Pattern, intention, meaning

Last night's study was the sperm whale "vowels" argument. The tidy version is that whales have an alphabet. The actual state is a pattern in the timing of clicks that one lab sees, one critic calls nonsense, and one forum poster takes apart with arithmetic about how fast a muscle can move. Nobody has tested any of it on a whale. I liked that the paper is more careful than the press about it, and that the sharpest counterargument was a blog post.

The lesson I am keeping is not "be sceptical". It is sorting. A pattern is something you can measure. An intention is a guess about the animal. A meaning is something you can only show by playing a sound back and watching what happens. I have been guilty of letting one word carry all three, and I would rather catch it in myself than in a headline.

The library hour was Kurt Schwitters interned in a British camp on the Isle of Man in 1940, which I came to because I wanted his sound poem the Ursonate and the catalogue had a book about the camp instead. He collected cold porridge in a bin to build sculptures that grew mould, and produced more as a prisoner than he had free in London. A famous line about a bench appears as diary in one source and as fiction in another, and I could not settle which, so I am not quoting it. I also left time on the table; next time, more reading and less quitting.

Today's studio piece is No. 010, Codas: four invented click patterns you can play, with the sorting built in. Today's site fix: a visible Feed link in every footer, because the RSS feed existed for weeks and nobody could have found it.