ON: Weird Communication Challenges

Houston, do you read me?

Song of the Week: “Space Oddity,” by David Bowie - “Ground control to Major Tom…/The time is near, there’s not too long / Can you hear me, Major Tom?” 

Last Saturday, my family visited an exhibit on animal superpowers at the Royal Botanical Gardens. Alongside displays about owl hearing, cheetah speed, and skunk spray, I got to see a peculiar creature that I’ve been hoping to see for the last twelve years: a mantis shrimp. Actually, three mantis shrimp. 

These oversized marine crustaceans are famous for their beauty and their violence. Their razor-sharp spring-loaded front claws allow them to punch at up to 50 miles an hour, boiling the water around them and breaking holes in prey’s exoskeletons and aquarium glass alike. Mantis shrimp are also extraordinarily beautiful, with iridescent shells and rows of peacock-like spots along their pleopods, or swimming limbs.

When I saw the mantis shrimp, I immediately started quietly singing “Mantis Shrimp! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” to the tune of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” and repeated it occasionally throughout the day. My parents were, understandably, puzzled, so I gave them the same explanation I’m about to give you.

In 2012, the science podcast RadioLab did an episode, “Colors,” that featured a segment on how the number of eye cones affects color vision. They discussed a range of animals:  dogs (2 cones), humans (3 cones), sparrows (3 cones), butterflies (5-6 cones), and finally, mantis shrimp. Mantis shrimp have a staggering sixteen cones, giving them the best color vision in the world by a wide margin.¹ 

In communicating this information, however, the creators of RadioLab had a problem: how do you explain color spectrums using only audio? 

In the video clip below, RadioLab co-host Jad Abumrad explains their brilliant choice to use a choir to represent animals’ range of color vision as a “crazy audio metaphor.”

“The thought was, could we hear it? Could we build up - sort of translate - the colors into harmony?” To demonstrate each animal’s increasing color vision, they added more voices in a wider range of notes, until finally, for the mantis shrimp’s extraordinary color vision, they had the entire choir sing a shrimp-themed rendition of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Ridiculous? Perhaps. But also hilarious and a wildly effective piece of science communication. 

Perhaps too effective, in fact. In 2018, RadioLab followed up on the episode with new research about mantis shrimp: “Recently researchers in Australia put the mantis shrimps’ eyes to the test only to discover that sure, they can SEE a lot of colors, but that doesn’t mean they can tell them apart.”  

I only found this out, however, when doing research for this newsletter, whereas the song and accompanying commentary from the original episode has stayed fresh in my mind for the last ten years. 

The entire thing, I think, is a testament to the power of effective communication - and the importance of getting it right. In this case, the stakes are low - the public’s understanding of the subtleties of crustacean vision, little more than a trivia fact to bring out at parties. 

It got me thinking, however, about other challenges of communication - some of them with much higher stakes - and the ways we’ve attempted to solve them. 

Four-Dimensional Knives

This February, I attended the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) annual conference in Denver, Colorado. 

I went to the AAAS to learn from its sessions and workshops about science communication. In my day job, I’m a communications officer for the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and I spend a lot of time figuring out how to communicate important math and computer science research to various groups, including students, faculty, and the general public.

At AAAS I heard presentations about YouTube from the team at PBS Digital, discussed the challenges of building relationships between scientists and religious communities at a round table, and tried my hand at writing math jokes in a session about comedy and humor in science communication. All of these sessions, however, shared a common premise: if we want people to believe scientists and act on their findings, we have to make sure that scientists and members of the public can clearly and empathetically communicate with each other. 

As a math communicator, this is especially challenging. People frequently think of math as boring at best and torturously incomprehensible at worst. I had to overcome my own biases when I started this job, and still frequently find the details of the research I write about baffling even when I can understand the general concepts.

Some kinds of math and computer science, of course, are easier to write and talk about than others: the average person is far more likely to be interested in questions of internet security or AI than they are in non-Euclidean geometry. 

