Saturday

likeafieldmouse:

Trevor Paglen - They Watch the Moon (2010)

“This photograph depicts a classified ‘listening station’ deep in the forests of West Virginia.

The station is located at the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a region of approximately 34,000 square kilometers in West Virginia and parts of Maryland.

Within the Quiet Zone, radio transmissions are severely restricted: omnidirectional and high-powered transmissions (such as wireless internet devices and FM radio stations) are not permitted.

The listening station, which forms part of the global ECHELON system, was designed in part to take advantage of a phenomenon called moonbounce.

Moonbounce involves capturing communications and telemetry signals from around the world as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth.

The photograph is a long exposure under the full moon light.”

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Saturday

Your Cat Is Trying to Talk to You

star-anise:

[T]here’s not exactly a universal cat language when it comes to meows. Rather, as Bradshaw writes in his book, “a secret code of meows … develops between each cat and its owner, unique to that cat alone and meaning little to outsiders.” This was demonstrated in a 2003 study by Cornell researchers, documented in Bradshaw’s book, in which they recorded meows from 12 cats in five everyday scenarios. They then played those recordings to pet owners, and found that only the owners could correctly decipher the scenario in which the meow was recorded. So cat owners can tell with some accuracy what message their cat is trying to get across via its meows, whether it’s feed me or I’m bored or whatever else, but “each meow is an arbitrary, learned, attention-seeking sound rather than some universal cat-human ‘language,’” Bradshaw writes.

YOUR CAT LITERALLY INVENTED A LANGUAGE FROM SCRATCH TO TALK TO YOU

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k.