We all like to think we know what other animals are saying. “Leave my acorn alone!” screams the squirrel on the sidewalk. “I’m so glad you’re home!” cheers your dog when you walk in the door. But the truth is that we don’t actually know. Animal communication researchers have made enormous advances in the last few decades, but there is still plenty to learn. So when one scientist said he’d found evidence of human-like dialogue in dolphins, experts raised an eyebrow.
Dolphins are incredibly smart animals, although they don’t always use their considerable intellect for good. They’re also very social, which means that communication is vital to their survival. Their clicks and whistles have a range of uses, from calling pod members to signaling an attack on some hapless shark. Each dolphin has its own signature whistle, which acts like its name, and some recent research suggests that female dolphins start teaching their calves their own names before they’re even born.
Author Vyacheslav Ryabov, of the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station in Ukraine, was interested in the casual dolphin-to-dolphin discussions of Yana and Yasha, two of the station’s captive bottlenose dolphins. He used underwater microphones to record the dolphins’ chatter as they floated near the edge of their pool, then analyzed the rhythms and frequencies of each dolphin’s noises.
Ryabov concluded that Yana and Yasha were carrying on a sophisticated, human-like conversation, in which each dolphin waited for the other to finish its “sentence” before starting to speak.
“Dolphins have possessed brains that are somewhat larger and more complex than human ones for more than 25 million years,” he writes. “Due to this, for further research in this direction, humans must take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of the planet Earth by creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of using languages and in the way of communications between dolphins and people.”
Dolphin translator technology isn’t quite as far-fetched as it sounds; researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project have been fine-tuning one such device for years. And the idea that dolphins don’t interrupt each other is not new. Still, Ryabov took it to the next level, veering into somewhat zany and hyperbolic territory, and other researchers are pretty turned off by both his utopian vision of dolphin-human brotherhood and his somewhat primitive research methods.
“It is complete bull,” marine biologist Richard Connor told Jason Bittel at National Geographic. Other experts, like Wild Dolphin Project research director Denise Herzing, were slightly more diplomatic in their language.
“This article does not present adequate data to make conclusions about dolphin sound structure or language,” she said in a statement to mental_floss. “Although we applaud the author for exploring dolphin vocalizations with some new methods, we urge caution regarding these conclusions and look forward to the day when we put the question of nonhuman animal language to the test.”
And then there’s the paper’s suspiciously short review period. The journal that published it, the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics, notes that the article was submitted August 16 and published a mere five days later, which suggests the journal eschewed any peer review process.
How does film music get made? Why are some musical themes—like those from, say, Star Wars or Harry Potter—so memorable? And how can it be that the most popular film franchise of our era, the Marvel movies, doesn’t have this kind of hummable music?
In this fantastic video essay, filmmakers Brian Satterwhite, Taylor Ramos, and Tony Zhou go deep on the issue. A big part of the issue is “temp music,” or music from other films used as a stand-in before a composer is brought in to write the real thing. You’ll be amazed at how close the temp music and final tracks are in the cases presented here.
Listen up:
If that’s not enough comparison of temp-to-real-score for you, here’s another eight minutes:
Conspicuous consumption was a theme of the Reagan era, so it wouldn’t be surprising to find an auction of Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s personal effects littered with high-status, high-glitter items in keeping with 1980s excess. But while the auction of Reaganobilia taking place at Christie’s later this month does feature some glitzy high points—like a diamond, sapphire, and ruby Bulgari American flag ring Nancy used when pledging allegiance—it’s more notable for its humble touches, like the horse-shaped jar of jellybeans than once sat on Reagan’s desk or the linen dinner napkins he favored, embroidered with the phrase “Mr. President.”
Bess Lovejoy
The auction includes plenty of glimpses of Reagan the man, including a set of doodles he penciled on White House stationery around 1982. Alongside cartoon characters with a Western theme, they feature two self-portraits: one of Reagan dressed up as a cowboy, and another of him in a suit. In keeping with the former president’s love of Western themes, the auction also features a pair of Tony Lama-designed cowboy boots made of ostrich, cowhide, and bullfrog skin, embossed with the Great Seal of the United States in 14k gold.
