, instead?
  
  Also, a while back, I discovered, thanks to several ditties getting stuck in my head together, that the alphabet song fits the tune of Frere Jaques much, much better than it fits the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, with fewer notes left over. Try it! You'll see!



• The thing about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) that kind of annoys me is twofold. First, if scientists can't even recognize nonhuman intelligence on Earth (among rats, and pigeons, and yeasts and flatworms and such), what makes them think that they'll know alien intelligence when it pops into their viewscreens? Second (and this is the biggie, imnsho), they're just assuming that aliens communicate by manipulating radio waves into special codes, just like we do. Isn't that kind of a rather BIG Assumption?



• I don't know anyone who can see a wee chipmunk running across the road without grinning, just a bit.



• This morning, at an entirely unholy hour of the wee sort, even for her different timezone, angevin2 posted a link to this flash game: Suburban Cat Herder. Thanks to her, I lost about an hour or more of potential sleep. It is addictive goodness, even though I think the game description lies just a tiny bit.

Comments

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

I've always assumed that "at the eleventh hour" refers to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

That could very well be. In fact, it probably is.

But why is signing an peace treaty a bad thing?

This is on my mind lately, because one of my terrestrial TV stations is relentlessly promoting a dystopian science detective thriller show called "The Eleventh Hour," and the theme of all the ads is an omninously ticking clock...

...And my brain finally went: Hey, wait a minute, there!

[jekesta]

I think the eleventh hour is a biblical thing about being allowed into heaven even if you show up at the very last moment.

I love the cat herding, and the alphabet fits very well to frere jacques, yes:)

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

So, according to the Bible, the world will end at 11:01 in the morning?

Humph. No respect for honey on toast.

Unless you count Day Time as Entirely Different than Night Time, which I suppose they might have done, once.

I Still think that the Eleventh Hour TV show looks like it will be entirely gratuitous. And nonsense.

[jekesta]

I think they worked 11 hour days, and even if you only showed up for the last ten minutes and worked a bit that was GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOD.

I hope the show is better than it seems. That would be nice.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

You're correct (I googled): http://kingjbible.com/matthew/20.htm

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Oh, well if it's about being pro-procrastination, than I approve. Maybe the show will have the heroes just doodling and playing computer solitaire and such like until the last ten minutes. That would be okay, too.

It's just that visions of the Future that are all Dystopian Bother me. All Utopian futures bother me too. Mostly, I think people will muddle through, and mean well, and make the best of things forever. And sometimes things work well, and sometimes they fail. But that's Okay. Really.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

Unless you count Day Time as Entirely Different than Night Time, which I suppose they might have done, once.

Yes, I think it's this. The Romans split day and night into twelve hours each. So "prima hora" was the first hour of daylight, and so on.

(I wasn't sure about my recollection of this from school eek-over-a-decade-ago, except I've just remembered the thing that always boggled me about it: they adjusted the length of the hours every day to make it fit. There were always twelve equal hours within each day, but tomorrow's hours would be slightly longer or shorter than today's depending on which half of the year you were in. I guess it makes sense when you're working with sundials and such.)

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yes, I remember that from my Latin class in school, too (eek-almost-three-decades-ago). And yes, I think sundials were the reason. I wonder if the exact measurement of hours and minutes came about after the invention of mechanical clocks? They don't do stretchy and bendy as well, when it comes to time..

[edited for the icon, natch!]

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

But why is signing an peace treaty a bad thing?

It's not. The connotation of "at the eleventh hour" is "saved at the eleventh hour" so it's a good not a bad. Of course, if you're saved "at the eleventh hour" that presumes the worst is immediately beforehand.

I remember when all disasters were at "twelve minutes to midnight".

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I was being kind of facetious, there. I just didn't bother to type anything like this: ;-) at the end of the line...

As the Third Doctor once said: "Thank you, Brigadier. But next time, could you possibly arrive before the Nick of Time?" (or something like that).

[pedanther]

Second (and this is the biggie, imnsho), they're just assuming that aliens communicate by manipulating radio waves into special codes, just like we do.

I think you're being unfair. Listening for radio signals doesn't imply an assumption that all aliens will use radio signals, only a recognition the some aliens might.

