Egypt has been cer­ti­fied malaria-free by the World Health Organization (WHO) - an achieve­ment hailed by the UN pub­lic health agency as “truly his­toric”.

“Malaria is as old as Egyptian civ­i­liza­tion it­self, but the dis­ease that plagued pharaohs now be­longs to its his­tory,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Egyptian au­thor­i­ties launched their first ef­forts to stamp out the deadly mos­quito-borne in­fec­tious dis­ease nearly 100 years.

Certification is granted when a coun­try proves that the trans­mis­sion chain is in­ter­rupted for at least the pre­vi­ous three con­sec­u­tive years. Malaria kills at least 600,000 peo­ple every year, nearly all of them in Africa.

Please do not write be­low this line

I have been vexed for some time by the re­quest at the bot­tom of

each let­ter that I am not to write be­low the line.

I emailed TVL/BBC on 5 November 2006 to find out why:

I’ve had a let­ter from TV Licencing and I’m in­ter­ested in the

state­ment at the bot­tom of the page. It says: ’Please do not write be­low this

line’. I would like to know why the let­ter re­quests this. The line re­ferred to

is about half an inch from the bot­tom edge of the let­ter.

What will hap­pen if I write there? How would you know? I am not

asked to re­turn the let­ter, so why the re­quest?

Seven weeks later, on 27 December 2006, I re­ceive

this from one Kelly Wright:

Thank you for con­tact­ing us. Unfortunately I am un­able to deal

with your re­quest, as you have not pro­vided your ad­dress and li­cence num­ber. If

you have moved ad­dress I will need both your new and old ad­dress. Once I have

this in­for­ma­tion I will ac­tion your re­quest and send you the ap­pro­pri­ate form

or con­fir­ma­tion.

I do not

have a li­cence. The let­ter was sent to me as part of TVL’s rou­tine mail-out. It

was not so­licited by me. Copies of these let­ters are com­monly re­pro­duced on the

in­ter­net [example].

You will see that these let­ters say “Please do not

write be­low this line”. So did the one sent to me. Please ex­plain to me why I

am not al­lowed to write be­low the line.

Evidently, my ques­tion was too tax­ing for Ms

Wright, as the next re­sponse came from Ruairi Mcclean, on 3 January

2007:

The rea­son you would re­ceive such let­ters is be­cause we would have

no record of a TV li­cence at your ad­dress.

The rea­son you can­not write be­low the line is be­cause the let­ters

go through a OCR ma­chine, and any­thing be­low the line is re­jected.

OCR is an ab­bre­vi­a­tion for “optical char­ac­ter

recog­ni­tion”, soft­ware that scans doc­u­ments for edit­ing on a com­puter.

This ex­pla­na­tion sur­prised me. I did not

un­der­stand why, hav­ing sent me a let­ter, TVL wanted it back to scan and edit;

why not scan it be­fore send­ing it to me? I re­sponded on 27 January

2007:

Thank you

for your re­ply. You say that I can­not write be­low the line be­cause the let­ter

will go through a OCR ma­chine, and any­thing be­low the line will be re­jected.

I have two fur­ther ques­tions:

i) I take it from your re­ply that

a TV of­fi­cer is plan­ning to col­lect the let­ter back off me in or­der to scan it.

Please tell me what pur­pose this serves.

ii) Anything I write above the line would also be

re­jected by the OCR. Why am I al­lowed to write above the line, if I am not

al­lowed to write in the nar­row strip be­neath it?

On 30 January 2007, I re­ceived this re­ply from Cas

Scott:

A

Licensing of­fi­cer may call at your prop­erty not to col­lect the let­ters but to

check that you are not watch­ing a TV.

You may write above the line but as we ad­vised you

pre­vi­ously any­thing writ­ten be­low the line when they go through the OCR ma­chine

they will be re­jected.

If you would like to con­firm your ad­dress I can up date our

records to ad­vise no Television is be­ing watched.

Thank you for con­firm­ing that I may write above the line.

Please ex­plain why, hav­ing sent me the

let­ter, you want it back for scan­ning. Also, please ex­plain how I am to get the

let­ter to you.

Without your ad­dress we are un­able to amend our records to show

that you are not us­ing TV equip­ment.

To re­turn an en­quiry let­ter to TV li­cens­ing,

sim­ply re­turn it.

I don’t seem to be get­ting a straight

an­swer.

Thank you for your re­ply. The pur­pose of my query is not to ask

why you want my ad­dress.

The in­for­ma­tion that I am seek­ing is why you want the let­ter back

for scan­ning. There was noth­ing on the let­ter that said I had to re­turn it.

Please note that I

am not Miss Scott.

The in­for­ma­tion about re­turn­ing the let­ter was not on the let­ter

it­self but on the en­ve­lope.

The only

rea­son we ask you to re­turn the let­ter is to help us up­date our records,

how­ever if you could pro­vide us with your ad­dress we can up­date our records

with­out you re­turn­ing the let­ter.

Having kept all my TVL/BBC en­velopes, I ex­am­ined

them to see whether any dis­played an in­struc­tion that I was to re­turn the

let­ter. None did. There was a re­turn ad­dress but only was for un­de­liv­ered

let­ters. I re­sist the temp­ta­tion to pur­sue this point.

Thank you for your re­ply.

What I still do not un­der­stand is why you would

wish to OCR my let­ter in or­der to up­date the records.

Obviously, the num­ber be­low the line must be very

im­por­tant. Please could you ex­plain its pur­pose.

I

apol­o­gise that it has not been made clear to you. An OCR stands for a Optical

Character System. This ma­chine en­ables us to deal/​process with large vol­umes of

in­for­ma­tion in a rel­a­tively short space of time. The OCR ma­chine reads the

in­for­ma­tion be­low the line and up­dates the cor­re­spond­ing records on our

com­puter sys­tem many times faster than if man­u­ally processed.

If the in­for­ma­tion

be­low the line is ob­scured in any­way the OCR ma­chine will be un­able to read the

in­for­ma­tion ef­fec­tively. The num­ber be­low the line is a unique num­ber that

re­lates to the spe­cific prop­erty that the let­ter has been sent to. Once this

num­ber is read by the OCR ma­chine it will au­to­mat­i­cally up­date the com­puter

records that re­late to that let­ter/​prop­erty/​li­cence/​ap­pli­ca­tion.

A tool that al­lows you to ex­tract a list of html pages from a web­site and com­pile them into an ePub book to be im­ported into your eReader of choice.

For ad­vanced users who can write javascript, you can add ad­di­tional parser de­f­i­n­i­tion to cus­tomize pars­ing of any site.

Check out the wiki for us­age.

Custom sites with UL/OL el­e­ments as table of con­tent, or regex on Link text, or use query se­lec­tor

Custom web app with pre­de­fined Title (header) el­e­ment and Next but­ton (clickable)

An am­a­teur his­to­rian has dis­cov­ered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker, pub­lished just seven years be­fore his leg­endary gothic novel Dracula. Brian Cleary stum­bled upon the 134-year-old ghostly tale while brows­ing the archives of the National Library of Ireland.Gibbet Hill was orig­i­nally pub­lished in a Dublin news­pa­per in 1890 - when the Irishman started work­ing on Dracula - but has been un­doc­u­mented ever since.Stoker bi­og­ra­pher Paul Murray says the story sheds light on his de­vel­op­ment as an au­thor and was a sig­nif­i­cant “station on his route to pub­lish­ing Dracula”.

The ghostly story tells the tale of a sailor mur­dered by three crim­i­nals whose bod­ies were strung up on a hang­ing gal­lows as a warn­ing to pass­ing trav­ellers. It is set in Gibbet Hill in Surrey, a lo­ca­tion also ref­er­enced in Charles Dickens’ 1839 novel Nicholas Nickleby.Mr Cleary made the dis­cov­ery af­ter tak­ing time off work fol­low­ing a sud­den on­set of hear­ing loss in 2021 - dur­ing which pe­riod he would pass the time at the na­tional li­brary in Stoker’s na­tive Dublin.In October 2023, the Stoker fan came across an un­fa­mil­iar ti­tle in an 1890 Christmas sup­ple­ment of the Daily Express Dublin Edition.Mr Clearly told the AFP news agency: “I read the words Gibbet Hill and I knew that was­n’t a Bram Stoker story that I had ever heard of in any of the bi­ogra­phies or bib­li­ogra­phies.“”I sat look­ing at the screen won­der­ing, am I the only liv­ing per­son who had read it?”He said of the mo­ment he made the dis­cov­ery: “What on earth do I do with it?”The li­brary’s di­rec­tor Audrey Whitty said Mr Cleary called her and said: “I’ve found some­thing ex­tra­or­di­nary in your news­pa­per archives - you won’t be­lieve it.“She added that his “astonishing am­a­teur de­tec­tive work” was a tes­ta­ment to the li­brary’s archives.“There are truly world-im­por­tant dis­cov­er­ies wait­ing to be found”, she said.

After his ini­tial sleuthing, Mr Cleary con­tacted bi­og­ra­pher Paul Murray - who con­firmed there had been no trace of the story for over a cen­tury. He said 1890 was when he was a young writer and made his first notes for Dracula.“It’s a clas­sic Stoker story, the strug­gle be­tween good and evil, evil which crops up in ex­otic and un­ex­plained ways,” he added.Gib­bet Hill is be­ing pub­lished along­side art­work by the Irish artist Paul McKinley by the Rotunda Foundation - the fundrais­ing arm of Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital for which Mr Cleary worked.All pro­ceeds will go to the newly formed Charlotte Stoker Fund - named af­ter Bram Stoker’s mother who was a hear­ing loss cam­paigner - to fund re­search on in­fant hear­ing loss.The dis­cov­ery is also be­ing high­lighted in the city’s Bram Stoker fes­ti­val later this month.

Carriers fight plan to re­quire un­lock­ing of phones 60 days af­ter ac­ti­va­tion.

T-Mobile and AT&T say US reg­u­la­tors should drop a plan to re­quire un­lock­ing of phones within 60 days of ac­ti­va­tion, claim­ing that lock­ing phones to a car­ri­er’s net­work makes it pos­si­ble to pro­vide cheaper hand­sets to con­sumers. “If the Commission man­dates a uni­form un­lock­ing pol­icy, it is con­sumers—not providers—who stand to lose the most,” T-Mobile al­leged in an October 17 fil­ing with the Federal Communications Commission.

The pro­posed rule has sup­port from con­sumer ad­vo­cacy groups who say it will give users more choice and lower their costs. T-Mobile has been crit­i­cized for lock­ing phones for up to a year, which makes it im­pos­si­ble to use a phone on a ri­val’s net­work. T-Mobile claims that with a 60-day un­lock­ing rule, “consumers risk los­ing ac­cess to the ben­e­fits of free or heav­ily sub­si­dized hand­sets be­cause the pro­posal would force providers to re­duce the line-up of their most com­pelling hand­set of­fers.”

If the pro­posed rule is en­acted, “T-Mobile es­ti­mates that its pre­paid cus­tomers, for ex­am­ple, would see sub­si­dies re­duced by 40 per­cent to 70 per­cent for both its lower and higher-end de­vices, such as the Moto G, Samsung A15, and iPhone 12,” the car­rier said. “A hand­set un­lock­ing man­date would also leave providers lit­tle choice but to limit their hand­set of­fers to lower cost and of­ten lesser per­form­ing hand­sets.”