I co-created the Math Marvels series to help make Pure Mathematics - the branch of mathematics that is entirely theoretical, not applied to another field such as physics or computing - more approachable and fun. In each installment of the series, we publish a written Q&A with a Pure Math professor about their career and research, and pair this with a light-hearted video where I ask questions, crack jokes, and try to understand advanced mathematics. 

In our most recent installment, I chatted with Professor Benoit Charbonneau about the challenges of translating math from French to English, four-dimensional knives, and what part he would play in an Oceans Eleven-style heist. You can watch it below, if you’d like. 

The series works, I hope, for two reasons. First and foremost, because I am not a mathematician, I ask the same questions that the viewer would. 

Secondly, neither I nor the videos themselves take these professors too seriously. If we can all have fun and approach each other as equals, we’re more likely to understand each other, instead of making assumptions about who is or isn’t worth listening to.

Circles of Infinite Danger

As a math communicator, I am tasked with building bridges between English-speaking mathematicians, and English-speaking non-mathematicians. What happens, however, when you need to communicate a concept instantly, without knowing whether your audience even speaks the same language? 

In the early days of automobiles, driving was more or less anarchy. Road rules and road signs changed between cities, counties, and states, where they existed at all. As Hilary Greenbaum and Dana Rubinstein explain in a 2011 New York Times Magazine article [gift link], the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments is responsible for many of the signs North American drivers recognize today. In 1923, the civil engineers of this office developed a series of guidelines for signage - based on some rather baffling logic. 

The recommendations were based on a simple, albeit not exactly, intuitive, idea: the more sides a sign has, the higher the danger level it invokes. By the engineers’ reckoning, the circle, which has an infinite number of sides, screamed danger and was recommended for railroad crossings. The octagon, with its eight sides, was used to denote the second-highest level. The diamond shape was for warning signs. And the rectangle and square shapes were used for informational signs.

Interestingly, that most iconic and instantly-recognizable aspect of the stop sign - its bright red colour - wasn’t introduced until the 1950s. It’s not that people didn’t already associate red with warning. Rather, we didn’t have the technology to produce a durable, reflective red material for signs until the the ‘50s.

Babel

If associating circles with “infinite danger” seems a little absurd to you, then you might want to try your hand at making some better translations yourself. My favorite recent video game is Focus Entertainment’s Chants of Sennaar, a language puzzle game based loosely on the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible.

In this intriguing, beautifully rendered game, you are a traveler who arrives in an ancient city where you do not speak the language. As you interact with strangers and watch them go about their daily lives, you must look for patterns and write your theories in your notebook, gradually deciphering their language. Once you’ve successfully deciphered that language, however, you are thrown into a new culture, with new symbols, a new grammar, and new expectations. 

You can watch a full trailer for the game, which is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PS3, and Xbox One, below.

While the puzzles would be satisfying by themselves for a language nerd like me, Chants of Sennaar is at its best during those “eureka” moments where a stranger’s seemingly oblique actions suddenly become familiar. Once you understand enough words, a string of nonsensical sounds become a plea for help, or a joke shared with a friend. Suddenly, these strange ancient people don’t seem so strange after all. As Emily Price writes for Polygon, 

[F]un is the wrong metric for this game. Is viewing ancient Egyptian sculpture fun? Is reading Ovid or Virginia Woolf? For that matter, is learning a language? Sometimes. But we do these activities to experience a different kind of pleasure: accessing a shared understanding of what it means to be human, across barriers of time and interpretation.

This Place Is Not a Place of Honor 

In Chants of Sennaar, you play as a lone figure encountering a foreign civilization. While the people you meet are unfamiliar, however, they are still, fundamentally, people, and they can communicate anger and disgust, joy and humor to you. 

What would you think, however, if you were wandering through the desert in an unfamiliar land, and instead of finding your fellow humans found only strange and menacing shapes jutting into the sky at weird angles, etched with the same warning in a dozen ancient, half-forgotten languages:

This place is a message…and a part of a system of messages…pay attention to it! 

