Those of us who sail catamarans tend to hold a prejudicial belief that “two hulls (like two heads) are better than one”. Apparently, Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team think so as well.

But when Space Ship Two / White Knight Two made its debut appearance this week, there was something even more enticing about it. Like the wind driving Humanity’s future in space was about to shift. We began to see how the rest of us might tack our way into the black sky for more than just 6 or 7 minutes of floating fun.

And, for some of my aeronautically knowledgeable friends, it was deja vu all over again. Like: “where have we seen this before?” It was downright ghostly:

Take a look at this design – circa 1979 or so – from the Russian Myasishchev Design Bureau as modeled by aerospace scholar Alex Panchenko:

It’s an extreme makeover of the Russian Air Force’s 3M bomber (aka the “Bison”) which had been in service since 1955. [Anyone who knows more about this, please reply with comments: below.] The plan was to drop a rocket-boosted vehicle, “X-15 style”, in the upper atmosphere - at subsonic but significant velocity - which would then light its candle and transit out of the atmosphere. In other words, a Virgin Galactic lift ticket.

Here’s another amazing Panchenko model-photo of the Bison space-launcher beast. It was called the 3M-2 concept. Bison bombers were made-over pretty often in that period. One of them even got puffed up (Super-Guppy style) to carry large parts for the Soviet Buran space shuttle and its Energia booster.

Apparently, the 3M-2 was to have had multiple permutations for various roles: It would have made a dandy crew delivery vehicle. Yes, also a handy satellite killer. And ambitious commanders, no doubt, dreamed of delivering squads of elite Soviet troops anywhere on Earth in a couple of hours (even as our USMC’s SUSTAIN program concept seeks to do in the coming years).

Alex Panchenko’s photos are postcards from the future as well as the past. Please remember, the first word in Scaled Composites is “scaled”. The rampant speculation, of course, is that Rutan has sold Sir Richard’s team on the idea that Scaled’s Level Two design will easily and inexpensively scale to an orbital Level Three configuration.

No surprise: that’s precisely the mission for which the Myasishchev group was designing the 3M-2 back in the late 1970s / early 1980’s.

Composer Igor Stravinsky (stealing from artist Pablo Picasso) supposedly once said: “the merely good composer borrows; the great composer steals!” Aerodynamic artist Burt Rutan would likely agree. His Space Ship Three / White Knight Three design, in Virgin livery colors, may just steal the entire orbital people-mover market by dropping the price to levels mere mortals can maybe afford.

So perhaps we’ll be sailing - sooner rather than later - into the space industrial revolution on twin keels.

“Ready about!?”

Back on February 7th 1971 (Earth time), Ed Mitchell was speeding much faster than a rifle bullet, on a trajectory between the Moon and the Earth. That’s when the strangest thing happened…

Mitchell had piloted Apollo 14’s Lunar Module down to the Fra Mauro region of the Moon, become the sixth human to do science in the dust, and gotten himself and Cdr. Alan Shepard back off the regolith and onto their bus ride back home.

Now he was bored: “We were just systems engineers on a perfectly functioning spacecraft.” So he looked out the window. The Command Module was pointing “up” – which is to say perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System – and spinning slowly, about once every two minutes. “Barbecue Mode”, it’s called; to evenly heat the vehicle. Ed was floating, watching the Earth, Moon, Sun and starfield pan by.

And then, without warning: an overwhelming feeing of bliss, timelessness, connected-ness… He suddenly and deeply felt the understanding of his constituent atoms as having been born in the fires of ancient supernovas. He saw Earth and it’s people and all it’s other species and systems as a unified integrated synergistic whole. He felt good; ecstatic actually…

He was not the first – nor the last – to have this specific epiphany.

Rusty Schweikart had felt it back on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.”

20 years ago, author Frank White collected, sifted, polished and curated the observations of 30 astronauts and cosmonauts. But these weren’t science observations or notes about the spacecraft hardware. They were reports of this specific, marked psychological shift – common to all these space travelers – immediately and profoundly broadening these hard-boiled guys’ perspectives.

This morning, in a hotel across the street from the Pentagon in Washington, DC, Frank White addressed proponents of proselytizing this Overview Effect. Cognitive scientist David Beaver had called us here. A core group of about 40 authors, astronauts, special; effects designers, ex-magicians, musicians, scientists, technologists, producers, journalists, capitalists, space-tourist adventurers, humanists, assorted geeks, hippie-survivors (and, yes, this reporter) quickly decided upon a loose strategy of collaboration and mutual support. Intended mission: maximize opportunities for Earth-dwellers to have individual Overview experiences. Strategy: use art, science, mass media, music, environmental awareness, personal networking and, oh yeah: the Web to spread the opportunity for non-space travelers to understand and possibly experience the Effect.