T-Mobile and other car­ri­ers are re­spond­ing to a call for pub­lic com­ments that be­gan af­ter the FCC ap­proved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in a 5–0 vote. The FCC is propos­ing “to re­quire all mo­bile wire­less ser­vice providers to un­lock hand­sets 60 days af­ter a con­sumer’s hand­set is ac­ti­vated with the provider, un­less within the 60-day pe­riod the ser­vice provider de­ter­mines the hand­set was pur­chased through fraud.”

When the FCC pro­posed the 60-day un­lock­ing rule in July 2024, the agency crit­i­cized T-Mobile for lock­ing pre­paid phones for a year. The NPRM pointed out that “T-Mobile re­cently in­creased its lock­ing pe­riod for one of its brands, Metro by T-Mobile, from 180 days to 365 days.”

T-Mobile’s pol­icy says the car­rier will only un­lock mo­bile de­vices on pre­paid plans if “at least 365 days… have passed since the de­vice was ac­ti­vated on the T-Mobile net­work.”

“You bought your phone, you should be able to take it to any provider you want,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said when the FCC pro­posed the rule. “Some providers al­ready op­er­ate this way. Others do not. In fact, some have re­cently in­creased the time their cus­tomers must wait un­til they can un­lock their de­vice by as much as 100 per­cent.”

T-Mobile ex­ec­u­tives, who also ar­gue that the FCC lacks au­thor­ity to im­pose the pro­posed rule, met with FCC of­fi­cials last week to ex­press their con­cerns.

“T-Mobile is pas­sion­ate about win­ning cus­tomers for life, and ex­plained how its hand­set un­lock­ing poli­cies greatly ben­e­fit our cus­tomers,” the car­rier said in its post-meet­ing fil­ing. “Our poli­cies al­low us to de­liver ac­cess to high-speed mo­bile broad­band on a na­tion­wide 5G net­work via hand­sets that are free or heav­ily dis­counted off the man­u­fac­tur­er’s sug­gested re­tail price. T-Mobile’s un­lock­ing poli­cies are trans­par­ent, and there is ab­solutely no ev­i­dence of con­sumer harm stem­ming from these poli­cies. T-Mobile’s cur­rent un­lock­ing poli­cies also help T-Mobile com­bat hand­set theft and fraud by so­phis­ti­cated, in­ter­na­tional crim­i­nal or­ga­ni­za­tions.”

For post­paid users, T-Mobile says it al­lows un­lock­ing of fully paid-off phones that have been ac­tive for at least 40 days. But given the 365-day lock on pre­paid users, T-Mobile’s over­all pol­icy is more oner­ous than those of other car­ri­ers. T-Mobile has also faced an­gry cus­tomers be­cause of a re­cent de­ci­sion to raise prices on plans that were ad­ver­tised as hav­ing a life­time price lock.

AT&T en­ables un­lock­ing of paid-off phones af­ter 60 days for post­paid users and af­ter six months for pre­paid users. AT&T lodged sim­i­lar com­plaints as T-Mobile, say­ing in an October 7 fil­ing that the FCC’s pro­posed rules would “mak[e] hand­sets less af­ford­able for con­sumers, es­pe­cially those in low-in­come house­holds,” and “exacerbate hand­set ar­bi­trage, fraud, and traf­fick­ing. ”

AT&T told the FCC that “requiring providers to un­lock hand­sets be­fore they are paid-off would ul­ti­mately harm con­sumers by cre­at­ing up­ward pres­sure on hand­set prices and dis­in­cen­tives to fi­nance hand­sets on flex­i­ble terms.” If the FCC im­ple­ments any rules, it should main­tain “existing con­trac­tual arrange­ments be­tween cus­tomers and providers, en­sure that providers have at least 180 days to de­tect fraud be­fore un­lock­ing a de­vice, and in­clude at least a 24-month pe­riod for providers to im­ple­ment any new rules,” AT&T said.

Verizon, which al­ready faces un­lock­ing rules be­cause of re­quire­ments im­posed on spec­trum li­censes it owns, au­to­mat­i­cally un­locks phones af­ter 60 days for pre­paid and post­paid users. Among the three ma­jor car­ri­ers, Verizon is the most amenable to the FCC’s new rules.

An October 18 fil­ing sup­port­ing a strict un­lock­ing rule was sub­mit­ted by nu­mer­ous con­sumer ad­vo­cacy groups in­clud­ing Public Knowledge, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Consumer Reports, the National Consumers League, the National Consumer Law Center, and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.

“Wireless users are sub­ject to un­nec­es­sary re­stric­tions in the form of locked de­vices, which tie them to their ser­vice providers even when bet­ter op­tions may be avail­able. Handset lock­ing prac­tices limit con­sumer free­dom and lessen com­pe­ti­tion by cre­at­ing an ar­ti­fi­cial tech­no­log­i­cal bar­rier to switch­ing providers,” the groups said.

The groups cited the Verizon rules as a model and urged the FCC to re­quire “that de­vice un­lock­ing is truly au­to­matic—that is, un­locked af­ter the req­ui­site time pe­riod with­out any ad­di­tional ac­tions of the con­sumer.” Carriers should not be al­lowed to lock phones for longer than 60 days even when a phone is on a fi­nanc­ing plan with out­stand­ing pay­ments, the groups’ let­ter said:

Providers should be re­quired to tran­si­tion out of sell­ing de­vices with­out this [automatic un­lock­ing] ca­pa­bil­ity and the in­dus­try-wide rule should be the same as the one pro­tect­ing Verizon cus­tomers to­day: af­ter the ex­pi­ra­tion of the ini­tial pe­riod, the hand­set must au­to­mat­i­cally un­lock re­gard­less of whether: (1) the cus­tomer asks for the hand­set to be un­locked or (2) the hand­set is fully paid off. Removing this bar­rier to switch­ing will make the stan­dard sim­ple for con­sumers and en­cour­age providers to com­pete more vig­or­ously on mo­bile ser­vice price, qual­ity, and in­no­va­tion.

In an October 2 fil­ing, Verizon said it sup­ports “a uni­form ap­proach to hand­set un­lock­ing that al­lows all wire­less providers to lock wire­less hand­sets for a rea­son­able pe­riod of time to limit fraud and to en­able de­vice sub­si­dies, fol­lowed by au­to­matic un­lock­ing ab­sent ev­i­dence of fraud.”

Verizon said 60 days should be the min­i­mum for post­paid de­vices so that car­ri­ers have time to de­tect fraud and theft, and that “a longer, 180-day lock­ing pe­riod for pre­paid is nec­es­sary to en­able wire­less providers to con­tinue of­fer­ing sub­si­dies that make phones af­ford­able for pre­paid cus­tomers.” Regardless of what time frame the FCC chooses, Verizon said “a uni­form un­lock­ing pol­icy that ap­plies to all providers… will ben­e­fit both con­sumers and com­pe­ti­tion.”

While the FCC is likely to im­pose an un­lock­ing rule, one ques­tion is whether it will ap­ply when a car­rier has pro­vided a dis­counted phone. The FCC’s NPRM asked the pub­lic for “comment on the im­pact of a 60-day un­lock­ing re­quire­ment in con­nec­tion with ser­vice providers’ in­cen­tives to of­fer dis­counted hand­sets for post­paid and pre­paid ser­vice plans.”

The FCC ac­knowl­edged Verizon’s ar­gu­ment “that providers may rely on hand­set lock­ing to sus­tain their abil­ity to of­fer hand­set sub­si­dies and that such sub­si­dies may be par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant in pre­paid en­vi­ron­ments.” But the FCC noted that pub­lic in­ter­est groups “argue that locked hand­sets tied to pre­paid plans can dis­ad­van­tage low-in­come cus­tomers most of all since they may not have the re­sources to switch ser­vice providers or pur­chase new hand­sets.”

The pub­lic in­ter­est groups also note that un­locked hand­sets “facilitate a ro­bust sec­ondary mar­ket for used de­vices, pro­vid­ing con­sumers with more af­ford­able op­tions,” the NPRM said.

The FCC says it can im­pose phone-un­lock­ing rules us­ing its le­gal au­thor­ity un­der Title III of the Communications Act “to pro­tect the pub­lic in­ter­est through spec­trum li­cens­ing and reg­u­la­tions to re­quire mo­bile wire­less ser­vice providers to pro­vide hand­set un­lock­ing.” The FCC said it pre­vi­ously re­lied on the same Title III au­thor­ity when it im­posed the un­lock­ing rules on 700 MHz C Block spec­trum li­censes pur­chased by Verizon.

T-Mobile told the FCC in a fil­ing last month that “none of the litany of Title III pro­vi­sions cited in the NPRM sup­port the ex­pan­sive au­thor­ity as­serted here to reg­u­late con­sumer hand­sets (rather than telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices).” T-Mobile also said that “the Commission’s le­gal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties on this score are only mag­ni­fied in light of re­cent Supreme Court prece­dent.”

The Supreme Court re­cently over­turned the 40-year-old Chevron prece­dent that gave agen­cies like the FCC ju­di­cial def­er­ence when in­ter­pret­ing am­bigu­ous laws. The end of Chevron makes it harder for agen­cies to is­sue reg­u­la­tions with­out ex­plicit au­tho­riza­tion from Congress. This is a po­ten­tial prob­lem for the FCC in its fight to re­vive net neu­tral­ity rules, which are cur­rently blocked by a court or­der pend­ing the out­come of lit­i­ga­tion.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He cov­ers the tele­com in­dus­try, Federal Communications Commission rule­mak­ings, broad­band con­sumer af­fairs, court cases, and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion of the tech in­dus­try.

To the as­ton­ish­ment of fore­cast­ers, a tiny hur­ri­cane just sprang up near Cuba

Solar power from space? Actually, it might hap­pen in a cou­ple of years.

One af­ter­noon in January 2011, Hussein Mourtada leapt onto his desk and started danc­ing. He was­n’t alone: Some of the grad­u­ate stu­dents who shared his Paris of­fice were there, too. But he did­n’t care. The math­e­mati­cian re­al­ized that he could fi­nally con­firm a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion he’d first had while writ­ing his doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tion, which he’d fin­ished a few months ear­lier. He’d been study­ing spe­cial points, called sin­gu­lar­i­ties, where curves cross them­selves or come to sharp turns. Now he had un­ex­pect­edly found what he’d been look­ing for, a way to prove that these sin­gu­lar­i­ties had a sur­pris­ingly deep un­der­ly­ing struc­ture. Hidden within that struc­ture were mys­te­ri­ous math­e­mat­i­cal state­ments first writ­ten down a cen­tury ear­lier by a young Indian math­e­mati­cian named Srinivasa Ramanujan. They had come to him in a dream.

Ramanujan brings life to the myth of the self-taught ge­nius. He grew up poor and un­e­d­u­cated and did much of his re­search while iso­lated in south­ern India, barely able to af­ford food. In 1912, when he was 24, he be­gan to send a se­ries of let­ters to promi­nent math­e­mati­cians. These were mostly ig­nored, but one re­cip­i­ent, the English math­e­mati­cian G. H. Hardy, cor­re­sponded with Ramanujan for a year and even­tu­ally per­suaded him to come to England, smooth­ing the way with the colo­nial bu­reau­cra­cies.