Another doodle in the same set, of a football player, reflects one of Reagan’s most famous film roles, when he played the gifted but doomed Notre Dame player George Gipp in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American. That role is also commemorated by another item in the collection, an official NFL Wilson football Reagan inscribed “win one for the Gipper”—a line Reagan uttered both in the film and at the 1988 Republican National Convention (when he directed it at George W. Bush).
Christie’s
Aside from repeated uses of the phrase “president” (“first place president” is engraved on one punch bowl), the football is one of the few items with obvious political overtones. However, there’s also a fine needlepoint pillow decorated with the line “you ain’t seen nothing yet,” and depicting all the states Reagan carried in the 1984 election (all but Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota). The 1984 election is also echoed in a Tiffany marine chronometer Frank Sinatra gave Reagan as a 1981 inauguration gift, which includes an inscribed plaque that reads “Good morning Mr. President.” (That “morning” theme, of course, is reminiscent of the TV ad campaign that propelled Reagan to his second term: “It’s morning again in America.”)
Politics also shows up in a more humorous vein in the couple’s collection of 27 elephant figurines, which were once strewn (alongside several bald eagles) around the couple’s Bel Air home at 668 St. Cloud Road. According to the auction catalog, the original address was 666, before Nancy Reagan made them change it.
Bess Lovejoy
But perhaps the most humble item of all is the most significant—a chunk of graffitied concrete to which Reagan added his name in black felt-tip marker. The 25-inch slab of the Berlin Wall recalls another of the 40th president’s famous moments, on June 12, 1987, when he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate and implored “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
For those interested in owning a piece of presidential history, the auction runs live at Christie’s in New York, September 21-22 (public previews run until September 20) and online September 19-27. While there are plenty of items with lower estimates—you can have napkins that once graced presidential lips for only a few hundred dollars—the auction in total is expected to raise over $2 million for the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Institute.
As websites track our search histories, or buy and sell our online data, it’s easy to feel like online privacy is a thing of the past. But Google Maps recently showed it takes online privacy so seriously, it even protects the identities of cows.
It’s Google Maps’s policy to blur the faces of people captured by Street View cars as they map the Earth. As NPR reports, the service recently took that face-blurring practice a little further than usual. On a road along the bank of England’s River Cam, a Google camera captured a group of grazing cows. Normally, Google only obscures human faces, but apparently the website’s automatic blurring technology decided the identity of one black-and-white cow needed protecting—and blurred its face.
David Shariatmadari, an editor for The Guardian, noticed the mysterious bovine on Google Maps this week and posted a screenshot on Twitter, where it quickly went viral. When NPR asked Google why that particular cow’s identity needed protecting, Google replied, “We thought you were pulling the udder one when we herd the moos, but it’s clear that our automatic face-blurring technology has been a little overzealous. Of course, we don’t begrudge this cow milking its five minutes of fame.”
Since its Amazon debut in 2014, critics have fallen madly in love with the Pfeffermans, a difficult family trying to make sense of their lives in the wake of their father coming out as trans. In anticipation of the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards, for which Transparent nabbed 10 nominations—including a repeat nomination for last year’s Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series winner Jeffrey Tambor—here are 15 facts you might not know about the streaming show, which is returning for a third season on September 23.
1. A STORY ABOUT COURTENEY COX’S BUTT HELPED JUMPSTART JILL SOLOWAY’S CAREER.
While working her first L.A. writing gigs at The Steve Harvey Show and Nikki (which she called “the worst sitcom in the world”), Transparent creator Jill Soloway had some time on her hands to mess around on a show called Sit ‘n Spin with her friends. The show involved people reading monologues and/or fiction, for which Soloway penned the hilarious “Courteney Cox’s A**hole,” a work of fiction told from the perspective of Cox’s personal assistant.
Soloway later sent the piece to a handful of literary magazines, while her agent passed it on to Alan Ball, executive producer of HBO’s Six Feet Under. Ball was impressed, telling TIME that the story, albeit a few pages long, was able to “convey the very real pain of a soul yearning to be authentic in a completely inauthentic world.” Also: He felt confident she’d be able to “write the hell out of Claire and Brenda.” Soloway won a spot in the Six Feet Under writer’s room.
2. SOLOWAY AND LENA DUNHAM COMPETED FOR THE SAME HBO SLOT. (DUNHAM WON.)
This huge victory was not without a series of painful rejections, too. In what The New Yorker called a “downward slide”—the period immediately following her Six Feet Under residency in 2005—Soloway was fired from both HBO’s United States of Tara and Grey’s Anatomy. Then, she was beat out of what seemed to be a promising HBO slot by Lena Dunham (who would go on to create Girls). To add insult to injury, Soloway recalls people would frequently ask her if she was related to Dunham—”People were, like, it’s you, but younger and better.”