After decades of studying this, Ed Mitchell is pretty certain that the feeling of interconnectedness / oneness with the Universe is a consequence of quantum physics. Now Mitchell and the others assembled here want, specifically to induce or produce the Overview Effect in as many of Earth’s citizens as possible.

If this feels a little religiously fervent to you, you’re not wrong. And that’s a danger: It tends to turn critical thinkers off before they start thinking truly critically about the possibilities.

But, to the good, the Overview Effect is - by definition - simultaneously ecumenical and agnostic. And it’s nothing if not a thrill ride:

40 years ago, Doug Trumbull instantiated Overview Effects in moviegoers as the special effects designer of Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001 a Space Odyssey. Since then Trumbull’s technical-artistic touched has graced many pivotal motions pictures. He, more than anyone, invented the motion-based movie-driven theme park ride. That little thing at Universal called Back to the Future, for instance; Trumbull made it fly.

Today, at the conference, Doug foresaw a time perhaps 5-6 years out when a video iPod-like device would deliver an Overview Effect-producing dose of media content directly to users’ retinas. Oh, and it looks like Trumbull will own or co-own the patent…

Andy Newberg, a neuroscientist/physician with a background in space medicine, is learning how to spot the markers: “You can often tell when you’re with someone who has flown in space,” he says, “It’s palpable.” Andy scans brains for a living: praying nuns, transcendental meditators, others in the act of focused states. He can pinpoint regions in subjects’ gray matter that correlate to these circumstances. Newberg is seriously looking at how to fly equipment that could study, in-situ, the brain functions of space travelers. If this Overview Effect is physiologically real, Andy could watch it happen.

Interestingly, Newberg’s first test subject will not be a paid astronaut, but rather a paying space tourist: Reda Andersen slated to fly with Rocketplane Kistler says “It would be criminal NOT to study the first of us (space adventure travelers).”

Barbara Marx Hubbard is convinced this is evolution in action: “The sleep of the womb is over,” she says, “We are growing up; becoming fully human.” Hubbard has worn many hats: disciple of Bucky Fuller, Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, international space advocate, and importantly a mother of five. As we’re born, Barbara says: “we pass from the Inner Space of our mothers into Outer Space”

So, keep the term “Overview Effect” in the top list of your search engine. In the next few years, you’ll see it connected to some awfully smart, entertaining, pithy, profound, soulful, and, yeah probably some way-too-silly and hopelessly doomed-to-fail stuff, as well.

But such is the messy, non-directed, unintended, viral-memetic way of evolution.

OK, show of hands: who got a new HDTV-ready flat-screen this year – maybe just in time for the Big Game? Yeah, me too. Too bad. If only Santa, the FCC, you and I had done our physics homework…

High Def, it turns out, actually isn’t. It’s just a tiny bit higher than low; and, sadly, not nearly high enough at all.

As Galileo showed, nearly 300 years before the birth of television, what you see depends on entirely where you sit. I’m not referring to the saleman-celebrated off-axis viewing performance of your new electronic fireplace. This is about something bigger and deeper. As with other forms of recreation, size actually does matter – but only up to a point. And it’s not, by any stretch, the whole story.

At about the same time Robert Laird was inventing (some would say simply improving upon) television, Albert Einstein was dismantling Isaac Newton’s Universe. Einstein, you see, was anti-gravity. He cut the rotten spot out of Newton’s apple – namely, that the force of gravity should operate over large distances, but doesn’t seem to. This force, Einstein showed, is really farce. It doesn’t exist. We’re simply seeing the effect of the curvature of space around massive objects. Even to the point of gravitationally lensing the images of things on those massive objects’ far-sides (relative to you) right round to where you can see them, albeit stretched-out and broken up into bits and pieces.

That massive new flat-screen on your wall draws you near and shows you images and events from the far-side of human imagination and of the actual universe too. And it claims to do so at between two and six times the resolution of your old tube TV (if you’re looking at a true HDTV signal). Trouble is: the screen’s larger. 42 inches diagonal; maybe 50 inches… Oh no, did you go even bigger??

But dude, your couch and your recliner are still in the same place! And your room didn’t magically expand. So, instead of a better picture, you now stand a better chance of seeing individual pixels – at the expense of a cohesive image. Despite it’s supposedly higher resolution, your new magic window could actually be showing you a fragmented Universe.