It be­came ap­par­ent to Hardy and his col­leagues that Ramanujan could sense math­e­mat­i­cal truths — could ac­cess en­tire worlds — that oth­ers sim­ply could not. (Hardy, a math­e­mat­i­cal gi­ant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his great­est con­tri­bu­tion to math­e­mat­ics was the dis­cov­ery of Ramanujan.) Before Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32, he came up with thou­sands of el­e­gant and sur­pris­ing re­sults, of­ten with­out proof. He was fond of say­ing that his equa­tions had been be­stowed on him by the gods.

More than 100 years later, math­e­mati­cians are still try­ing to catch up to Ramanujan’s di­vine ge­nius, as his vi­sions ap­pear again and again in dis­parate cor­ners of the world of math­e­mat­ics.

Ramanujan is per­haps most fa­mous for com­ing up with par­ti­tion iden­ti­ties, equa­tions about the dif­fer­ent ways you can break a whole num­ber up into smaller parts (such as 7 = 5 + 1 + 1). In the 1980s, math­e­mati­cians be­gan to find deep and sur­pris­ing con­nec­tions be­tween these equa­tions and other ar­eas of math­e­mat­ics: in sta­tis­ti­cal me­chan­ics and the study of phase tran­si­tions, in knot the­ory and string the­ory, in num­ber the­ory and rep­re­sen­ta­tion the­ory and the study of sym­me­tries.

Most re­cently, they’ve ap­peared in Mourtada’s work on curves and sur­faces that are de­fined by al­ge­braic equa­tions, an area of study called al­ge­braic geom­e­try. Mourtada and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have spent more than a decade try­ing to bet­ter un­der­stand that link, and to ex­ploit it to un­cover rafts of brand-new iden­ti­ties that re­sem­ble those Ramanujan wrote down.

“It turned out that these kinds of re­sults have ba­si­cally oc­curred in al­most every branch of math­e­mat­ics. That’s an amaz­ing thing,” said Ole Warnaar of the University of Queensland in Australia. “It’s not just a happy co­in­ci­dence. I don’t want to sound re­li­gious, but the math­e­mat­i­cal god is try­ing to tell us some­thing.”

Ramanujan’s math­e­mat­i­cal prowess was ob­vi­ous to those who knew him. Without for­mal train­ing, he ex­celled; by the time he was in high school he had de­voured ad­vanced, though of­ten out­dated, text­books, and was do­ing in­de­pen­dent re­search on dif­fer­ent kinds of nu­mer­i­cal prop­er­ties and pat­terns.

In 1904, he was granted a full schol­ar­ship to the Government Arts College in Kumbakonam, the small city where he had grown up, in what is now the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But he ig­nored all sub­jects be­sides math and lost his schol­ar­ship within a year. He later en­rolled in an­other uni­ver­sity, this time in Madras (now Chennai), the provin­cial cap­i­tal some 250 kilo­me­ters north. Again he flunked out.

He con­tin­ued his re­search on his own for years, of­ten while in poor health. During that time, he tu­tored stu­dents in math to sup­port him­self. Eventually he se­cured a job as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust in 1912. He pur­sued math­e­mat­ics on the side and pub­lished some of his re­sults in Indian jour­nals.

Hoping to get some of his work into more pres­ti­gious and widely read pub­li­ca­tions, Ramanujan wrote let­ters to sev­eral British math­e­mati­cians, en­clos­ing pages of find­ings for their re­view. “I have not trod­den through the con­ven­tional reg­u­lar course which is fol­lowed in a uni­ver­sity course,” he wrote, “but I am strik­ing out a new path for my­self.” Among the re­cip­i­ents was Hardy, an ex­pert in num­ber the­ory and analy­sis at the University of Cambridge.

Hardy was shocked at what he saw. Ramanujan had iden­ti­fied and then solved a num­ber of con­tin­ued frac­tions — ex­pres­sions that can be writ­ten as in­fi­nite nests of frac­tions within frac­tions, such as:

They “defeated me com­pletely; I had never seen any­thing in the least like them be­fore,” Hardy later wrote. “They must be true be­cause, if they were not true, no one would have had the imag­i­na­tion to in­vent them.” The for­mu­las, un­proved, were so strik­ing that they in­spired Hardy to of­fer Ramanujan a fel­low­ship at Cambridge. In 1914, Ramanujan ar­rived in England, and for the next five years he stud­ied and col­lab­o­rated with Hardy.

One of Ramanujan’s first tasks was to prove a gen­eral state­ment about his con­tin­ued frac­tions. To do so, he needed to prove two other state­ments. But he could­n’t. Neither could Hardy, nor could any of the col­leagues he reached out to.

It turned out that they did­n’t need to. The state­ments had been proved 20 years ear­lier by a lit­tle-known English math­e­mati­cian named L. J. Rogers. Rogers wrote poorly, and at the time the proofs were pub­lished no one paid any at­ten­tion. (Rogers was con­tent to do his re­search in rel­a­tive ob­scu­rity, play pi­ano, gar­den and ap­ply his spare time to a va­ri­ety of other pur­suits.) Ramanujan un­cov­ered this work in 1917, and the pair of state­ments later be­came known as the Rogers-Ramanujan iden­ti­ties.

Amid Ramanujan’s prodi­gious out­put, these state­ments stand out. They have car­ried through the decades and across nearly all of math­e­mat­ics. They are the seeds that math­e­mati­cians con­tinue to sow, grow­ing bril­liant new gar­dens seem­ingly wher­ever they fall.

Ramanujan fell ill and re­turned to India in 1919, where he died the next year. It would fall to oth­ers to ex­plore the world his iden­ti­ties had re­vealed.

Hussein Mourtada grew up in the 1980s in Lebanon, in a small city called Baalbek. As a teenager, he did­n’t like study­ing and pre­ferred to play: soc­cer, bil­liards, bas­ket­ball. Math, too. “It looked like a game,” he said. “And I liked play­ing.”

As an un­der­grad­u­ate at the Lebanese University in Beirut, he stud­ied both law and math­e­mat­ics, with an eye to a le­gal ca­reer. But he soon found that while he en­joyed the philo­soph­i­cal as­pects of law, he did not en­joy it in prac­tice. He turned his at­ten­tion to math, where he was par­tic­u­larly drawn to the com­mu­nity. As a child, his teach­ers and class­mates were what ex­cited him about go­ing to school, even though he of­ten fell asleep dur­ing class. As a bud­ding math­e­mati­cian, “I had the im­pres­sion that these are beau­ti­ful peo­ple,” he said. “They are hon­est. You need to be hon­est with your­self to be a math­e­mati­cian. Otherwise, it does­n’t work.”

He moved to France for his doc­tor­ate and started to fo­cus on al­ge­braic geom­e­try — the study of al­ge­braic va­ri­eties, or shapes cut out by poly­no­mial equa­tions. These are equa­tions that can be writ­ten as sums of vari­ables raised to whole-num­ber pow­ers. A line, for in­stance, is cut out by the equa­tion x + y = 0, a cir­cle by x2 + y2 = 1, a fig­ure eight by x4 = x2 − y2. While the line and cir­cle are com­pletely smooth, the fig­ure eight has a point where it in­ter­sects it­self — a sin­gu­lar­ity.

It’s easy to spot sin­gu­lar­i­ties when you’re deal­ing with shapes that you can draw on a sheet of pa­per. But higher-di­men­sional al­ge­braic va­ri­eties are far more com­pli­cated and im­pos­si­ble to vi­su­al­ize. Algebraic geome­ters are in the busi­ness of un­der­stand­ing their sin­gu­lar­i­ties, too.

They’ve de­vel­oped all sorts of tools to do this. One dates back to the math­e­mati­cian John Nash, who in the 1960s started study­ing re­lated ob­jects called arc spaces. Nash would take a point, or sin­gu­lar­ity, and de­fine in­fi­nitely many short tra­jec­to­ries — lit­tle arcs — that passed through it. By look­ing at all these short tra­jec­to­ries to­gether, he could test how smooth his va­ri­ety was at that point. “If you want to see if it’s smooth, you want to pet it,” said Gleb Pogudin of the École Polytechnique in France.

In prac­ti­cal terms, an arc space pro­vides an in­fi­nite col­lec­tion of poly­no­mial equa­tions. “This is re­ally the thing that Mourtada is ex­pert in: un­der­stand­ing the mean­ing of those equa­tions,” said Bernard Teissier, a col­league of Mourtada’s at the Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris. “Because these equa­tions can be very com­pli­cated. But they have a cer­tain mu­sic to them. There is a lot of struc­ture which gov­erns the na­ture of these equa­tions, and he’s just the per­son, I think, who best lis­tens to this mu­sic and un­der­stands what it means.”

TAMPA, Fla. — The Intelsat 33e satel­lite has bro­ken up in geo­sta­tion­ary or­bit (GEO) and lost power, ceas­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices for cus­tomers across Europe, Africa and parts of Asia Pacific.

Intelsat said in an Oct. 19 news re­lease it is work­ing with satel­lite maker Boeing to ad­dress an anom­aly that emerged ear­lier that day, but “believe it is un­likely that the satel­lite will be re­cov­er­able.” An Intelsat spokesper­son said the satel­lite was not in­sured at the time of the is­sue.

The U. S. Space Force re­ported Oct. 19 it is track­ing around 20 pieces of de­bris as­so­ci­ated with the space­craft.

“U. S. Space Forces-Space (S4S) has con­firmed the breakup of Intelsat 33E (#41748, 2016-053B) in GEO on October 19, 2024, at ap­prox­i­mately 0430 UTC,” states an alert posted on SpaceTrack, the U.S. Department of Defense’s space-track­ing plat­form.

“Currently track­ing around 20 as­so­ci­ated pieces — analy­sis on­go­ing. S4S has ob­served no im­me­di­ate threats and is con­tin­u­ing to con­duct rou­tine con­junc­tion as­sess­ments to sup­port the safety and sus­tain­abil­ity of the space do­main.”

Douglas Hendrix, CEO of ExoAnalytic Solutions, said the U. S.-based space-track­ing com­pany iden­ti­fied 57 pieces of de­bris Oct. 21 as­so­ci­ated with the breakup.

“We are warn­ing op­er­a­tors of any space­craft that we think are at risk of col­li­sion,” Hendrix said via email.

A snap­shot of Intelsat 33e’s break-up taken Oct. 19 by U. K.-based Spaceflux. 44071 and 58698 are the WGS 10 (USA 291) and Ovzon-3 satel­lites, re­spec­tively, which Spaceflux said are un­likely in dan­ger of be­ing hit by the de­bris. “The prob­lem is that there is a lot of un­cer­tainty re­gard­ing the or­bits of these frag­ments at the mo­ment,” Spaceflux spokesper­son Viktoria Urban said Oct. 21. “They can be po­ten­tially dan­ger­ous for other satel­lites but we do not know that yet.” Credit: Spaceflux.

