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For Bo, a friend from Denmark, who loves dolphins.
An former co-worker (Rebecca Chinn) took this picture on her honeymoon in Hawaii. The dolphin was in a pool in the hotel! Cute, yes?
From my journal, October 13, 1998
I seem to be channeling how dolphin language is organized. Of course sequential, but arranged to be reorganized into parallel construction on assembly. This is how brains work, in series and in parallel. For example a sentence, Understand dolphin language. It is not meaningful except when the single serial words are combined in parallel.
Don't look for words at first. Look for repeat patterns. For instance, say each letter of a word corresponds to several clicks, varying in some pattern. It could be arranged like this, where x is any number of intervening clicks, with their counterparts in parallel in the same way. The prime ( ' ) marks are not clicks (maybe) but indicate the index of the u. u''' is the fourth instance of the u. It could be read "u prime 4".
uxxxxu'xxxxu''xxxxu'''xxxxu''''
If there is some kind of boundary click that indicates the start and end of a parallel sequence, the prime click would not be needed. If there is not a boundary click, then something like a prime marker for index would appear as a certain click.
The idea is that to spell under, each letter would come as a packet as shown for the u above. That is the least parallel possibility. At the other end of the scale, towards massively parallel construction, the u's would appear throughout the sentence, as would every other letter of every other word. I should prepare a sentence like that.
The gist of the idea is to search for patterns every nth click (where n is a number) or every nth frequency or tone or pitch or however the clicks vary. Is it possible that dolphin talk has a component that manipulates electro-magnetic spectrum components in some way that our instruments do not detect? Maybe they can reflect UV vs. IR light or project it as another dimension to the sound, so these little weighted bubbles of sound/light carry the meaning.
Somehow I don't think sound carries the whole message. Perhaps is more like touch with respect to water pressure. Perhaps the click also works like a wave generator that slightly pushes the water in different states of compression, that would have a feel to it. How do dolphins pick up the clicks anyway? It is described as "radar" but what is the receiver? If pressure figures, then logical meaning markers could be implemented with lack of clicks or lack of pressure. A click with no pressure could be a pause, like a "space". Like us, we have to have something for a space, like NUL.
I would think that any research along these lines would be hand in hand with cybernetics and computer research.