The problem is the HDTV spec itself. It’s way too low. It’s not really “high definition” at all. It was conceived decades ago in the ancient, analog, Asian world of last century where apartments were petite and viewers sat right up close to their diminutive TVs. Today’s “HDTV” of 1080 viewable lines is actually a small-screen spec. Too bad yours is bigger.

Worse, most of the programming you’ll be watching isn’t even true HD. And much of it may come to you clipped, crunched and noise-ridden courtesy of your pre-HD analog coaxial cable or via badly blasted broadcast.

Despite (in fact because of) its big size, there’s a shockingly narrow window of distance at which your new monitor will be tolerable. I suggest you stay within 6 to 7 feet of a 42-incher; 7 to 9 feet of a 50-inch; no closer than 8 feet but no further than 12 feet of a 62, etc. Plot the curve for yourself to get values for larger or smaller screens. Any way you view it; it’s a damn small sweet spot.

Should old acquaintance be forgot? Maybe now you’re feeling nostalgic for the way your old 27 inch CRT’s picture took a few moments to congeal – giving your left hemisphere a chance to downshift into full couch-potato stupidity. Gonna miss the warm, cheery glow. Not to mention its actual warmth: CRTs are so bright in the infrared that they make pretty good space heaters. That oft-overstated threat of stray X-ray radiation; That always-unstated but ever-present threat of vacuum tube implosion…

Just over the event horizon – say 4 years from your electronics showroom –HDTV screen-resolution will at least double, maybe quadruple. Your computer’s monitor is halfway there already. A few high-end digital cinema cameras are as well. Gordon Moore’s Law has seen to it that the cost (so perhaps the price) will drop like a stray proton into a black hole. And energy efficiencies will improve; we’ll all be green-guilt marketed into buying them.

One likely implication of all this: both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (based on the 1080 spec) are doomed before they get off the ground. Your cable, phone, wireless and computer providers are all conspiring to kill them. Leave Earth for a few days on the Starship Einstein at close to the speed of light, and time slows down for you. Come back in a few decades Earth time and you’ll see that box-packaged, disc-delivered video became the 8-Track cartridge of the 21st century.

So it’s: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me!” Those bastards got us with a screen size that’s too big, based on a resolution that’s too low. Let’s not let them sell us the matching set of coasters, shall we?

Oprah’s been taking a lot of barbs for her magnum opus, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. Sited in South Africa, it’s the first - but surely not the last - of its kind. Critics cry: “Too opulent; Too few students; Too elitist; Why South Africa? Why not the US? Why only females?”

The critics are wrong. But to see why you have to dial past the shallow media focus which has, of course, been fixated on the “Oprah Winfrey” portion of the institution’s name. Much more compelling in the long run is the rest: “Leadership Academy for Girls”. And from that careful formulation flow streams of strong, compassionate logic.

Within a protected setting, Oprah has provided for 450 students, grade 7 through 12, to explore “math, languages, arts and culture, social science, life orientation, and natural science” with a through-line of leadership development transecting all. And they’ll do it with human teachers supplemented by ed-tech and e-learning. In its intensity, it’s relationship culture, and it’s underlying goal of preparation for events far over the horizon, this sounds a lot like astronaut training.

Before advancing a more rational argument in support of Oprah’s choices, let’s first simply remind her critics that she “made this money, you didn’t, right?” She can do what she wants to do. [A wide spectrum from Newt Gingrich to Bobby Brown must surely agree.] It’s her prerogative, her creation of opportunity in global society, her choice of mission.

And Oprah states the mission thus: “The school will teach girls to be the best human beings they can ever be; it will train them to become decision-makers and leaders; it will be a model school for the rest of the world.” That’s just how we used to think of NASA’s astronaut corps (before the Public Affairs Office adopted policies calculated to kill the charisma): a concentration of the best, the brightest, and the most motivated brought together to realize difficult endeavors, some never-before attempted.

It’s a bold strategy. Start where the problems are acute, not where they’re easy. South Africa is a country recovering too slowly from the effects of pitiless apartheid, with portions mired in wretched poverty. It has a weak and overly bureaucratic police system ineffectively combating a high felony rate, and a struggling health care system dealing with a population mercilessly wracked with HIV/AIDS. It needs to become a society where – for the good of its sons as well as its daughters – the crime of rape, “intimate partner violence” and other sexual abuse is immediately recognized, held utterly unacceptable, and is severely punished. It takes at least a full generation to break such cycles.