And what's the alternative? If there aliens out there using a communication technique unknown on Earth, then by definition the people of Earth can't search for it anyhow. All we can do is look for the types of communication we know about - which, again, doesn't imply an assumption that those are the only types of communication.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this, and in fact there are speculations about other forms of interstellar communications that we wouldn't be able to detect (narrow beam-width incredibly powerful lasers and such), but as you say we wouldn't be able to detect those.

Though there is a powerful bias even within the radio thing that assumes that aliens seeking to communicate probably transmit somewhere around the 21cm line of hydrogen emissions (on the grounds that astronomers look for this to map gas clouds, so it would get noticed).

Generally, there's a huge parameter space of possible modalities of alien intelligence, of which some possibly-tiny fraction might be capable of and/or willing to partake in interstellar communication, which still leaves a huge parameter-space of possible methods of communication, of which some possibly-tiny fraction we might be capable of detecting, and even that parameter space of things we might be able to notice is mostly unexplored. The whole thing's got a long way to go yet.

(OTOH, we might not only be looking for intentional communication but overspill -- Earth has been generating radio waves that would look very very weird to aliens for well over a century. But then I know capriuni's seen the intro sequence to Remembrance of the Daleks, so I shan't labour the point.)

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Earth has been generating radio waves that would look very very weird to aliens for well over a century

Actually, this is what got me thinking about it. On this week's Nova Science Now episode featured a piece on SETI, and the new technologies their employing to broaden their search.

But in his concluding "final thoughts," the host pointed out that if we switch all our commications over to things like the Internet, we'll stop sending radio waves out into space, and aliens who have been (or will have been) monitoring our civilization through our radio leakage might just assume we've finally killed ourselves off.

[pedanther]

Also:

First, if scientists can't even recognize nonhuman intelligence on Earth (among rats, and pigeons, and yeasts and flatworms and such), what makes them think that they'll know alien intelligence when it pops into their viewscreens?

Not wishing to be disrespectful to rats or pigeons or yeasts or flatworms, when was the last time you heard about one building a device capable of transmitting a message over interstellar distances?

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

when was the last time you heard about one building a device capable of transmitting a message over interstellar distances?

Actually, I haven't. But I have read (somewhere) that flatworms have been seen in the labratory exhibiting behavior that looks a lot like boredom (that, at least, suggests the possibility of intelligence).

And I've read/heard of squid and cuttlefish showing signs of curiosity, and how many plants seem to have neuron-like structures in their roots (mayapples seem to plan their growth cycles two years in advance (http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0303/p01s03-usgn.html)).

My point is, many people seem to be assuming that Intelligence means "Just Like Humans." But maybe only humans are like humans. Looking for a needle in a thousand million haystacks is hard enough, without assuming that the only kind of needle is an embroidery #6).

(Besides, if yeasts or flatworms have figured out intersteller communication -- maybe through manipulating amino acid proteins -- what are the chances we'd notice any of it?)

[pedanther]

I'm not saying that flatworms and such haven't shown signs of intelligence; but I am saying that such signs of intelligence are beside the point when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

"Behaviour indicative of curiousity" is all very well, but it's small and subtle; you have to be on the same planet as the organism to even have a hope of seeing it. From another solar system, you don't even see the organism, let alone the behaviour.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not about small and subtle; it can't be. It's about big obvious things that can be seen light-years away. It's not looking for the needle in the haystack so much as the pitchfork.

(Which, to reiterate, doesn't mean that the searchers think there are no needles, or that the needles don't matter. But when you're looking at a haystack from the far side of the field, or from several fields away, needles don't really come into it.)

So, when you asked, "If they don't recognise signs of non-human intelligence on Earth, what makes them think they'll recognise signs of extraterrestrial intelligence when it appears on their screens?"

...what I heard you ask was "If they can't spot the needles, what makes them think they'll spot the pitchfork?" To which I tried (not, I admit, very comprehensibly) to point out that failure to spot a needle doesn't cast any doubt on pitchfork-spotting ability, that what you need to demonstrate is a failure to spot another pitchfork.

...on re-reading, I suspect you meant "If they don't recognise most kinds of terrestrial needles, what makes them think they'll recognise alien needles?" But, as I've said, alien needles aren't even in the picture so far, and won't be until we find a way to cross the field and look at the haystack close to.