The sequence of “The Sparrow” and “Children of God” by Mary Doria Russell are wonderful tales of the consequences of 1st encounters with new worlds and species. These books focus on the impact of evangelizing new worlds.

This spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom from electron state spin up to electron state spin down can specify a unit of length (wavelength, 21 cm) as well as a unit of time (frequency, 1420 MHz). Both units are used as measurements in the other symbols.” Wittgenstein’s aphorism suggests aliens would speak as we do because they “do” mathematics the same way.

Actually they were chosen because we expect aliens would “do” physics. Physics should be the same, regardless of how alien they are, because they live in the same universe and have had to deal with the same way things work.

Parisians are our culture lecturers too

I realized just how smart he was when he started speaking recognizable English. He would stick his head around the corner of my office and say: “Hello”. The H was pronounced with an m sound, but it was clearly hello. This is not a one time thing. He also has “now” down very well. Used when he thinks it is time for food.

The most astonishing example of how much he knows was when he wanted food about an hour before it was time, and i told him I would feed him when my son called to be picked up at the train station. About an hour later, my son called. As I hung up the phone, behind me I heard, “Now?” from Ninja. True story.

Our other cat shows no signs of intelligence. But that may just that he hides it better.

When I was growing up, we had a parrot who used to yell “cat” when he saw one out the window, and the dog would rush to the window and start barking. We realized the parrot had a somewhat vicious sense of humor when he would sometimes yell cat even when there wasn’t one, just to watch the dog rush to the window. As far as we could tell, the dog never caught on.

well, surely it was somewhat annoying having to explain twice weekly to the same barman at the same bar for three long years that what I wanted was a glass of white wine, not a glass of white wind

the French, well, at least the Parisians never actually leave high school (the lycée) and tend to behave like older students who see it as their duty to correct the younger students’ mistakes, specially when it comes to matters of spelling

I remember a black cat, called “Mitzou” he was my choice and favorite “play-boy ; when we had invitees he used to parade like a deainous macho in front of them. Also when we had the opportunities to take a few days or a week off, an employee of my hubby used to come to our home and feed him, he was a real tiger and jumped at him and scratch him when he entered into our home. Idem when I came back, he showed me that he was anger at me,in jumping at my back legs too. I had to pass some time with him to calm him. So this was his way, to show me that he loved me and that he didn’t appreciate that I left him alone.

I spent 3 years in France, but kept on thinking in my native languages. It probably changes from individual to individual.

What’s interesting about the oldest cave paintings we know is that they are not entirely abstract fantastic, geometric or something: they, in a way, depict real or, rather, plausible things.

Any articulated language, whether communicable or not, would have to be able to operate at a certain level of abstraction (for instance, the concept of cat, any or every cat in contradistinction to this cat, that cat or my cat) and to produce new meanings through endless recombination.

It works like this: we have the concept of “cat” (from having, for instance, seen this cat and then generalizing from it), the concept of “red” (from having seen blood) and the concept of “four” (from having counted some of our fingers); a real language must allow us to formulate something new, previously unseen, like “four red cats”.

As far as I know, cats cannot say or express this (an articulated sequence of numeral, adjective and noun), but can they think/imagine it?