Oprah’s end product will not be a leader class so much as class after class after class of leaders. They’ll need elegant toolsets to leapfrog generations of nation building. Especially, they’ll need a deep understanding of and facility with the explosive growth of new sciences. Moreover, they’ll need enlightened management skills to harness the sciences’ hard-working daughter: technology.

Though it stands apart, Oprah’s Academy is not alone. Earlier this year, USAID’s Global Development Alliance and the African Education Initiative launched Mindset Cabanga (Zulu for “to think”), a direct-to-classroom satellite service carrying math, science and tech courseware. Fifty South African schools have so far been equipped to receive the signal. Twenty more in Kenya will get similar programming in Swahili. Given Oprah’s media acumen, it would not be surprising for Leadership Academy to become a shining node on this net.

Why girls? Clearly beyond the rape/HIV dynamic lies poverty’s largest perpetuator: too many children, too early in life. Protect and empower girls at their critical transition to young women and you null the nasty cycles. In addition, Oprah well knows the dynamics of women’s knack for networking. After all, she built a media empire upon them. Female Homo sapiens’ skill with the dissemination (!) of information is without peer in the known Universe. Our species’ taxonomic moniker means, “wise human” and wisdom has a precise definition: knowledge gained through experience. Create the boundary conditions for that experience to unfold and you maximize insight. Do that exercise with young women and you expand the probability for their newfound good judgment to propagate.

And Oprah is not the only one to identify the need to support and supplement South African women. In October 2006, Sir Richard Branson (known usually to LiveScience and Space.com readers as the power behind Virgin Galactic) and American undergarment entrepreneur Sara Blakely donated large sums to South Africa’s Women on the Move program. This is a four-year college-level course leading to a business degree. Some of Oprah’s first class of 152 students could be enrolling in it five years from now.

Too elitist? A certain measure of elitism is inevitable. It’s not unhealthy; it’s an essential part of rewarding aspirations. And of coaching the perspiration needed to realize those aspirations. But, critically, Oprah and her advisors specifically eschewed the educational chauvinism that “foreign is better”. South Africans will teach her girls.

Too opulent? Does not Stanford or Harvard contain a few facilities with a like level of finish? Several similarly well endowed? Any so well positioned to affect the course of a nation that so desperately needs leaders? South Africa has no Ivy League. Let these girls experience a taste of what they might become; what they might help their sisters to attain.

Too few students? These are early days for Oprah’s Academies (yes, plural). Think of Oprah’s Leadership Academy – South Africa as a bit like a human-rated spacecraft on an ambitious mission into a new flight regime. You want it to be the best ship it can be. You need to keep the crew size small. And you must handpick them for success and compatibility. You require the mission to be well defined. You can’t depend on much help from the space outside the craft. In time, you’ll want the fleet to grow. But you absolutely, positively have to get the first one right.

I’m not privy, of course, to Oprah’s student selection criteria (she personally interviews the finalists). But she’s invested more than $40 million of her own dollars and she knows the stakes. We know at least that these girls are there not only because of need but also (equally?) because of ability and potential.

Likewise, by selection and training, astronauts and cosmonauts tend to be self-motivated workaholics and selfless team players. [They don’t get paid that much. Their families endure long separations, regimented lives and, yes, quiet fear. Astronauts no longer enjoy rewards of fame.] They tirelessly labor for something beyond themselves: often goals out there in the far future – some without precise definition, and none with surety of completion. Yet they all exhibit a soft-spoken confidence rooted in the importance of the work and the membership in that work’s extended tribal family.

NASA astronaut and US Navy Capt. Bob Curbeam recently returned to Earth from a gig as lead spacewalker on STS-116, his 2nd Space Shuttle mission to the weightless, airless construction site that is the International Space Station’s exoskeleton. In May of 2006, at a conference of African-American engineers, Curbeam related what he sometimes needs to say to minority and disadvantaged American youth. I believe he said: “If you don’t make it, don’t tell me it’s because of the money. My entire education cost me a total of $400.” No similar opportunities existed in South Africa. Until now; until Oprah.