3. TRANSPARENT IS EXACTLY TWO PERCENT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.
Soloway knew she wanted to make her own family show ever since working on Six Feet Under. What she didn’t know is that her father would come out as trans at the age of 75—a pivotal moment which would eventually become the central storyline of the hit Amazon series. Speaking to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Soloway called it her “creative destiny.”
Soloway has also gone on record saying that the storyline of Shelly and Ed was informed by the death of her mother’s husband, who had frontal temporal dementia. Nevertheless, Soloway has been resistant to the label of “autobiography” through the years, telling Rolling Stone back in 2014 that Transparent is “98 percent fictionalized.”
“The Pfeffermans are just very real people,” she said. “The reason I wanted to cast Jeffrey [Tambor] is because he’s always reminded me of my parent. They really have a very similar sense of humor and that was just immediate. Other than that, it’s not really autobiographical.”
4. IT’S THE MOST TRANS-INCLUSIVE PRODUCTION IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY.
Transparent producer Rhys Ernst toldOUT that he felt strongly about casting a trans actor to portray a young Maura (Tambor) in season three’s flashback sequences, ultimately bringing 12-year-old Sophia Grace Gianna (who had recently transitioned) on for the part.
This trans-inclusiveness has been a through line for the show’s three-season production: Ernst said that the show has employed more than 50 trans and gender-nonconforming people in the capacity of “crew members or as actors with speaking roles.” That doesn’t include what he estimates to be “hundreds of extras.”
5. JAY DUPLASS FELL INTO THE ROLE OF JOSH PFEFFERMAN.
During a get-together for directors that Jay and his brother Mark regularly hosted, Duplass got to talking with Soloway, who told him that she was struggling to find someone for the part of Josh Pfefferman. After he’d rattled off a list of actor suggestions, a light bulb went off in Soloway’s head: He was just the guy she was looking for, even though he wasn’t an actor and was already swamped with work on developing Togetherness for HBO. In Soloway’s mind, Duplass was the “wildly charismatic and wildly insecure” Jewish guy in his mid-30s that she’d been looking for the whole time.
6. PEOPLE HAVE A HARD TIME SEPARATING JAY DUPLASS FROM JOSH PFEFFERMAN.
Living in Eagle Rock—a neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles, and the same general area where Transparent is filmed—has created a host of funny situations for Duplass. Particularly because people can’t seem to separate his on-screen character as the “roving male id” from his off-screen one as a father and husband when they bump into him at a Trader Joe’s. (Yes, he’s been known to have locals tell him not to “mess things up” with the rabbi—as if that were something he had control over.)
The differences don’t end at father and husband, either. Duplass told Gold Derby that he grew up going to Catholic school and “being overly responsible to everyone around [him].” Also, the sex: “I think Josh Pfefferman has more sex in season one than I’ve had in my entire life,” he said.
7. SOLOWAY EMBRACES IMPROVISATION ON SET.
Season two of Transparent opens with a four-minute scene so perfect and categorically “Pfefferman,” it likely did not occur to you that the whole thing was predicated on a mistake. The whole family is gathering for a wedding portrait and we hear the photographer mis-gender Maura. Maura doesn’t let the flub go unnoticed, snapping back, “Did he just call me sir? This is over.”
Gaby Hoffman told Vanity Fair that this scene began as a “one-line moment in the script.” That is, Soloway stepped back and let “everybody [say] whatever the hell he or she was saying.” It was Tambor who made the snap decision to incorporate this mistake into the scene.
Michaela Watkins (Yetta and Connie in season two) echoed Hoffman’s sentiments in an episode of WTF with Marc Maron,telling Maron that she remembered Soloway encouraging her to just use the script as a “roadmap.” “Throw it out, you know what happens. You do it.” Coming from such an accomplished writer, these words left an impression.
“She’s not ego-driven,” Watkins said. “She didn’t do it because she needed to be revered. It’s how she does every single scene—whether it’s with two people or 100 people. She just horse-whispers you before it. And then you shoot it, and you’re operating from this other place.”
