I've been reminiscing on Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, and enjoy the HUD the Chinese community has implemented for spectators. It's just another way to enjoy the game.
It makes me wonder which passion projects go unnoticed, and the breadth of their SF2CE/FGC ecosystem.
You use vowels when you talk, the a and i sounds. Sperm whales hide the same ones in their clicks. Slow a click down and the vowel appears, with a pitch shift that changes meaning the way Chinese does. We have the whole structure mapped and still cannot read a word of it.
The clicks come in quick little bursts that sound a bit like Morse code. Scientists call one burst a coda. For a long time the assumption was that the rhythm carried the whole message, just taps in a pattern. Then a team at MIT ran roughly 8,700 of these bursts through software built to catch patterns, and a hidden order fell out.
Think of it like a few knobs the whale can turn. One knob sets the beat. Another changes the speed. A third stretches or squeezes the timing halfway through, the way a singer drags a note. The last drops in an extra click. Turn those knobs in different combinations and you get at least 143 patterns the whales use over and over. People build words from a small handful of sounds the exact same way.
None of this came from us. A sperm whale makes sound by pushing air through lip-like flaps inside its nose, equipment that has nothing to do with the human throat. Two animals on completely separate paths, tens of millions of years apart, both landed on vowels anyway.
They have accents too. Whale families cluster into clans, some spread across a whole ocean. Each clan favors certain clicks the others rarely use. Take the Caribbean clan: it has a signature, a short 1+1+3 pattern found nowhere else, passed down for at least thirty years. One sweep of more than 23,000 of these click patterns across the Pacific sorted the whales into seven clans, each known by the clicks it prefers.
We can lay the whole alphabet out and watch the accents shift from clan to clan. Not one of us can tell you what a single click means. The grammar is right in front of us, and the dictionary is blank.
Dudu Cat King is a Chinese ink artist who creates expressive cat paintings using traditional sumi ink techniques. With a few confident strokes, he captures posture, personality, and softness, making the process appear simple.
[🖌️ 艺术肚肚猫王国画教育]