Intelsat said it is work­ing to move cus­tomers to other satel­lites in Intelsat’s fleet or space­craft op­er­ated by third par­ties.

Intelsat 33e launched in August 2016 and en­tered ser­vice in January 2017 at 60 de­grees East, about three months later than planned fol­low­ing an is­sue with its pri­mary thruster.

A sec­ond propul­sion is­sue that emerged dur­ing in-or­bit tests helped knock off around 3.5 years from the satel­lite’s ini­tially es­ti­mated 15-year lifes­pan.

Intelsat 33e is the sec­ond in Intelsat’s EpicNG (next-generation) se­ries of high-through­put satel­lites.

The first, Intelsat-29e, was de­clared a to­tal loss in 2019 af­ter just three years in or­bit. That fail­ure was pinned on ei­ther a me­te­oroid im­pact or a wiring flaw that led to an elec­tro­sta­tic dis­charge fol­low­ing height­ened so­lar weather ac­tiv­ity.

This ar­ti­cle was up­dated Oct. 21 with more de­tails about the in­ci­dent.

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The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the win­ning en­try in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight sim­u­la­tor in un­der 2 kilo­bytes of code, com­plete with rel­a­tively ac­cu­rate 6-degree-of-freedom dy­nam­ics, load­able wire­frame scenery, and a small in­stru­ment panel.

IOCCC Flight Simulator runs on Unix-like sys­tems with X Windows. As per con­test rules, it is in the pub­lic do­main.

You have just stepped out of the real world and into the vir­tual. You are now sit­ting in the cock­pit of a Piper Cherokee air­plane, head­ing north, fly­ing 1000 feet above ground level.

Use the key­board to fly the air­plane. The ar­row keys rep­re­sent the con­trol stick. Press the Up Arrow key to push the stick for­ward. Press the left ar­row key to move the stick left, and so on. Press Enter to re-cen­ter the stick. Use Page Up and Page Down in­crease and de­crease the throt­tle, re­spec­tively. (The rud­der is au­to­mat­i­cally co­or­di­nated with the turn rate, so rud­der ped­als are not rep­re­sented.)

On your dis­play, you will see on the bot­tom left cor­ner three in­stru­ments. The first is the air­speed in­di­ca­tor; it tells you how fast you’re go­ing in knots. The sec­ond is the head­ing in­di­ca­tor, or com­pass. 0 is north, 90 is east, 180 is south, 270 is west. The third in­stru­ment is the al­time­ter, which mea­sures your height above ground level in feet.

cat hori­zon.sc pitts­burgh.sc | ./banks

banks is the name of the pro­gram (a quirk of IOCCC rules, and no pun in­tended). hori­zon.sc and pitts­burgh.sc are scenery files.

* The air­plane is mod­eled as a six de­gree-of-free­dom rigid body, ac­cu­rately re­flect­ing its dy­nam­ics (for nor­mal flight con­di­tions, at least).

* Fly through a vir­tual 3-D world, while sit­ting at your X con­sole.

* Head-up dis­play con­tains three in­stru­ments: a true air­speed in­di­ca­tor, a head­ing in­di­ca­tor (compass), and an al­time­ter.

* Flight con­trols may be mapped to any keys at com­pile time by re­defin­ing the macros in the build file. Nice if your key­board does­n’t have ar­row keys.

* Time step size can be set at com­pile time. This is use­ful to re­duce flicker on net­work X con­nec­tions. (But be care­ful: step sizes longer than about 0.03 sec­onds tend to have nu­mer­i­cal sta­bil­ity prob­lems.)

* Airplane never runs out of fuel!

Each of the files is a scenery file. The sim­u­la­tor pro­gram reads in the scenery from stan­dard in­put on startup. You may in­put more than one scenery file, as long as there are less than 1000 to­tal lines of in­put.

Here is a brief de­scrip­tion of the scenery files:

* hori­zon.sc — A hori­zon, noth­ing more. You will prob­a­bly al­ways want to in­put this piece of scenery.

* moun­tains.sc — An al­ter­nate hori­zon; a lit­tle more moun­tain­ous.

* pitts­burgh.sc — Scenery of down­town Pittsburgh. The down­town area is ini­tially lo­cated to your right.

* bb.sc — Simple ob­sta­cle course. Try to fly over the build­ings and un­der the bridges.

* pyra­mids.sc — Fly over the tombs of the an­cient Pharaohs in this (fictitious) Egyptian land­scape.

A few ex­am­ples of how to in­put scenery:

cat hori­zon.sc pitts­burgh.sc | ./banks

cat moun­tains.sc bb.sc | ./banks

cat moun­tains.sc river.sc pyra­mids.sc | ./banks

You can sim­u­late fly­ing through a cloud bank as well:

./banks < /dev/null

You will usu­ally want at least a hori­zon, though.

The for­mat of scenery files is sim­ple, by the way. They’re just a list of 3-D co­or­di­nates, and the sim­u­la­tor sim­ply draws line seg­ments from point to point as listed in the scenery file. 0 0 0 is used to end a se­ries of con­sec­u­tive line seg­ments. Note that in the co­or­di­nate sys­tem used, the third co­or­di­nate rep­re­sents al­ti­tude in a neg­a­tive sense: neg­a­tive num­bers are pos­i­tive al­ti­tudes.

I’m sure you’ll be mak­ing your own scenery files very soon!!!

Several op­tions must be passed to the com­piler to make the build work. The pro­vided build file has the ap­pro­pri­ate op­tions set to de­fault val­ues. Use this sec­tion if you want to com­pile with dif­fer­ent op­tions.

To map a key to a con­trol, you must pass an op­tion to the com­piler in the for­mat “-Dcontrol=key”. The pos­si­ble con­trols you can map are de­scribed in the table be­low:

Control Description Default Key

IT Open throt­tle XK_Page_Up

DT Close throt­tle XK_Page_Down

FD Move stick for­ward XK_Up

BK Move stick back XK_Down

LT Move stick left XK_Left

RT Move stick right XK_Right

CS Center stick XK_Enter

Values for the pos­si­ble keys can be found in the X Windows header file . This file is most likely a cross-ref­er­ence to an­other header,

You must map all seven con­trols to keys at com­pile time, or the com­pi­la­tion will fail.

For ex­am­ple, to map Center Stick to the space-bar, the com­pile op­tion would be “-DCS=XK_space”.

To set the time step size, you must pass the fol­low­ing op­tion to the com­piler: “-Ddt=duration”, where dt is lit­eral, and where du­ra­tion is the time in sec­onds you want the time step to be.

Two things to keep in mind when se­lect­ing a time step. Time steps that are too large (more than about 0.03) will cause nu­mer­i­cal sta­bil­ity prob­lems and should be avoided. Setting the time step to be smaller than your clock res­o­lu­tion will slow down the sim­u­la­tor, be­cause the sys­tem pauses for more time than the sim­u­la­tor ex­pects.

The best ad­vice is to set time step size to your sys­tem timer res­o­lu­tion. Try a longer pe­riod if you’re get­ting too much flicker.

Here we are fly­ing to­wards Downtown Pittsburgh. We can see the Point, sev­eral build­ings in­clud­ing the USX tower, and sev­eral bridges in­clud­ing the Smithfield Street bridge. We see three in­stru­ments near the bot­tom.

IOCCC stands for “International Obfuscated C Code Contest.” It is an quasi-an­nual con­test to see who can write the most un­read­able, un­in­tel­li­gi­ble, un­managable, but le­gal C pro­gram.

In the 1998 IOCCC, My flight sim­u­la­tor won the “Best of Show” prize. Here is the source code to the pro­gram:

#include

Note that this pro­gram will not com­pile out-of-the-box. It re­quires cer­tain com­pile-time pa­ra­me­ters. The fol­lo­ing script builds it on my Linux sys­tem:

#! /bin/sh

cc banks.c -o banks -DIT=XK_Page_Up -DDT=XK_Page_Down \

-DUP=XK_Up -DDN=XK_Down -DLT=XK_Left -DRT=XK_Right \

-DCS=XK_Return -Ddt=0.02 -lm -lX11 -L/usr/X11R6/lib

If you want to try this pro­gram, I sug­gest you down­load the 1998 IOCCC Winners Distribution.

One of the rules of the con­test was that the pro­gram could not be longer than 1536 bytes (excluding spaces, tabs, new­lines, semi­colons, and braces). Needless to say, cram­ming a flight sim­u­la­tor into such a small file was fairly dif­fi­cult. I will say that if it weren’t for the won­der­ful prop­erty of or­thog­o­nal ma­tri­ces, this flight sim­u­la­tor would not have been pos­si­ble.

* The IOCCC Simulator ap­peared in a book, Calculated Bets by Steve Skiena.

* Wikipedia has a list­ing of IOCCC Simluator in its IOCCC Entry.

* The of­fi­cial International Obfuscated C Code Contest web­site

* IOCCC Flight Simulator’s Facebook page. (I made this page be­cause ran­dom peo­ple around the world would send me friend re­quests and it was creep­ing me out.)

I do not dis­trib­ute this pro­gram my­self. If you want it, you can down­load the 1998 IOCCC Winners Distribution. The dis­tri­b­u­tion comes with a dozen or so other win­ning en­tries, all quite in­ter­est­ing pro­grams.

Note that this is a source dis­tri­b­u­tion, and you will have com­pile it to run it. I’ve tested it on some ver­sions of Linux, AIX, Irix, and Sun.

IOCCC Flight Simulator source code is in the pub­lic do­main; there are no copy­right re­stric­tions on it what­so­ever. However, the win­ners dis­tri­b­u­tion has been copy­righted by the IOCCC judges. See the hint files in the dis­tri­b­u­tion for de­tails.

Remember when be­ing a “Senior Software Engineer” ac­tu­ally meant some­thing? I do, and I can’t help but feel nos­tal­gic for that clar­ity. In re­cent years, our in­dus­try has wit­nessed ram­pant ti­tle in­fla­tion, turn­ing what used to be a clear-cut ju­nior-mid-se­nior pro­gres­sion into a con­fus­ing pa­rade of in­flated roles.

The “senior” ti­tle, once a badge of sub­stan­tial ex­pe­ri­ence and ex­per­tise, has been par­tic­u­larly de­val­ued. Today, de­vel­op­ers are be­ing crowned “senior” faster than ever, of­ten with just three to four years un­der their belts. It’s as if the path to se­nior­ity, once a marathon of skill-build­ing and di­verse ex­pe­ri­ences, has turned into a sprint­er’s dash.

This ex­plo­sion of grandiose ti­tles is­n’t just con­fus­ing—it’s erod­ing the mean­ing of ca­reer mile­stones in tech. Each new ti­tle tries to outdo the last in im­pres­sive­ness, while para­dox­i­cally mean­ing less and less. For every­one in­volved—from job seek­ers to hir­ing man­agers—this in­fla­tion has mud­died the wa­ters of pro­fes­sional pro­gres­sion and recog­ni­tion.

Being a se­nior en­gi­neer meant far more than just log­ging years on the job. It was a ti­tle earned through a di­verse set of ex­pe­ri­ences and chal­lenges that shaped not just their tech­ni­cal skills, but their en­tire ap­proach to soft­ware de­vel­op­ment.