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. 

This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here. 

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. 

The danger is in a particular location…it increases towards a center…the center of danger is here…of a particular size and shape, and below us. 

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. 

The danger is to the body, and it can kill. 

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. 

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.

This place is best shunned and left uninhabited. 

How would you react to a message like that? Would you run very far away, as fast as you can, and never go back? Or would you be tempted to get out a shovel and start digging, The Mummy-style, for the treasures undoubtedly hidden within? 

After all, as Terry Pratchett writes in Thief of Time, “Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.” 

If you did choose to dig in this particular mysterious site, you would encounter a lot of hostile architecture and both pictorial and written warnings. And, if you still kept digging, you would eventually find your treasure: a vast cache of decaying nuclear waste. And then, not too long after, you would die a gruesome and horrible death. 

The ominous warning above was included in a 1993 report from the Sandia National Laboratory as an example of what long-term nuclear waste warning messages should attempt to evoke without the use of existing human language. 

As research into nuclear power and weapons advanced, the field of nuclear semiotics evolved alongside it, focused on a singular question: how do we warn our descendants about the danger of nuclear waste? Nuclear waste remains dangerous for more than 10,000 years, yet none of today’s languages, religions, or cultures are the same as those from 10,000 years ago. 

This collaboration between Vox and the design podcast 99% Invisible explains how our current warning labels were created - and why they are insufficient. We have been working on the problem of long-term nuclear waste warning messages for more than fifty years, with suggestions ranging from the development of an atomic priesthood to genetically engineering cats that would glow when dangerous levels of radiation were present.

“[There’s] conflict between these two urges: you want people to notice it but you don’t want people to go there,” explains physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford. “Those are always going to fight each other.” 

It’s an impossible problem, one that takes human nature into account even as it exists because of that very same nature: we are simultaneously creatures who have unleashed the atom and its potential for unfathomable destruction, as well as creatures who spend enormous amounts of time and effort trying to keep people we will never meet safe.

Greetings in 54 Languages

Even as we began working to communicate horrors buried far beneath the surface of the earth, however, we were also dreaming about how to send our greatest wonders out into the stars. 

In 1977, the spacecraft Voyager began its journey into deep space, carrying with it two identical golden records containing a “time capsule” of sounds and images depicting the best and most beautiful aspects of life on earth. 

I first learned about the Voyager Records from the Classical Kids audio drama “Mr. Bach Comes to Call,” and I was immediately enchanted.

In nineteen hundred and seven-seven, the capsule Voyager was sent into space. Inside were greetings in 54 languages, 117 different pictures of the planet earth, a drawing of a man and a woman, sounds of whales, wind, rain, elephants, avalanches, birds, fires, crickets, wild dogs herding sheep, ships, trains, frogs, volcanoes, mothers, children, a kiss, and music. 

Twenty-seven pieces of the best music from all over the world. All kinds of music. Drummers from Senegal, pan pipes from Peru, music by Stravinski, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Blind Willie Johnson, Mozart, Beethoven, and three pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, the record also contains a great deal of other data: diagrams and photographs of math and physics, DNA and human anatomy, and both ordinary life and celebrations from cultures around the world. 

The Voyager Records represent a very strange, and very unlikely, form of communication: communication with alien intelligence, which may not be able to decipher our message, if these aliens even exist. 

As astronomer Carl Sagan, one of the organizers of the project, reflected, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space, but the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” 

Hello? we say to the stars, Is anybody listening?

On earth, we may have to communicate warnings about traffic laws and nuclear waste, but if we encounter someone new, out there in the vastness of space, we hope that the first thing they learn about us is music.

When it comes to weird communication challenges, what should I add to my syllabus?

I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!

1. The episode also inspired this very fun comic about mantis shrimp from irreverent web comic “The Oatmeal.”