8. CHERRY JONES’S CHARACTER IS BASED ON POET EILEEN MYLES, WHO IS SOLOWAY’S GIRLFRIEND.
Among Transparent’s slate of new cast members introduced in season two is Leslie (Cherry Jones), an intense feminist scholar who lures Ali in with her sexual confidence and wisdom.
Soloway’s writing staff had encouraged her to read up on the work of Eileen Myles while fleshing out the character. Later, the two met while speaking on a panel at a museum event in San Francisco. When the opportunity presented itself, Soloway asked Myles what she meant by a line in one of her journals. “Whoever falls in love with me is in trouble,” that line read.
“It could also be true that anybody who falls in love with Jill is in trouble—deeply, deeply in trouble,” Myles responded. “If you both have strong wills, you’re always pushing the boundaries. Love is trouble, you know, which is one thing that is so great about it.”
(Funnily enough, the real Eileen Myles later appears as an extra in a scene opposite her “copy.” Her poetry is recited by many different characters throughout the season.)
9. CARRIE BROWNSTEIN WAS ORIGINALLY SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROLE OF TAMMY.
As the story goes, Portlandia and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein was so adored on the set of Transparent that a role was created just for her. “Originally, when we were trying to cast Tammy, her name came up,” Soloway said. “But I always felt Tammy was really tan and blonde, like Lady Diana or someone who spent some time in her childhood on a ranch. And Carrie just seemed too Jewy to play Tammy, but I really, really wanted to work with her, so in the writers’ room we created this character of Syd for her.”
10. SOLOWAY HAD GABY HOFFMAN IN MIND FOR THE PART OF ALI AFTER SEEING HER IN LOUIE.
In the season three premiere of Louie, Gaby Hoffman is introduced as Louis C.K.’s girlfriend just as the relationship is about to end. Though brief, her role in the larger arc of the series is vital, forcing C.K. to confront his introversion head-on. Soloway was blown away by the performance, telling Rolling Stone:
“I just loved the way she was talking the whole time and he’s trying to get a word in edgewise and he lets her break up with him. I just loved the way words rolled off her tongue and nothing seemed written. I loved how free she was. I was just like who is this really cool, Jewish lady? And she’s not even Jewish.”
11. JEFFREY TAMBOR USED MORE OF HIMSELF FOR THE CHARACTER OF MAURA THAN ANY OTHER ROLE.
Jeffrey Tambor anticipated the biggest challenge of playing a trans character would be the physical transformation, though this was quickly proven incorrect. He told Terry Gross in a Fresh Air interview that that part turned out to be “very, very easy” for him. The hardest part? Coming to terms with his true self. “I got to use more of Jeffrey than I’ve ever used in any role. Probably even in playing Jeffrey,” he said.
12. TAMBOR WENT “METHOD” TO WARM UP TO HIS ROLE AS MAURA.
Ahead of shooting the pilot episode of Transparent, Tambor was taken on a field trip by producers Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker. To get to the heart of his character, Maura, Tambor was encouraged to put on his full wardrobe and go out in public for the first time. The scariest part wouldn’t be the club-hopping but, in fact, the inevitable walk through the hotel lobby.
“I can remember my legs were shaking, literally trembling—not so much because we were going to a club, but I was so nervous about the walk through the hotel lobby,” Tambor told the Los Angeles Times. “And I remember telling myself: ‘Remember this. Don’t forget this. Let this instruct every single one of your shots and your days.’ And it did. It has nothing to do with the entirety of what being a transgender person is, by any means, but it informed me.”
13. JUDITH LIGHT WAS VERY NERVOUS ABOUT SHOOTING THAT NSFW BATHTUB SCENE.
Two-time Tony Award-winning actress Judith Light’s reaction to reading the now-iconic bathtub scene in “Flicky-Flicky Thump-Thump” for the first time went something like this: “Oh my god, I can’t do this. I can’t do this.” Upon further encouragement from her manager Herb Hamsher, as well as castmates Amy Landecker, Gaby Hoffman, Kathryn Hahn, and Jay Duplass (all quite experienced with the art of the sex scene), she agreed to the intimate scene with her ex, Maura (Tambor).
“When it was done they wrote me and said, ‘That was so beautiful.’ That’s the kind of working circumstance we have,” Light said.
