😭

Human vowels consist of a sequence of glottal pulses produced by vocal folds. Whale codas consist of a sequence of clicks produced by vibrating phonic lips, which play a role similar to the human vocal folds [15]. In human languages, the frequency of glottal pulses corresponds to pitch—closely spaced glottal pulses give rise to a higher pitch, while more widely spaced pulses give rise to a lower pitch. In linguistics, tone refers to pitch as recruited to express linguistic meaning. Many languages use tone to distinguish between different words. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the following four words differ only in their tonal contour, while having the same consonants and vowels [21]: high and level tone ma ‘mother’, rising tone má ‘hemp’, falling-rising tone ma ‘horse’ and falling tone mà ‘scold’. The coda types can therefore be compared to human tone: ‘regular’ coda types can be compared to level tones, codas with ‘increasing’ ICIs to falling tones and codas with ‘decreasing’ ICIs to rising tones. (However, our analogy has a limit: while in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.) In figure 1, the ‘F0’ (fundamental frequency) of each coda is represented with a blue line.

Beguš et al. [15] show that different coda vowel qualities can be instantiated on the same coda types and propose that coda type and coda quality are orthogonal [15]. This points to another parallelism between the sperm whale communication system and human language, as tone and vowel quality are often similarly orthogonal. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the falling–rising tone may appear on any vowel, e.g. ma ‘horse’, ma ‘rice’ and ma ‘smear’. Orthogonality, in this case, is used to describe the independent mechanisms of production between the traditional timing or source features and the vocalic or filter features. In other words, the rate of vocal fold or phonic lip vibration can be independent of the shape of the resonant body (the vocal tract or the distal air sac), and both vowel types surface on several traditional coda types. However, while the production can be independent, there can still exist distributional patterns, where a vowel quality is more frequent on certain tones or some coda vowels are more common on certain traditional coda types. Our paper builds on Beguš et al.’s [15] findings and reveals further complexities within the system of sperm whale vocalizations.

i’m definitely not working in China’s Cetacean Ops and trying to prevent the western world from finding out that whale speak is just super slowed down Mandarin, i swear

[735 of the 4.1k words of the above-linked blog post]

By the time Shuttle development began, it was clear that the original vision of a Shuttle as part of a larger space transportation system was far too costly and ambitious to receive Congressional support. So NASA concentrated on building only the first component of its vision, a reusable manned spacecraft that could reach low earth orbit. Since NASA assumed it would be able to fly Shuttle missions with a turnaround time as low as two weeks, this left the vexing question of what to do with all that spare launch capacity. The tiny commercial launch market was in no shape to supply such a wealth of satellites, so NASA turned to the one agency that had an abundance of things requiring shooting into space - the Air Force - and asked it to abandon its unmanned rocket programs, instead committing all future satellite launches to the Shuttle.

The Air Force was only too happy to agree, but at a crippling price. What the Air Force wanted to launch was spy satellites - lots of them, bulky telescopes with heavy mirrors, the bigger the better - and it wanted to launch them in an orbit over the Earth’s poles, so they could snoop over the maximum amount of Red territory. This meant NASA had to go back to the drawing board, since polar orbits would require a heavier orbiter than the Shuttle design had anticipated, which in turn meant using a bigger rocket at launch, and dissipating more heat during re-entry.

Moreover, there was no way to launch a polar mission safely from Kennedy Space Center — it would mean overflying either heavily populated areas in the Carolinas or risking capture of a fuel tank by the wily Cubans. So the Air Force also demanded, and got, billions in funding to build a new Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force base in California. And because some of the Air Force’s military missions involved capturing a Soviet satellite on the sly and landing after one orbit, the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand miles cross-range during re-entry, so that it could catch up with the rapidly eastbound Air Force base underneath it. This meant bigger wings, which in turn meant more weight, an even more powerful rocket, and again a more complicated heat shield.

Most of the really wrong design decisions in the Shuttle system — the side-mounted orbiter, solid rocket boosters, lack of air-breathing engines, no escape system, fragile heat protection — were the direct fallout of this design phase, when tight budgets and onerous Air Force requirements forced engineers to improvise solutions to problems that had as much to do to do with the mechanics of Congressional funding as the mechanics of flight. In a pattern that would recur repeatedly in the years to come, NASA managers decided that they were better off making spending cuts on initial design even if they resulted in much higher operating costs over the lifetime of the program.

To further cut costs, and keep the weight from growing prohibitive, the Shuttle became the first manned spacecraft to fly without any kind of crew escape system, relying on certain components (solid rockets, wing tiles, landing gear) to function with complete reliability. NASA also decided not to make the Shuttle capable of unmanned flight, so that the first test flight of the vehicle would have astronauts on board. This was a major departure for the traditionally conservative agency, which had relied on redundant systems wherever possible, and always tested unmanned prototypes of any new rocket. It showed how confident NASA had grown in its ability to correctly predict, simulate, and design for high reliability.

The final Shuttle design, incorporating all of the budgetary and Air Force design constraints, was impressive but not particularly useful. Very soon after the start of the program, it became clear that Shuttle launches would not be routine events, that it would cost a great deal of money to repair each orbiter after its trip to space, and that estimates of launch cost and frequency had been wildly optimistic. At the same time, the Air Force proved unable to get the Vandenberg base ready for use, negating much of the reason for the extensive Shuttle redesign. After the Challenger explosion, the Vandenberg base was quietly mothballed. Not once did the Shuttle fly a mission to polar orbit.

someone asked in a reply:

Does that loop infinitely

The first version I posted would loop infinitely… if you have infinite RAM, that is 🫠 (the length of the string will reach 1KB after 30 iterations, and 1MB after 60, 2MB after 63, and so on). Also, to keep the loop in a single line I had foolishly used a list comprehension which meant each previous iteration was also being retained.

Fortunately the rate of memory consumption is not too fast because python string replacement is very slow, but, thanks to your question making me think about it, to avoid eventually crashing someone’s computer if they don’t know to hit ctrl-c to kill it, i’ve now edited it so that it will stop after 60 iterations. I also made it use all() to consume a generator comprehension instead of a list comprehension, to avoid retaining the state of previous iterations.

here is my very inefficient list-comprehension-using original version which will run until it runs out of memory:

python -c 'import itertools as I,time as t;a="o";[(print(a),a:=a.replace(*["o","O","8","oo"][i%3:i%3+2]),t.sleep(max(.3,1-(i/50))))for i in I.count()]'

if you leave this version running long enough, you will be at the mercy of your operating system’s out-of-memory-killer: if it decides to kill other things before it kills this python process you might have a bad time.

here is another version which will actually loop infinitely without consuming more RAM:

python -c 'import itertools as I,time as T; all((any(print(["o","O","8"][i%3],end="")for _ in range(2**(i//3))),print(),T.sleep(max(.3,1-i/50)))for i in I.count())'

this is technically not completely constant-space because i and 2**(i//3) are still growing… but it will run for a very very very long time before it needs to allocate a small amount more.

I’m leaving the space-inefficient now-not-infinite one at the top of this comment because using replace() is easier to read than this nested loop version.