Aspies For Freedom

http://www.planetpuna.com/dp.htm

Haven't had time to read it yet, but I saw this linked to on a news site and thought it might be of interest


Just to spark interest

Dolphins have their own language of up to a trillion words? Um, a billion maybe... you would be surprised at how much just simply a billion is. A million seconds is a few weeks, a billion seconds is 30 some years, and a trillion...

It's said that we aspies often have a special affinity with animals. I think dolphin therapy could help some of us but would need to be very carefully supervised for the good of all involved.

This is cool, thanks.

Have read some of it will read more later.

The sonar stuff is really interesting.

I can see your dolphin avatar is smiling

Quite true =p

In fact. The English language has under 1 million. More conservative estimates under half a million. A trillion words is a full 1 million times as many words as the English language.

Somehow, I doubt a creature with a brain significantly smaller than ours would possess quite such a compelx means of communication. ;p

Maybe they mean that a dolphin can distinguish that many different tones they to communicate? After all, sound comes at a lot of frequencies, and dolphins' ears are quite sensitive.

Anwyay, I don't think they really use "words" at all. Not the way we use them.

Humans use words... when we think about communication, it's bound to be word-centric. there's so much more to communication than words. Any Aspie knows that, because we miss most of it!

Actually, dolphins have larger brains than humans (1600g versus 1300g). Their brain-to-body-mass ratio is smaller than than of humans (1% versus 2%), however. Dolphins are thought to have the same brain-to-body-mass ratio as some of the archaic Homo species, and therefore would not have nearly the language capacity that modern humans do (despite radical claims that they are nearly as smart or as smart as modern humans). It's known that they do convey information through vocalizations, give themselves names, and talk about each other behind the others' backs, but their language is nowhere near as complex as ours.

Meh.  I used to like dolphins, until I saw a nature documentary on television showing a gang of male dolphins in the wild harassing a lone female so they could have sex with her.  It made me feel physically ill watching her twisting to keep her genitalia above the waterline, but because a dolphin's nose is on top of the head, she couldn't do this for long AND keep swimming AND manage to breathe.  And so whenever she went right-side-up to be able to breathe, the males repeatedly raped her.  It was apparently the first time this was caught on film.  Sort of made me think then that all the dolphins-as-peaceable-loveable-less-aggressive-than-humans is bunkum.
Alison

I've read that male dolphins can be real sex-maniacs.

It was a shock to me too to find out that dolphins can be really aggressive toward each other. Juvenile dolphins are targets for rape as well.