In the sciences, the barriers aren’t only economic. Too often it’s a cycle of sexual discrimination driving the killing of young girls’ confidence. Dr. Sally Ride, America’s first female orbital astronaut, has quietly been moving these mountains. Through her Sally Ride Science enterprise, she’s been erasing the imaginary lines that separate girls from exploring the Universe through the methods of science. Supplanting fear with self-assurance, Dr. Ride’s team shows girls – and boys – how to perceive testable truth where others are blinded by superstition, preconception and prejudice. Precisely what Oprah’s girls confront outside the Leadership Academy’s perimeter. Perhaps some of Dr. Ride’s science modules have found the osmotic pressure to transfer into Academy curricula. Perhaps they will.

Of course, here in the United States, if you have African blood (and, guess what, we all do) you can be automatically excused from science class. Especially if you have athletic or musical skill. Dr. Neil Tyson - astrophysicist, educator, communicator, author, and planetarium director – has quite a few insights on this particular cultural illness. I hope that his autobiographical work “The Sky is Not the Limit” makes its way into the library at Oprah’s Academy.

The word “race” – much like the word “planet” – has cultural connotations. But, like “planet”, “race” has no precise scientific definition. It’s a term of convenience born of a misconception; one upon which we’re constantly tripping.  We are all of African descent; all our families can trace our roots to the African continent, possibly even to a single “mitochondrial mother”. Wave after wave of restless, brave, clever explorers expanded our range across the world. And, in our time, we are just beginning to spread off-world. Now, paradoxically, as our satellite and aeronautical technologies accelerate the shrinking of planet Earth, the Human Family could – if we choose - draw ever closer back together. When Oprah bootstraps opportunities for South African girls, she accelerates us all towards escape velocity along both vectors.

All the assets of the Academy are chartered to encourage girls “to explore the changing world through advanced education techniques and technology.” This exploratory process really does need 52 acres protected by a high-tech security perimeter. It requires a set-aside; a safe haven for the weightless, timeless envelope of protected learning to work. For each girl, this won’t be just a mission to understand, and then alter, the changing culture outside the school. Essentially, it’s about the shifting of the Universe within each girl. As Oprah put it, “I know that this Academy will change the trajectory of these girls’ lives.”

Soar high, young women, the sky is indeed not your limit. And you may very well show the rest of us multiple ways to get there.

Ok, I’m finally convinced. It’s time for NASA’s Shuttle program to submit its resignation. Go fix Hubble. Gracefully and heroically bow. And leave on a high note.

We made Shuttle an American Icon. We all believed in it. It was appropriate at the time (although wrong). But now its time is past.

Here’s the crux: if we fly with caution, the timeline gets stretched and the price per flight rises way too high. If we fly with wild abandon, good people may die and we’ll abandon space flight to other nations. [Until they start military ops there, and we have to play catch-up.]

Shuttle has never been the Space Transportation System it was sold to us as. Depending on how you do the numbers, the Shuttle has never flown for less than about $750 million per mission. Now, with a severely handicapped flight rate, that cost is closer to $10 billion per flight. So let’s finally think clearly about this:

Myth #1: Shuttle is vital for Science.
No. In fact, it’s now the other way ‘round. Shuttle’s enormous cost has nearly killed NASA’s ability to do science.

Myth #2: Flying Shuttle to build the International Space Station keeps Russian nuclear scientists off the streets.
Huh? Only the inexperienced Clinton-Gore White House circa 1993 could have believed this one. If we’re truly afraid that idle minds turn to selling weapons of mass destruction, hire those folks to help restart Prometheus or better nuclear propulsion & power systems. These are vital for deep Solar System science. They’re essential for living in cold places like Mars, the Moon’s poles, Main Belt asteroids… And, no, they won’t kill all life in Central Florida – or anywhere else - if their launches fail.

Myth #3: We can repair Hubble with robots.
Nope. The best we can do with “teleoperations” is close it up, park it up in high orbit, wait for our children to grow up, go back, wake it up, point it up and hope it can still track. Hubble was designed to be retrofit and serviced by Shuttle. It’s the right and proper final mission for the vehicle. I know astronauts who are eager, able and appropriately trained to fly this one right now. Immediately would not be too soon.

Myth #4: The Space Station is vital for Science.
What science? If we were spinning rats, monkeys or people in artificial gravity to work countermeasures for cardiovascular de-conditioning and loss of bone mass… If we were baking large scale, rad-hard, high-switch rate chips made by compositing elements way up the periodic table beyond even gallium-arsenide… If, if if… But all we seem to be doing is asking PhD astronauts to ride a bicycle and pee in a tube. ISS does have practical engineering roles to play in the development of long-term crew support systems for Mars missions and asteroid trips. And Station does give us a platform to choreograph EVAs for construction in space. But science? When??

