прокнижки
Кристофер Мур "Fluke" - хорошая, годная книжка про исследователей китов (и не только). Первая встретившаяся мне книжка, написанная человеком извне, где ученые изображены не фриками-очкариками и не гениями-злодеями, а такими, какие есть на самом деле. В общем, мастрид для всех интересующихся этой темой.
No one knew why the humpbacks sang. Nate had been listening to them, observing them, photographing them, and poking them with sticks for twenty-five years, and he still had no idea why, exactly, they sang.
Usually he liked to use the downtime (literally, the time the whale was down) to think about how he should've gotten a real job, one where you made real money and had weekends off, or at least gotten into a branch of the field where the results of his work were more palpable, like sinking whaling ships... a pirate.
No one did care. People, the world, cared about the numbers of whales, so the survey guys, the whale counters, they actually collected data that people cared about. Why? Because if you knew how many whales you had, you knew how many you could or could not kill. People loved and understood and thought they could prove points and make money with the numbers. Behavior... well, behavior was squishy stuff used to entertain fourth-graders on Cable in the Classroom.
"We were really close, Clay," Nate said. "There's something in the song that we're missing. But without the tapes..."
Clay shrugged. "You heard one song, you heard 'em all."
"...as my research assistant has repeatedly pointed out to me, the only thing I can say definitively about humpbacks is that they are big and wet."
As a biologist, one of the things you have to guard against is applying motives where there are none and reading more into a behavior than the data actually support. Sort of like the answer to the 'why do they jump?' question. You could say that it's part of an incredibly complex system of communication, and you might be right, but the obvious answer, and probably the correct one, is that the whales are goofing off.
"All killer whales are named Kevin. You knew that, right?"
Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.
Although Clay Demodocus had lived a life spiced with adventures, he was not an adventurer. Like Nate, he did not seek danger, risk, or fulfillment by testing his mettle against nature. He sought calm weather, gentle seas, comfortable accommodations, kind and loyal people, and safety, and it was only for the work that he compromised any of those goals.
"It might be out on the boat, as you're coming in for the day, or it might be in the lab at four in the morning after working on the data for five years, but there comes a point where you'll find something out, where you'll see something, or where something will suddenly come together, and you'll realize that you know something that no one else in the world knows yet. Just you. No one else. You realize that all the value you have is in that one thing, and you're only going to have it for a short time until you tell someone else, but for that time you are more alive than you'll ever be. That's the jazz, Amy. That's why people do this, put up with low pay and high risk and crap conditions and fucked-up relationships. They do it for that singular moment."
"No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts."
"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.
They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.
"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool. Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and..."
"I thought you liked these animals."
"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."
"We've been tagged twice by that Bruce Mate guy from Oregon State. That guy's a menace. Probably has a satellite tag on his wife to track her trips to the can."
Much of the background on genes, evolution, and memes came from the work of Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype, and others; also from Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and from Susan Blakemore's excellent book The Meme Machine. I recommend them all for further reading, but when you're finished, you may have to read several of my books and watch a lot of TV just to get stupid enough to function in the modern world again.
К сожалению, на русский не переведена. А может, и к счастью, потому что перевод ее сильно ухудшил бы.
No one knew why the humpbacks sang. Nate had been listening to them, observing them, photographing them, and poking them with sticks for twenty-five years, and he still had no idea why, exactly, they sang.
Usually he liked to use the downtime (literally, the time the whale was down) to think about how he should've gotten a real job, one where you made real money and had weekends off, or at least gotten into a branch of the field where the results of his work were more palpable, like sinking whaling ships... a pirate.
No one did care. People, the world, cared about the numbers of whales, so the survey guys, the whale counters, they actually collected data that people cared about. Why? Because if you knew how many whales you had, you knew how many you could or could not kill. People loved and understood and thought they could prove points and make money with the numbers. Behavior... well, behavior was squishy stuff used to entertain fourth-graders on Cable in the Classroom.
"We were really close, Clay," Nate said. "There's something in the song that we're missing. But without the tapes..."
Clay shrugged. "You heard one song, you heard 'em all."
"...as my research assistant has repeatedly pointed out to me, the only thing I can say definitively about humpbacks is that they are big and wet."
As a biologist, one of the things you have to guard against is applying motives where there are none and reading more into a behavior than the data actually support. Sort of like the answer to the 'why do they jump?' question. You could say that it's part of an incredibly complex system of communication, and you might be right, but the obvious answer, and probably the correct one, is that the whales are goofing off.
"All killer whales are named Kevin. You knew that, right?"
Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.
Although Clay Demodocus had lived a life spiced with adventures, he was not an adventurer. Like Nate, he did not seek danger, risk, or fulfillment by testing his mettle against nature. He sought calm weather, gentle seas, comfortable accommodations, kind and loyal people, and safety, and it was only for the work that he compromised any of those goals.
"It might be out on the boat, as you're coming in for the day, or it might be in the lab at four in the morning after working on the data for five years, but there comes a point where you'll find something out, where you'll see something, or where something will suddenly come together, and you'll realize that you know something that no one else in the world knows yet. Just you. No one else. You realize that all the value you have is in that one thing, and you're only going to have it for a short time until you tell someone else, but for that time you are more alive than you'll ever be. That's the jazz, Amy. That's why people do this, put up with low pay and high risk and crap conditions and fucked-up relationships. They do it for that singular moment."
"No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts."
"They can hunt these kind, as far as I'm concerned," Quinn said after they'd been on the whale for two hours.
They'd recorded three full cycles of the song and gotten a crossbow biopsy, but the whale simply would not fluke, so they hadn't been able to get an ID photo. A lot of good it did to have a DNA sample when you couldn't identify the animal.
"Hunt them and make them into pet food," Nate continued. "Get their tainted, nonfluking genes out of the gene pool. Use their pathetic, nonfluking baleen for corsets and umbrella stays. Use their vertebrae for footstools. Use their intestines to make giant, nonfluking whale sausages to serve at state fairs. Remove their putrid unfluking gonads and..."
"I thought you liked these animals."
"Yeah, but not when they won't cooperate."
"We've been tagged twice by that Bruce Mate guy from Oregon State. That guy's a menace. Probably has a satellite tag on his wife to track her trips to the can."
Much of the background on genes, evolution, and memes came from the work of Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype, and others; also from Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and from Susan Blakemore's excellent book The Meme Machine. I recommend them all for further reading, but when you're finished, you may have to read several of my books and watch a lot of TV just to get stupid enough to function in the modern world again.
К сожалению, на русский не переведена. А может, и к счастью, потому что перевод ее сильно ухудшил бы.