The possibility of a prize, talking to whales
Some news this week is that A Book of Noises is a finalist in the science and technology category of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. The other four finalists look to be excellent. Two of them — The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell, and A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith — were already on my reading list. I hope to catch up with all of them.
Also, I was been back in studio this week. with the excellent Rich Woodhouse at Electric Breeze Audio to record a few short corrections for An Audiobook of Noises. Proofing and production have been taking a while, but we are still on schedule to get the audiobook out in March.
In my last post I mentioned a talk by Milton Mermikedes on the science and art of tuning. Since then he has delivered yet another outstanding lecture, this time on The Colour Spectrum of Scales and Modes. I strongly recommend it to your attention.
Finally, a heads-up for an article by Ross Anderson in The Atlantic about what it might mean to talk to whales thanks to assistance of much-touted but yet to deliver AI systems such as CETI.
Anderson asks a number of researchers: if we can learn to speak to whales what should we say?
Their answers are various and interesting. To my mind one of the best comes from Kristin Andrews, a philosopher at York University, in Toronto, who says “I’d ask them: What are you interested in? What do you value? To you, what is the meaning of life?”
For what it’s worth, however I think that we already know the answer to this question, and it is, simply, “a world in which we and those we love can flourish.”