A true se­nior en­gi­neer is a bat­tle-tested prob­lem solver. They’ve faced and con­quered com­plex tech­ni­cal chal­lenges across mul­ti­ple pro­jects, deal­ing with more than just tricky bugs. These are the ar­chi­tects who’ve un­tan­gled sys­tem-wide is­sues that re­quire deep un­der­stand­ing and cre­ative so­lu­tions. They’re the ones who can nav­i­gate and refac­tor sprawl­ing legacy code­bases with con­fi­dence, un­der­stand­ing the del­i­cate bal­ance be­tween main­tain­ing ex­ist­ing sys­tems and build­ing new ones.

Senior en­gi­neers have been through the cru­cible of ma­jor pro­duc­tion out­ages. They’ve felt the heat of a sys­tem melt­ing down in real-time and learned to stay calm un­der pres­sure. These ex­pe­ri­ences have taught them to di­ag­nose is­sues rapidly and lead a team through a cri­sis, mak­ing crit­i­cal de­ci­sions when every sec­ond counts.

But tech­ni­cal skills alone don’t make a se­nior en­gi­neer. They’re also ar­chi­tec­tural vi­sion­ar­ies who can see be­yond im­me­di­ate tasks to de­sign scal­able, main­tain­able sys­tems. Their de­ci­sions pos­i­tively im­pact pro­jects years down the line, show­cas­ing a level of fore­sight that only comes with ex­ten­sive ex­pe­ri­ence. They’ve de­vel­oped the soft skills to be ef­fec­tive men­tors and lead­ers, guid­ing ju­nior de­vel­op­ers not just in cod­ing, but in nav­i­gat­ing the com­plex land­scape of soft­ware de­vel­op­ment.

Perhaps most im­por­tantly, se­nior en­gi­neers re­main hum­ble and cu­ri­ous de­spite their ex­pe­ri­ence. They’re con­tin­u­ous learn­ers, adapt­ing to new tech­nolo­gies and method­olo­gies, al­ways ex­pand­ing their toolkit. They’ve de­vel­oped a strong sense of pro­fes­sional ethics, un­der­stand­ing the broader im­pli­ca­tions of their work and ad­vo­cat­ing for re­spon­si­ble de­vel­op­ment prac­tices.

This depth of ex­pe­ri­ence is­n’t typ­i­cally gained in just a few years. It’s forged through di­verse pro­jects, mul­ti­ple tech stacks, and yes, a fair share of fail­ures and lessons learned along the way.

The fierce com­pe­ti­tion for tal­ent has led com­pa­nies, es­pe­cially star­tups, to use ti­tles as a re­ten­tion tac­tic. Unable to al­ways match the salaries of­fered by tech gi­ants, these com­pa­nies re­sort to in­flat­ing ti­tles as a form of non-mon­e­tary com­pen­sa­tion. While this might seem like a clever short-term so­lu­tion, it’s cre­at­ing long-term prob­lems for the in­dus­try by di­lut­ing the mean­ing of these ti­tles.

The rise of pro­fes­sional net­work­ing plat­forms like LinkedIn has ex­ac­er­bated this is­sue. These plat­forms have turned ti­tles into per­sonal brand­ing tools, cre­at­ing im­mense pres­sure for in­di­vid­u­als to sport im­pres­sive-sound­ing roles. This “LinkedIn Effect” has every­one, from fresh grad­u­ates to sea­soned pro­fes­sion­als, yearn­ing for ti­tles that look good on their pro­files, of­ten pri­or­i­tiz­ing ap­pear­ance over sub­stance.

HR de­part­ments, grap­pling with the in­creas­ing com­plex­ity of tech roles, have con­tributed to this prob­lem as well. In an at­tempt to ac­cu­rately cat­e­go­rize the myr­iad of spe­cial­ized po­si­tions in our rapidly evolv­ing field, they’ve cre­ated a pro­lif­er­a­tion of niche ti­tles. While these ti­tles might be de­scrip­tive, they’ve made it in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult to com­pare roles across com­pa­nies, fur­ther mud­dy­ing the wa­ters of ca­reer pro­gres­sion.

Lastly, many com­pa­nies have be­gun us­ing ti­tle pro­mo­tions as a re­ten­tion strat­egy. The in­tent is to rec­og­nize and re­tain valu­able em­ploy­ees, but this ap­proach of­ten back­fires. When ti­tles are handed out like par­tic­i­pa­tion tro­phies, they cease to align with ac­tual growth in re­spon­si­bil­i­ties or skills. This mis­align­ment not only de­val­ues the ti­tles them­selves but also sets un­re­al­is­tic ex­pec­ta­tions for the newly pro­moted em­ploy­ees.

In essence, what we’re see­ing is a per­fect storm of mar­ket pres­sures, per­sonal brand­ing needs, or­ga­ni­za­tional chal­lenges, and short-sighted re­ten­tion strate­gies. Together, these fac­tors have in­flated ti­tles to the point where they risk los­ing their mean­ing en­tirely.

Title in­fla­tion is­n’t just about words on a busi­ness card or a LinkedIn pro­file. It’s a prob­lem that strikes at the heart of our in­dus­try’s in­tegrity and func­tion­al­ity. When we in­flate ti­tles, we’re es­sen­tially ly­ing to our­selves and each other about our ca­pa­bil­i­ties and ex­pe­ri­ence.

This de­cep­tion has real con­se­quences. It cre­ates a mis­match be­tween ex­pec­ta­tions and re­al­ity, lead­ing to sit­u­a­tions where peo­ple are placed in roles they’re not pre­pared for. Imagine a “senior” en­gi­neer with three years of ex­pe­ri­ence try­ing to ar­chi­tect a com­plex sys­tem or men­tor ju­nior de­vel­op­ers. The po­ten­tial for fail­ure is high, and the stress on that in­di­vid­ual is im­mense.

For those in lead­er­ship po­si­tions, it’s para­mount to re­sist the temp­ta­tion of us­ing in­flated ti­tles as a quick fix for re­ten­tion or re­cruit­ment chal­lenges. Instead, fo­cus on cre­at­ing mean­ing­ful ca­reer pro­gres­sion frame­works that tie ad­vance­ments to con­crete skills and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties. Consider im­ple­ment­ing a sys­tem sim­i­lar to those used by larger tech com­pa­nies, where lev­els (like L3, L4, L5) pro­vide a more nu­anced view of se­nior­ity with­out re­sort­ing to ti­tle in­fla­tion.

Companies can take a stand by stan­dard­iz­ing their ti­tle struc­tures and be­ing trans­par­ent about what each level means. This could in­volve cre­at­ing de­tailed job de­scrip­tions that clearly out­line the ex­pec­ta­tions and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties for each role. By do­ing so, you not only pro­vide clar­ity for your em­ploy­ees but also con­tribute to a more stan­dard­ized in­dus­try-wide un­der­stand­ing of ti­tles.

HR de­part­ments have a crit­i­cal role to play. They can work on de­vel­op­ing more so­phis­ti­cated ways to cat­e­go­rize and com­pare roles across the in­dus­try. This might in­volve col­lab­o­rat­ing with tech leads to cre­ate stan­dard­ized skill ma­tri­ces that can be used to eval­u­ate can­di­dates and em­ploy­ees more ob­jec­tively.

Companies that re­sist ti­tle in­fla­tion gain a sig­nif­i­cant com­pet­i­tive edge. By main­tain­ing mean­ing­ful ti­tles, they at­tract and re­tain top tal­ent who value au­then­tic growth over in­flated roles. This leads to more ac­cu­rate hir­ing, im­proved team dy­nam­ics, and en­hanced pro­duc­tiv­ity. Realistic ti­tles also fos­ter trust, both in­ter­nally and with clients, po­si­tion­ing the com­pany as a bea­con of in­tegrity in the in­dus­try. Ultimately, com­pa­nies with well-de­fined, hon­est ti­tle struc­tures build stronger, more ca­pa­ble teams and a rep­u­ta­tion for ex­cel­lence that sets them apart in the mar­ket.

This ar­ti­cle was orig­i­nally pub­lished on

https://​www.trevor­lasn.com/​blog/​soft­ware-en­gi­neer-ti­tles-have-al­most-lost-all-their-mean­ing. It was writ­ten by a hu­man and pol­ished us­ing gram­mar tools for clar­ity.

