I was talking to someone two nights ago who grew up in the USSR. I grew up on Australia. The common thread was after school clubs, and a well funded state run and centralised system for spotting talent, and then scholarships to institutions set up to develop the talent. In Australia the club's are mostly sport, and they fed into the Australian Institute of Sport (which gave you a good rounded education for when you didn't get rich and famous, plus the specialist stuff). The soviets had sports, maths, chess, gymnastics, music ...

I did an apprenticeship in metalwork many..many years ago and I seem to recall the zinc is meant to be in compression. If a zinc plug pulled out, it was in shear. Sounds wrong to me. Vincenti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Engineers_Know_and_How_Th... Has a chapter on flush pop rivetting which discussed the loss of this kind of knowing.

It's rambling, but highlights a point. The big picture IMHO is that news as we ingest it is like history. History is viewed through a lens of the present and its concerns. News is viewed through the same lens, filtered by the concerns of, not journalists, but what journalists think we are concerned with. Real journalists (IE investigative) don't present "facts", but interpret "facts" against a world view. Good journalists state how they do that. Just to put the cat out and see what happens, Michael Moore is definitive at this, irrespective of whether or not you agree with his world view, at least you know what his world view is. I've just had a piece of Reform UK advertising through the mailbox, and it is printed in the format and style of news. Nice trick. I guess that is what 70 million GBP of overseas funding buys you.

> Michael Moore is definitive at this

Is he though?

I thought it was pretty well known he's manipulated timelines, selectively edited interviews and staged things.

He puts his world view first and makes the facts fit that view.

He's not the only one. And as I said you at least get told his bias. The BBC (see the trump court case) edited time lines and claim to be unbiased. The idea (not mine; "critical discourse analysis" I think) is that all news is biased and the right way to report is to state the bias up front.

claims as these require sources .

We laugh at Russia's "fields of rusting armour" but one interpretation I saw somewhere said these scrap heaps were (plausibly) set up to be a source of components for whatever military requirements appeared next. It also kept the armaments industry ticking along for the last 80 years. The Japanese build two submarines every two years, by two companies. Unless they stuff up, each company can plan developments with forward looking. The contract system in the US has its drawbacks.

There is the effect that it takes more words to say something new in a way that is convincing than to say something your audience already believes.

Nope. The point of the original argument was the path to autocracy, not the current state of things. This article focuses on the here and now. The point is the trap is in front of us, we are not in it yet. Stop talking about how nice the bait looks everyone!

I think you miss the point that power is a global market. In the UK we pay international prices because otherwise our state/corporations/establishment would sell it overseas. Yes, electricity is linked to natural gas, just because they can.

This is a much more sensible research programme.

IMHO translation of anything interesting requires the cultural background for context. To do it with a new language requires the translator to "go native". The mega fauna gets media attention, but they would have more chance of success with one of the many dolphin pods that live up close and personal with humans. For example Shark Bay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Mia In the 1990s we had field linguists interested, but the tech sucked. It's good to try again, but a lit search might help.

I'm also fascinated by what we'd actually say, beyond "hello".

Humans from different cultures have problems communicating clearly. How would we say anything meaningful to creatures who don't share any part of our worldview?

A whale's world is upside down from our point of view - there's a flat upper limit, but no effective lower limit. They are stuck near the surface in the same way we're stuck near the ground. But they live in a much more 3-dimensional world than we do - it's much easier for them to swim down than it is for us to fly up. That's got to affect their thinking and language in ways we can't know. They will have expressions and terms that are relatable to other whales but incomprehensible to us because we don't have that same shared experience.

I think it's great that we're trying, but I'm expecting a pretty dull conversation at the end, purely because we can't say anything more meaningful in a way that they'd understand, and vice versa.

Life is an adventure, and you can't imagine that an entirely different species wouldn't have some absolutely fascinating stories to tell?

We saw a talk on this at EMF Camp and it is inspiring. The main technical challenge in the short term is collecting the data. Talking to non humans is a grand challenge - and one I think is really interesting - however..