Myth #5: Shuttle is essential to finish building Station.
Whatever follows Shuttle, be it CEV + heavy lifter or smarter concepts, it will need payload bay capacity and EVA facility. Finish Station with that. Soyuz can re-supply it in the meantime. Re-boost can be done cheaper than Shuttle. And why is this President continuing the failed policy of his predecessors, anyway? Sell the Space Station to Space Adventures…or Virgin…or Hilton…or Disney…

I don’t hate Shuttle; I love it. Or at least I love the people who fly it and run it. I don’t bash NASA; I support it. Administrator Griffin and his new team are sharp, compassionate, innovative thinkers. But they need your citizen’s voice and mine to get the white elephant (and the White House) off their backs. So together we can go explore and settle the Solar System.

All things must pass. Even American Idol will eventually get cancelled.

There I was, 60 miles offshore, when the condom broke. No it’s not what you’re thinking. We were sailing circles around a spot north of the Dominican Republic, on a patch of ragged ocean called Silver Bank. I say ragged because it’s a place where coral formations poke above the surface for miles – but there are no actual islands.  It’s a place where many a Spanish galleon has come to grief. It’s also one of the places where the western north Atlantic stock of Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) come to have their babies (and start new babies) each year.

The year this particular year was 1979. I was working with a crew of scientists and volunteers from the University of Rhode Island to capture recordings of whale songs and ID photos of individual whales. The photos we called “fin and fluke shots”, those being the body-zones where Humpback whale markings vary most. Just like faces on people. But it was the audio recording that needed the condoms. We had an old U.S. Navy surplus hydrophone; a big black rubber thing with a length of vinyl coated cable coming off of it. But its electronic impedance wasn’t an ideal match for our Sony cassette recorder. So the back-up plan was to wrap a standard dynamic microphone – straight off the shelf from the music store – inside a condom and tie it off with a rubber band. This one had been abused by numerous bar band vocalists and, true to Billy Joel’s lyric, actually did “smell like a beer”. But it was the right shape to stretch tight our makeshift membrane for safe sound and joyful acoustic coupling.

Well, let’s just say that latex condoms are not designed to be left baking in the tropical sun then dragged across the transoms of sailboats. It needed to be a sailboat: no engine noise to crap up the pristine audio or nasty subsonic vibrations to scare the dozing Humps. But our sailboat needed lots of  time between recording runs – with our improvised “condom-phone” out of the water – as we jockeyed the boat into position to set up another transect across the reef. Fortunately, we noticed the split in our waterproof covering just a bare moment before tossing the rig in the ocean. Good thing we had brought extras…

Researchers have been tracking the Humpbacks this way for a couple of decades. Many of these folks are volunteers; budgets for field biology aren’t nearly what they should be. But their homespun methods have paid off. From the fin and fluke photos, we now know that these Humps divide into five distinct herds as they move north later in the year. And the whale-song work has shown that these animals have regional dialects and perhaps even family linguistic cultures. What they’re actually saying – if anything – remains a mystery.  

You can visit the Humpbacks on Silver Bank yourself - it’s now become an eco-tourist attraction. Some operators will even let you swim with them. Although the idea of getting in the water near an adult with a baby by her side strikes me as discourteous, if not disastrous (unless you want to win a Darwin Award)! 

You can also have fun with underwater audio in the privacy of your own home. Just stick any old microphone inside a condom and tie it up tight at the cable above the connector. Latex or silicone both work. Old-school sheep intestine doesn’t. But buy the non-lubricated, non-spermicidal variety if you care about ever using your mic for anything else. If your mic has a wire cage-style windscreen, you can leave it on. If it has a foam “sock”, take it off. For best acoustic transmission, make sure to stretch the condom material tight across the mic’s diaphragm area (hey, no puns please), leaving a small air-gap between the two membranes. Now throw it in your fish tank, put on the headphones, and eavesdrop on your animals. Cichlids and snapping shrimp are star performers, but many other species have something to say. 

The best story I’ve heard about “prophylactic audio” concerns the poor grad student who was sent to the pharmacy on a Friday afternoon to procure one gross (144) condoms for an upcoming weekend “diurnal study”.  His post-doctoral boss recorded multiple microphone arrays, changing the condoms often, for 48 hours without stopping. On Monday morning, the same grad student was dispatched back to the drug store for another gross. The very same pharmacist greeted him with a sour look. But as he rang up the sale the druggist said only: “Well I hope I didn’t ruin your weekend.”  Happy hydro-phoning!