She continued:
“Jeffrey texted me afterward and I believe the text was something like, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this and thank you.’ Thanking me. He’s the most remarkable man. I’ve known for forever how incredibly talented he is. But this really just allows him to shine in a way he has long deserved. For my friend, I rejoice. He was there for me every single second of that scene. We were so present for each other and I think it comes across in the scene.”
14. FAITH SOLOWAY, JILL’S SISTER AND SHOW WRITER, WAS HARI NEF’S CAMP COUNSELOR.
One of Transparent‘s breakout stars is the 23-year-old trans actress, model, and writer Hari Nef, who plays Gittel. Faith Soloway, who is a writer on the show (and also Jill’s sister) evidently knew of Nef because she had been her camp counselor at the Charles River Creative Arts Program in Dover, Massachusetts. Nef recalled that she received an email seemingly out of the blue from Jill asking if she’d be interested in being her date to a New York gala. “So I showed up, we hit it off, and she wrote me a part,” Nef said.
15. TRANSPARENT‘S EMMY AWARD-WINNING MAIN TITLE THEME MUSIC WAS COMPOSED ON AN 80-YEAR-OLD PIANO.
Do not underestimate the power of a man and his 80-year-old piano. The nostalgia-inducing composition at the beginning of each episode is the work of Dustin O’Halloran, who is largely responsible for setting the “understated” tone of the rest of the series. Speaking with Song Exploder, O’Halloran described coming up in a “hippie Methodist church” community and learning to play the piano there.
O’Halloran said that he used a Swiss piano from the 1930s for the theme song, the same piano he had recorded Piano Solos Vol. 2 on. He also admitted that he’d composed an earlier version to be used for the show but felt that it wasn’t right. “I was probably thinking too much about it being an opening title piece—more of a statement, like ‘the show is beginning!‘” O’Halloran’s secret for the finished tune: A “fuller” but still understated sound. Also, some killer harmonium.
We often think of space as something that happens Way Out There, but our planet is in and of the cosmos—and vice versa. The Moon, for one, was once a part of the rock we call home, and chunks of interstellar metal stud the globe. Now scientists in Argentina may have found one of the biggest chunks yet: a 34-ton meteorite fragment nicknamed “Gancedo.”
About 4000 to 5000 years ago, a meteor shower peppered the soil in the region that would become South America. Most of the action happened over a region northwest of Buenos Aires called Campo del Cielo (“Field of Sky”). The field was left pockmarked with craters, which have yielded more than 100 tons of space debris (some of which has a tendency to walk away). The largest lump ever found in the field is a whopper named El Chaco, which was said to weigh in at more than 40 tons when it was first discovered in 1980. Newer estimates have slimmed El Chaco down substantially, putting it at just under 35 tons.
Its challenger, the 34-ton Gancedo, was discovered on the border of the Chaco province. Scientists knew they’d found something good, but had no idea just how big Gancedo would be until it had been completely dug out.
Mario Vesconi is president of the Astronomy Association of Chaco. “While we hoped for weights above what had been registered, we did not expect it to exceed 30 [metric] tons,” he told Argentinian newspaper Clarín. “The size and weight surprised us.”
Immense as both Argentinean fragments may be, they’re still vying for a silver medal. The title of Largest Meteorite rests comfortably with a 66-ton Namibian giant called Hoba, discovered in 1920.
Gancedo’s journey into posterity is just beginning. “We will weigh it again,” Vesconi told Télam. “Apart from wanting the added confidence of a double-check of the initial readings we took, the fact that its weight is such a surprise to us makes us want to recalibrate.”
The Whole Shabangs are the most popular potato chip you’ve never heard of. Produced by the Keefe Group specifically for America’s prison inmates, the potato chips aren’t sold in stores—they’re sold in prison commissaries. But the potato chips, which blend barbecue, salt and vinegar, and a range of other mysterious flavors, are so popular that former inmates often seek them out once they get out of jail.
In the video below, NBC News reports that word of The Whole Shabangs is spreading: What started out as a prison snack is now sought after, not only by former prisoners and their friends and family members, but by other snack aficionados who have caught wind of the crunchy, flavorful chips. In fact, though you still won’t find The Whole Shabangs at your local supermarket, the Keefe Group recently began selling them online.
Check out the clip to find out more about the history of The Whole Shabang, and learn how prison inmates use the popular chip to make a delicious, sodium-filled soup.