Skip to main con­tentFind any­thing you save across the site in your ac­count Language is said to make us hu­man. What if birds talk, too?“So­cial birds . . . are con­stantly chat­ting to each other,” Mike Webster, an an­i­mal-com­mu­ni­ca­tion ex­pert at Cornell, says. “What in the hell are they say­ing?”On a driz­zly day in Grünau im Almtal, Austria, a gag­gle of grey­lag geese shared a peace­ful mo­ment on a grassy field near a stream. One goose, named Edes, was preen­ing qui­etly; oth­ers were rest­ing with their beaks pointed tail­ward, nes­tled into their feath­ers. Then a cam­ou­flaged speaker that sci­en­tists had placed nearby started to play. First came a recorded honk from an un­part­nered male goose named Joshua. Edes went on with his preen­ing. Next came a honk that was lower in pitch than the first, with a slight bray. Edes looked up. As the other geese re­mained tucked in their warm po­si­tions, in­cu­ri­ous, Edes scanned the field. He had just heard a recorded “distance call” from his life part­ner, a fe­male goose whom sci­en­tists had named Bon Jovi. Edes and his fel­low-geese live near the Konrad Lorenz Research Center for Behavior and Cognition, which is named for a Nobel lau­re­ate whose im­print­ing ex­per­i­ments, in the nine­teen-thir­ties, con­vinced goslings that he was their mother. (They took to fol­low­ing him in a downy line.) Greylag geese in the area have been stud­ied con­tin­u­ally ever since. The di­rec­tor of the cen­ter, a bi­ol­o­gist and bird ecol­o­gist named Sonia Kleindorfer, showed me footage of Edes to demon­strate the sub­tlety of goose com­mu­ni­ca­tion.Geese main­tain elab­o­rate so­cial struc­tures, travel in fam­ily groups, and can nav­i­gate from Sweden to Spain. In a fight, an un­part­nered grey­lag goose has a higher heart rate than a part­nered one, and the heart rate of a re­cently wid­owed goose can re­main de­pressed for about a year. These birds have things to dis­cuss. Still, geese are not the Ciceros of the bird world. A lyre­bird sings long, elab­o­rate songs; ravens re­ally can say “nevermore.” Geese are known for nasal honks. How much nu­ance can there be in a honk?Grey­lag geese, it turns out, have at least ten dif­fer­ent kinds of calls. “We are com­pletely un­der­ap­pre­ci­at­ing the way they com­mu­ni­cate,” Kleindorfer told me. “They give a de­par­ture call when they leave, and a con­tact call af­ter they ar­rive. They know if their al­lies are there, if the bold geese are there. There is so much in­for­ma­tion that geese are get­ting from calls.”Bird vo­cal­iza­tions are usu­ally di­vided into songs and calls, but these are wob­bly cat­e­gories. What is des­ig­nated a song in one species may be shorter in du­ra­tion than what, in an­other species, is termed a call. Onomatopoeic group­ings such as tseets, chirrups, rreey­oos, seeew-soooos, and dahs are also in­de­ter­mi­nate: peo­ple tran­scribe the same sounds in dif­fer­ent ways, and no bird ver­sion of the Académie Française ex­ists to ad­ju­di­cate. The vo­cal­iza­tions of birds are fun­da­men­tally in­com­men­su­rate with hu­man ones. We have a lar­ynx and two vo­cal cords; they have what’s called a sy­rinx, which is a bit like hav­ing two lar­ynxes that you can use at the same time.Klein­dor­fer, the daugh­ter of a math­e­mati­cian and an ac­tress, looks like a cross be­tween a hiker and the film star Sophia Loren. From February to April, she re­searches Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos; from September to December, song­birds in Australia; and, for the rest of the year, the geese out­side her of­fice door. Early in her ed­u­ca­tion, as an un­der­grad­u­ate at the University of Pennsylvania, she was taught that “male song­birds sing, fe­males don’t, and if fe­males do sing it’s an er­ror.” The at­ti­tude at the time, she told me, was that “females are drab, in­con­spic­u­ous, and quiet.” A few years af­ter earn­ing a Ph.D. in zo­ol­ogy at the University of Vienna, Kleindorfer took a job as a re­search bi­ol­o­gist at Flinders University, in Australia, where song­bird species orig­i­nally evolved. “Imagine my sur­prise,” she told me. “I heard all these fe­males singing songs as com­plex as the male songs.” Much of her en­su­ing ca­reer has fo­cussed on bird vo­cal­iza­tions that were ei­ther un­der­ap­pre­ci­ated or un­known.Klein­dor­fer de­cided to study bird eggs and early de­vel­op­ment, which were then ne­glected re­search top­ics. “Maybe this was be­cause only fe­males have eggs and I was a woman in sci­ence,” she told me. “I don’t have a bet­ter rea­son.” Kleindorfer had no­ticed that mus­tached-war­bler chicks seemed to re­spond to the alarm calls of adult war­blers, even though the think­ing at the time was that such calls were di­rected at other adults, or pos­si­bly at preda­tors. “If I put a snake nearby, the parental alarm call made the chicks in the nest jump,” she said. “If I put a marsh har­rier”—a hawk­like preda­tory bird—“nearby, the re­sponse to the parental alarm call was that the chicks would duck.” The chicks were re­spond­ing ap­pro­pri­ately to dif­fer­ent alarm calls—a sat­is­fy­ing find­ing.Klein­dor­fer also stud­ied the su­perb fairy wren, a song­bird that weighs about as much as a wal­nut and sports a flirty, up­right tail. Despite their fan­ci­ful names, fairy wrens are com­mon­place in Australia. They are so­cially monog­a­mous but sex­u­ally promis­cu­ous—they are es­sen­tially in open mar­riages—and they bring up their young col­lec­tively. Arguably, they have even more to chat about than geese do. Fairy-wren nests are about the size of cupped hu­man hands, built to con­tain pale, speck­led eggs that are smaller than thumb­nails. Kleindorfer and her team wired up nests with cam­eras and mi­cro­phones and soon dis­cov­ered some­thing that they had­n’t known to look for. “The moth­ers in nests were pro­duc­ing an in­cu­ba­tion call—a call to the eggs,” she told me. It was like a lul­laby. Why would a mother bird make any sound that could at­tract preda­tors to the nest? “Songbird em­bryos don’t have well-de­vel­oped ears, so this was com­pletely un­ex­pected,” she said. “That started a twenty-year pro­ject—why is she call­ing to the eggs?”The team com­pared in­cu­ba­tion calls to the beg­ging calls of young chicks. “It was very odd,” Kleindorfer re­called. “Each nest had its own dis­tinct beg­ging call.” What’s more, each beg­ging call matched an el­e­ment from the moth­er’s in­cu­ba­tion call. This sug­gested, star­tlingly, that birds could learn a lit­eral mother tongue while still in ovo. (Humans do this, too; French and German ba­bies have dis­tinct cries.) Even “foster” chicks, who as eggs were phys­i­cally moved from one nest to an­other, learned beg­ging calls from their fos­ter moth­ers, rather than from their ge­netic moth­ers. This was big news in the or­nithol­ogy world. “The par­a­digm of how song­birds learn—af­ter hatch­ing, from their fa­ther’s song—was over­thrown,” she said. The same process was soon doc­u­mented in more song­bird species.Lan­guage is of­ten cited as the qual­ity that dis­tin­guishes us as hu­mans. When I asked Robert Berwick, an M.I.T. com­pu­ta­tional lin­guist, about birds, he ar­gued that “they’re not try­ing to say any­thing in the sense of James Joyce try­ing to say some­thing.” Still, he and Kleindorfer both pointed out that hu­mans and song­birds share a trait that many an­i­mals lack: we are “vocal learn­ers,” mean­ing that we can learn to make new sounds through­out our lives. (Bats, whales, dol­phins, and ele­phants can, too.) “To me, the most amaz­ing thing is that every gen­er­a­tion of vo­cal learn­ers has its own sound,” Kleindorfer said. “So, just like our English is dif­fer­ent from Shakespeare’s English, the song­birds, too, have very dif­fer­ent songs from five hun­dred years ago. I am sure of it.” We hu­mans have long tried, of­ten mis­tak­enly, to dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves from non­hu­man an­i­mals—by ar­gu­ing that only we have souls, or use tools, or are ca­pa­ble of self-aware­ness. Perhaps we should see what the birds have to say.An­i­mals have promi­nent speak­ing roles in many of our old­est sto­ries. Eve has a mem­o­rable con­ver­sa­tion with a snake. In Norse mythol­ogy, two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, serve as spies to the god Odin, whis­per­ing to him the news of the world. In many cul­tures, the “language of birds” refers to a di­vine or per­fect lan­guage—the lan­guage of an­gels. In the sci­en­tific realm, how­ever, the no­tion that non­hu­man an­i­mals use lan­guage is of­ten seen as fool­ish or naïve. Some birds may be ex­cel­lent mim­ics, like par­rots, but they can also mimic chain­saws or bark­ing dogs; schol­ars don’t usu­ally con­sider im­i­ta­tion a form of un­der­stand­ing. The pre­vail­ing dogma is that birds sing ei­ther to im­press mates or to de­fend their ter­ri­tory. (I sus­pect that most of hu­man com­mu­ni­ca­tion could also be slot­ted into those cat­e­gories.) In col­lege, I was taught a stranger but sim­i­larly di­min­ish­ing idea: that song­birds sing in the morn­ing to burn fat, so that they are light enough to fly around dur­ing the day. Apparently, this idea is no longer taken se­ri­ously.Even among species we view as be­ing closer to our­selves, such as pri­mates, sci­en­tists have tended to talk about “communication” in­stead of “language.” But it’s tricky to say where the line is, or what we mean by “communication,” since even bac­te­ria com­mu­ni­cate, as Berwick pointed out to me. “I think it’s best to think of lan­guage not as speech but as a cog­ni­tive abil­ity in the mind that some­times leads to speech,” he said, giv­ing the ex­am­ple of in­ward con­ver­sa­tions we have with our­selves. The lin­guist Noam Chomsky has said, “It’s about as likely that an ape will prove to have a lan­guage abil­ity as there is an is­land some­where with a species of flight­less birds wait­ing for hu­mans to teach them to fly.” Chomsky’s 2017 book on the evo­lu­tion of lan­guage, co-au­thored with Berwick, is ti­tled“Why Only Us.”Over the years, how­ever, some re­searchers have looked closely at the con­texts in which cer­tain an­i­mal vo­cal­iza­tions are made. In the late nine­teen-sev­en­ties, two pri­ma­tol­o­gists, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, were study­ing vervet mon­keys in Kenya. Vervets have dark faces and pale fur; they are about the size of a small back­pack and are hunted by pythons, ea­gles, and leop­ards. Cheney and Seyfarth doc­u­mented some­thing re­mark­able: one recorded vervet vo­cal­iza­tion made vervets look up, pre­sum­ably for ea­gles; an­other made them look down, pre­sum­ably for pythons; and a third sent them run­ning up into the trees, a good de­fense against ap­proach­ing leop­ards. Young vervets some­times use these calls fault­ily, per­haps sound­ing a leop­ard alarm for a warthog. But they get bet­ter as they grow up. They learn.A newer gen­er­a­tion of sci­en­tists has been try­ing to un­der­stand bird vo­cal­iza­tions. The alarm calls of Siberian jays can be said to have been par­tially trans­lated. One of their screeches in­di­cates a sit­ting hawk (which prompts other jays to come to­gether in a group), an­other a fly­ing hawk (jays hide, which makes them dif­fi­cult to spot), and a third a hawk ac­tively at­tack­ing (jays fly to the tree­tops to search for the at­tacker, and pos­si­bly flee). When cheery birds known as tufted tit­mice make a pierc­ing sound, other tit­mice may re­spond by col­lec­tively har­ry­ing an in­vad­ing preda­tor. Some birds even lie. Fork-tailed dron­gos—com­mon, in­nocu­ous-look­ing lit­tle dark birds that live in Africa—sometimes mimic the alarm calls of star­lings or meerkats. Duped lis­ten­ers flee the nonex­is­tent threat, leav­ing be­hind a buf­fet for the drongo.Upon see­ing an owl, a chick­adee might sound a loud chick-a-dee-dee-dee, adding dees in re­la­tion to how dan­ger­ous the preda­tor is per­ceived to be. This call is also un­der­stood by nuthatches, which will join in to mob and ha­rass the preda­tor, form­ing a kind of de­fen­sive al­liance. If you record an Australian bird warn­ing of a nearby cuckoo—cuck­oos leave their eggs in the nests of other species and of­ten kill their step-sib­lings—birds in China will un­der­stand the call.Klein­dor­fer con­sid­ers Cheney and Seyfarth, the pri­ma­tol­o­gists, to be im­por­tant sources of in­spi­ra­tion. After she moved to Australia, she and her col­leagues built up a sound li­brary of Australian song­birds. They also made record­ings of qui­eter, fa­mil­ial bird sounds, such as the in­cu­ba­tion calls. Each fam­ily unit, they dis­cov­ered, had its own “familect,” a sys­tem of sounds that chicks learn from their par­ents. Curiously, chicks seemed to adopt sounds sung ei­ther by their mother or by their fa­ther—but they avoided the sounds used by both par­ents. If the mother sings ABCXYZ and the fa­ther sings ABCGHI, then the chicks tend to sing the sound units X, Y, Z, G, H, and I. It’s as if the young birds sep­a­rate them­selves from their par­ents by not speak­ing the shared sounds, but also stay close to their par­ents by learn­ing what’s unique to Mom and unique to Dad. When fe­male chicks grow up, they are at­tracted to mates whose reper­toire is fa­mil­iar (he’s one of us!), but not too fa­mil­iar (he’s not my brother or dad).Birds in gen­eral are turn­ing out to have in­tel­lec­tual abil­i­ties far greater than most peo­ple had imag­ined. It’s not just that par­rots and crows can do math as ably as young chil­dren, or that scrub jays clev­erly cache and then un­cache their food to fool other jays. Even in­con­spic­u­ous and un­cel­e­brated birds are ca­pa­ble of learn­ing, and of shar­ing their learn­ing with oth­ers. In the nine­teen-twen­ties, tits from Swaythling, England, fig­ured out how to open the caps of milk bot­tles, and by the late for­ties tits across Ireland, Wales, and England had learned the trick. If lan­guage is more a ca­pac­ity than it is a speech act, it seems pos­si­ble that birds pos­sess it.In 1889, Ludwig Paul Koch, an eight-year-old boy in Frankfurt, Germany, re­ceived a pre­sent from his fa­ther: an Edison phono­graph and some wax cylin­ders for record­ing sounds. The old­est known au­dio of bird­song is young Koch’s record­ing of his pet white-rumped shama, a small­ish song­bird with a dark head, an or­ange body, and feath­ers that re­sem­ble a white bus­tle on its glossy black tail. A shama sings like a small cham­ber or­ches­tra, with slip­pery, per­cus­sive, and sweet sounds in phrases of vary­ing lengths. Many sim­i­lar record­ings fol­lowed. In 1929, the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds—now the Macaulay Library—was started with a few hard-won record­ings of a spar­row, a wren, and a gros­beak. (Cornell is to or­nithol­ogy what the Juilliard School is to mu­sic.)Koch, who was Jewish, be­came a pro­fes­sional mu­si­cian but fled Germany in the nine­teen-thir­ties. In England, he be­came a beloved pres­ence on BBC ra­dio. Sounding like a singsong, san­guine sib­ling of Werner Herzog, he guided Brits through the charms of bird­song. (A yel­low icter­ine war­bler, he told lis­ten­ers, “frequently called me by my Christian name . . . Ludwig, Ludwig.”) Koch of­ten ex­pressed the hope that such record­ings might be used for sci­ence. Many years later, they were.In 2010, Grant Van Horn was an un­der­grad­u­ate at U.C. San Diego and work­ing in a com­puter-vi­sion and ma­chine-learn­ing lab led by the com­puter sci­en­tist Serge Belongie. The lab was look­ing for a good data set to train an im­age-recog­ni­tion pro­gram. At the time, Van Horn told me, many of the top im­ages on Flickr, the pop­u­lar pho­tog­ra­phy Web site, were of birds. Van Horn was no birder, but he wanted to see if he and his col­leagues could teach a com­puter pro­gram to dis­tin­guish be­tween closely re­lated species, such as a house wren and a marsh wren. As it turned out, they could.The lab’s work soon at­tracted the at­ten­tion of or­nithol­ogy re­searchers at Cornell. Van Horn re­calls them telling him and his col­leagues, “in the nicest pos­si­ble way, ‘Look, guys—this data set is quaint and poorly con­structed, and the species that you chose to study make no sense. Do you want to ef­fec­tively redo this whole process, but do it in col­lab­o­ra­tion with us?’ ” When Van Horn vis­ited Cornell, the sci­en­tists took him out bird­ing every morn­ing and evening, and he re­mem­bers wish­ing that he could take their ex­per­tise back to California with him. The col­lab­o­ra­tion even­tu­ally helped the Cornell Lab of Ornithology de­velop Merlin Bird ID, an app that could re­li­ably iden­tify sev­eral hun­dred species of bird from pho­tographs. It proved im­mensely pop­u­lar—but the Cornell team had al­ways had larger am­bi­tions. “They kept ask­ing, ‘How can we do this with sound?’ ” Van Horn re­called. That was what the sci­en­tists were most in­ter­ested in. But he as­sumed that au­di­tory recog­ni­tion was out­side his ex­per­tise—un­til, out of cu­rios­ity, he at­tended a work­shop on au­dio-re­lated ma­chine learn­ing.“I kind of had an epiphany,” Van Horn said. Sound recog­ni­tion of­ten re­lied on spec­tro­grams, vi­sual rep­re­sen­ta­tions of sounds sim­i­lar to what you see in au­dio-edit­ing soft­ware. Mike Webster, an an­i­mal-com­mu­ni­ca­tion ex­pert at Cornell who di­rects the Macaulay Library, and who worked on Merlin, told me, “When peo­ple fig­ured out how to vi­su­al­ize sound—how to ac­tu­ally take mea­sures of it—that led to just an ex­plo­sion of re­search and un­der­stand­ing about how and why birds com­mu­ni­cate with each other.” Much of the work in sound recog­ni­tion, Van Horn re­al­ized, was ac­tu­ally vi­sual: “I thought, Let me bring these com­puter-vi­sion skills to bear.” An early test could dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween record­ings of alder fly­catch­ers and wil­low fly­catch­ers.“It’s still too heavy. What if in­stead of two arm­rests we just share one?”In 2021, the num­ber of bird record­ings in the Macaulay Library, many of which were sub­mit­ted by cit­i­zen sci­en­tists, reached a mil­lion. That same year, Cornell re­leased Merlin Sound ID, which was orig­i­nally trained on around two hun­dred and fifty hours of bird sounds, as well as on back­ground noises (whistling wind, pass­ing cars), all man­u­ally an­no­tated by ex­perts. At first, Sound ID could iden­tify about three hun­dred dif­fer­ent North American birds, with a bias to­ward those found around Cornell. Three years and a mil­lion ad­di­tional record­ings later, Sound ID can now very ac­cu­rately iden­tify about four­teen hun­dred species. The lab hopes that num­ber can grow to roughly eight thou­sand, out of around eleven thou­sand known bird species.Am­a­teurs now have a re­mark­able abil­ity to rec­og­nize the birds that are coo­ing or chirp­ing—which has gen­er­ated more in­ter­est in birds and di­rected more cit­i­zen-sci­ence record­ings to the Macaulay Library. But de­cod­ing the bird vo­cal­iza­tions is an­other mat­ter. One prob­lem is that cer­tain sorts of record­ings are more plen­ti­ful than oth­ers. “Most of our data­base is songs,” Webster said. “We can now un­der­stand songs at a level that we could­n’t be­fore.” Alarm calls are also rel­a­tively easy to cap­ture. But some­thing like nest chat­ter, which is qui­eter and less pre­dictable, is more elu­sive: “There are whole cat­e­gories of bird com­mu­ni­ca­tion that we’ve hardly even started to look at.” Webster is­n’t ex­pect­ing there to be straight­for­ward trans­la­tions of birds’ sounds into hu­man lan­guage; an­i­mals live in per­cep­tual worlds that are just too dif­fer­ent from our own. Still, he sees ma­chine learn­ing as a pow­er­ful new tool. “There are a lot of peo­ple who have dreams of us­ing A.I. to al­low us to de­ci­pher what an­i­mals are say­ing,” he told me.Af­ter three decades of re­search, Webster is prepar­ing to re­tire. When I asked him what he hoped the next gen­er­a­tion of sci­en­tists might learn, he thought for a mo­ment. “Well, so­cial birds. They are con­stantly chat­ting to each other,” he said. “Making lit­tle noises. Often very qui­etly. It’s like they’re hav­ing a whis­per con­ver­sa­tion. What in the hell are they say­ing to one an­other? I’d re­ally like to know.”Un­til my eleven-year-old daugh­ter be­came in­ter­ested in birds, I barely knew a star­ling from a spar­row. She once asked me, in­cred­u­lously, “You’re say­ing you can’t tell a male spar­row from a fe­male?” For a long time, we lived just east of the Lincoln Tunnel, where “birds” meant pi­geons and seag­ulls, but within weeks of mov­ing to Brooklyn we saw a red-tailed hawk on a lamp­post. My daugh­ter be­gan talk­ing about dark-eyed jun­cos and tufted tit­mice and pere­grine fal­cons; we started vis­it­ing bird sanc­tu­ar­ies, and I even­tu­ally out­grew my fa­voritism to­ward mam­mals. Like mil­lions of oth­ers, we started to use Merlin Bird ID. Usually, we heard birds be­fore we saw them. Some lo­cal spar­rows nest­ing in a hol­low pole on our block sounded like Laurel and Hardy bick­er­ing.“An­thro­po­mor­phism” is a fa­mil­iar term that de­scribes a com­mon er­ror: the as­sump­tion that an­i­mals have hu­man qual­i­ties. A less fa­mil­iar term, “anthropectomy,” also de­scribes a kind of er­ror—that of base­lessly as­sum­ing an­i­mals don’t share cer­tain qual­i­ties with us. Which kind of er­ror is a per­son more likely to make? Or are these not er­rors but, rather, start­ing points, with some­one like Jane Goodall start­ing from the premise that 98.7 per cent of our DNA is shared with chimps, and some­one else start­ing from the fact that we hu­mans have se­quenced our own DNA and no other species has even in­vented pli­ers? Since we’re still ar­gu­ing about what lan­guage is, it’s dif­fi­cult to say which as­sump­tion about an­i­mal lan­guage is more pre­sump­tu­ous.Toshi­taka Suzuki first started to won­der if birds speak their own lan­guage dur­ing his last year of col­lege, at Toho University, in Tokyo. He was on a hike in the forests of Karuizawa when he wit­nessed what struck him as a strange drama among some com­mon Japanese tits, birds that re­sem­ble chick­adees. One tit called out dee-dee-dee near some scat­tered sun­flower seeds; other tits flew over and be­gan to eat. “Then one bird called out hee-hee-hee, and the birds all flew off into nearby bushes,” Suzuki re­called. He could see no rea­son for them to aban­don their feast.Sec­onds later, a spar­row hawk swooped in; all of the tits had es­caped safely. “I thought, Maybe hee-hee-hee means ‘Hawk in­com­ing, run away!’ ” Suzuki said. He al­ready took birds se­ri­ously and knew a lot about them; he had stud­ied un­der Hiroshi Hasegawa, a sci­en­tist who was cen­tral in bring­ing the short-tailed al­ba­tross back from near-ex­tinc­tion. But Suzuki had thought of bird vo­cal­iza­tions as, for the most part, emo­tive, like mu­sic, or as a kind of beau­ti­ful non­sense. He has now de­voted eigh­teen years to re­search­ing tits and their com­mu­ni­ca­tion. “I could­n’t have imag­ined how long I would be study­ing tits, be­cause I love other an­i­mals as well,” Suzuki told me. Like many re­searchers, he hopes that the more we un­der­stand birds the like­lier we are to pro­tect them.In April, 2023, at the University of Tokyo, Suzuki founded what he calls the world’s first lab­o­ra­tory specif­i­cally de­voted to an­i­mal lin­guis­tics. He ar­gues that more work should be done to ex­plore what cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties un­der­lie hu­man lan­guage—and then to in­ves­ti­gate whether these abil­i­ties are pre­sent in an­i­mals. (In many ways, this ap­proach mir­rors the work of Berwick and Chomsky, but leads to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions.) Some are skep­ti­cal of his push to com­pare an­i­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion to hu­man lan­guage. “It’s just so far re­moved from the com­plex­ity of hu­man lan­guage that it does­n’t make sense to use the same word,” Todd Freeberg, an an­i­mal-com­mu­ni­ca­tion re­searcher at the University of Tennessee, told me. When a chick­adee am­pli­fies a call by adding dees, some re­searchers might say that they are en­gag­ing in ref­er­en­tial sig­nalling, by ad­just­ing their call to the se­ri­ous­ness of the threat. But Freeberg points out that ex­tra dees could also be a re­sult of height­ened arousal, in gen­eral—less a con­scious mes­sage than a phys­i­cal re­sponse.Like Kleindorfer, Suzuki took an in­ter­est in nests. Early on, he showed that chicks in nest­ing boxes re­spond to a call as­so­ci­ated with crow sight­ings by crouch­ing, and to a call as­so­ci­ated with snakes by flee­ing the nest al­to­gether. The arc of Suzuki’s re­search has, to some ex­tent, fol­lowed a se­ries of ar­gu­ments about what qual­i­ties are re­quired for com­mu­ni­ca­tion to rise to the sta­tus of lan­guage. Humans are noted for their abil­ity to form a men­tal im­age—a con­cept—of what they are com­mu­ni­cat­ing. Suzuki de­signed an ex­per­i­ment in which he played a va­ri­ety of calls and moved a stick in a va­ri­ety of ways; only when he played a snake-alarm call and moved a stick in a snake­like way did the birds tend to re­act as if a snake were pre­sent. To him, this sug­gested that they had some con­cept of snake-ness. (He said that the ex­per­i­ment was in­spired by the way that hu­mans per­ceive shapes in clouds.)In a 2023 study, Suzuki showed that tits re­sponded dif­fer­ently to a recorded ABCD call than they did to a remixed ver­sion of the call, such as DABC—a po­ten­tial chal­lenge to lin­guists who see so­phis­ti­cated syn­tax as be­ing unique to hu­man lan­guage. (Studies of south­ern pied bab­blers and of chest­nut-crowned bab­blers also have in­ter­est­ing syn­tax re­sults.) Symbolic ges­tures—also of­ten con­sid­ered unique to hu­mans—were ad­dressed in a par­tic­u­larly adorable Suzuki pa­per, in 2024. His team watched mated pairs of tits as they en­tered their nest boxes. The open­ing to each nest box was small, al­low­ing only one bird at a time to pass. But some­times one bird, usu­ally the fe­male, flut­tered its wings in what seemed to be an “after you” ges­ture. The other bird would then en­ter the box first. The flut­ter­ing did­n’t point at the nest box. In Suzuki’s view, this sug­gested that the flut­ter was not a sim­ple in­di­ca­tion but, in­stead, a sym­bolic ges­ture—an­other item crossed off on the unique-to-hu­man-lan­guage list.Per­haps the nest-box study needs to be repli­cated; per­haps there are al­ter­na­tive in­ter­pre­ta­tions of the re­sults in the con­cept and syn­tax stud­ies. Suzuki is open to such cri­tiques. But he is also skep­ti­cal of many promi­nent ideas in lin­guis­tics, such as Chomsky and Berwick’s ar­gu­ment that a slight evo­lu­tion­ary change in the brain un­locked a new lin­guis­tic ca­pac­ity in hu­mans: the unique and pow­er­ful abil­ity to con­nect in­di­vid­ual units in a hi­er­ar­chi­cal and ex­pres­sive way. (Suzuki thinks that lan­guage more likely emerged bit by bit.) By Suzuki’s lat­est count, the tit’s vo­cal reper­toire has more than two hun­dred dis­tinct calls and phrases. He has many more ex­per­i­ments to con­duct.Re­cently, my daugh­ter and I took an early-morn­ing trip to Little Stony Point, in the Hudson Valley, and met up with two peo­ple who have no par­tic­u­lar need for an app like Merlin Bird ID. Andrew C. Vallely does field-or­nithol­ogy work for the American Museum of Natural History; he’s be­come friends, by way of bird-watch­ing, with Jeffrey Yang, an ed­i­tor at New Directions Publishing. Yang had been see­ing a lot of mi­grat­ing war­blers, which had flown well over a thou­sand miles—did we want to come try our luck? At his sug­ges­tion, I warned my daugh­ter that there was no telling whether we’d ac­tu­ally see any.About five min­utes down the trail, in a not par­tic­u­larly dis­tin­guished wood (we could still hear cars and an ex­ca­va­tor across the river), we saw a king­fisher div­ing and an ado­les­cent ea­gle on a bare tree. As we walked, stopped, walked, stopped, we re­peat­edly heard what sounded like the call of a red-tailed hawk. But it soon be­came clear, at least to Vallely and Yang, that it was a jay mim­ic­k­ing a hawk. “They do that some­times,” Vallely told me.“That’s one thought,” he said. “Vocal mim­icry can be pretty mys­te­ri­ous.”We heard the “tea ket­tle tea ket­tle” call of a Carolina wren; it sounded like a game of mar­bles to me. We saw a war­bling vireo, a Cape May war­bler, a black­poll war­bler, and a black-and-white war­bler—birds so small that it was dif­fi­cult to fathom how far some of them had trav­elled to be there. We heard lit­tle chips that sounded like a win­dow be­ing cleaned; a crick­ety de­crescendo that was not made by crick­ets; a sound like a trill run­ning into a wall; a high-pitched three-fast-one-slow, like a child play­ing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We en­coun­tered forty-four species by Yang’s able count, and at the very end we saw a Swainson’s thrush, who ap­par­ently was­n’t in the mood to show off. Bird-watching, I thought, is a mis­lead­ing term. So much of the fleet­ing, pre­sent-tense plea­sure of it is bird-lis­ten­ing.The quiet of the pan­demic brought nat­ural sounds to the fore­ground for Maddie Cusimano, who was then a grad­u­ate re­searcher of au­di­tory per­cep­tion at M.I.T.’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. “Like a lot of peo­ple, I had the sense of get­ting to know the birds around me for the first time,” she told me. Two doves were of­ten vis­i­ble from her win­dow; she read that, in some dove pairs, one bird sings to the other in the morn­ings, and in the evenings the roles re­verse. Cusimano was fa­mil­iar enough with ma­chine learn­ing that, when she tried out bird-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion apps, she thought, I could help make this kind of thing.Cusi­mano is now a se­nior sci­en­tist spe­cial­iz­ing in A.I. re­search at the Earth Species Project (E.S.P.), a non­profit ded­i­cated to “using ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence to de­code non-hu­man com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” E.S.P.’s cur­rent ef­forts ex­am­ine such species as ze­bra finches, crows, and bel­uga whales, but its early work has been pre­oc­cu­pied with pre­lim­i­nary chal­lenges: the “cocktail-party prob­lem” of pick­ing up in­di­vid­ual sounds in a noisy en­vi­ron­ment; how to cor­re­late par­tic­u­lar noises with the pre­cise con­texts in which they oc­cur. “It’s like we want to write the Magna Carta, but first we need to make the quill,” Katie Zacarian, the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s co-founder and C.E.O., told me. Zacarian is­n’t ex­pect­ing a Google Translate for an­i­mal lan­guages, but she does be­lieve that we can un­der­stand an­i­mals bet­ter. She re­mem­bers that, as a kid, peo­ple of­ten brought her fa­ther, an en­to­mol­o­gist, pic­tures and spec­i­mens and asked: What is this? Her mother was a re­searcher and an ad­min­is­tra­tor of mul­ti­lin­gual ed­u­ca­tion pro­grams. “There’s this un­der­ly­ing cur­rent, in their work, of de­cod­ing,” she told me.When I talked to Cusimano, on Zoom, she pulled up a col­lec­tion of sound files of crows. Her data set comes from Daniela Canestrari and Vittorio Baglione, re­searchers at the University of León, in Spain, who have been study­ing Spanish car­rion crows for more than twenty-five years. Cusimano has spent count­less hours sit­ting in San Francisco, lis­ten­ing to these birds, and can some­times guess which one she’s hear­ing. “This is maybe what you ex­pect a crow to sound like,” she said, play­ing me two caws. “But then there’s also this,” she said, play­ing a whis­pery rasp. “Some sounds are very long.” She played a ghostly oooo. “Then these two sounds, which you would never think were com­ing from crows.” One sounded like the click of a com­puter mouse; an­other sounded froggy. Her fa­vorite record­ing re­minded me of a duck’s quack. “I love these sounds,” she told me.One am­bi­tion of Cusimano’s work is to find cor­re­la­tions be­tween these var­ied vo­cal­iza­tions and the pre­cise con­texts in which they oc­curred. Research part­ners re­cently iden­ti­fied a quiet grunt that is most of­ten made right when an adult crow re­turns to a nest—per­haps a way of say­ing, “Wake up!” A small bio-log­ger on the back of a crow can pro­vide au­dio along with other data—a bird’s-tail view. “You hear their wing­beats, you can hear their friends call­ing, and them call­ing back to their friends,” Cusimano told me. The data feels in­ti­mate: “You hear baby chicks a dis­tance away, then you hear the bird take off, and the chick sounds are get­ting louder. And then the crow lands in the nest. You’re in the mid­dle of this crow fam­ily.”Can a ma­chine be trained to dis­tin­guish in­di­vid­ual birds by the sounds they make? Can it pick up on vo­cal­iza­tions across in­di­vid­u­als which share sim­i­lar func­tions? Machine learn­ing is ex­cel­lent at de­tect­ing cor­re­la­tions, but some are ir­rel­e­vant and even mis­lead­ing. Cusimano de­vel­oped an al­go­rithm to dis­tin­guish among caws made by var­i­ous crows, which had names such as Naranja, Rosa, and Azul. She seemed to have suc­ceeded. Then she re­al­ized that the com­puter might be cat­e­go­riz­ing the sounds based on dis­tinc­tive back­ground noises, which cor­re­sponded to the place­ment of the record­ing de­vices. “The al­go­rithms can pick up on tiny lit­tle clues that con­found the ac­tual prob­lems we want to find an­swers to,” she said.Those who live and work along­side an­i­mals, whether they’re sci­en­tists or not, of­ten think, as a mat­ter of course, that an­i­mals can speak with one an­other, and in depth. Instead of be­ing sur­prised by the dis­cov­ery of each “unexpected” an­i­mal abil­ity, maybe we should be sur­prised that hu­mans have such low ex­pec­ta­tions. Many of us laugh—or shake our heads sadly—when we read that Descartes sup­pos­edly threw a cat out of a win­dow to see if it would show fear, as a sort of test for con­scious­ness. (He be­lieved that non­hu­man an­i­mals were sense­less au­toma­tons.) Yet many of us would also con­sider it a won­der that, ac­cord­ing to a re­cent study, ele­phants seem to have dis­tinct names for one an­other, which their ele­phant friends and fam­ily use among them­selves.When I started re­search­ing this story, I was amazed by each ad­di­tional avian ac­com­plish­ment that I learned about, es­pe­cially in small, or­di­nary birds. It was­n’t only that they com­mu­ni­cated this or that to one an­other but that they were full of con­cerns—that they were at the cen­ter of their own worlds. But should­n’t I have in­tu­ited that this was the case all along? I had base­lessly as­sumed that birds had lit­tle on their minds. The other day, my daugh­ter and I were walk­ing to her soc­cer prac­tice, pass­ing by spar­rows and also peo­ple. “We know al­most noth­ing about birds,” she told me. “There’s so much we don’t even no­tice.” She thought for a mo­ment. “I think they have just as much lan­guage as we do, but a lot of it is in their mind. So we don’t hear it.” ♦