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Posted by Sapient Fridge on August 22, 2008, 6:31 pm
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From your stream of consciousness let's see if I can pick out and answer
the questions individually:
>Well, nobody is perfect. Isn't that really the point about
>civilisations?
No
> We place
>such importance on appearance that anything falling outside of "the
>norm" might be rather terrifying or downright ugly to most of us.
>Hairy legs in women? Cleft lips? Thinning hair? Cross-eyed? Acne? An
>odd skin colour? Sweaty hands?
You want an answer for each of your individual problems, or all at once?
Personally I have no problem if you have hairy legs, thinning hair, odd
(or even) skin colour, or sweaty hands. Cleft lip, cross-eyed and acne
might distract me for the first few minutes, until I get to know you.
Sorry for that.
> Don't we all carry a heavy load of prejudices around
> with us concerning communication?
Not that I had noticed, unless of course the other person can't actually
communicate.
>Shouldn't we choose an intermediate language which neither of us know?
No. There is a fundamental problem with that suggestion...
>Just to be fair to both?
There are only two of us in this newsgroup? Gosh, you write a lot!
>How do you judge the format and quality of a message from space?
Whether or not I can detect and decode it.
> By?
>your own standards of educated, middle class, 21st century English,
>competent punctuation, broad vocabulary and decent spelling?
No, I'd expect an encoded prime number sequence or similar first.
>Are these the same standards you apply to dolphins and whales?
No. They haven't mastered communication via radio waves yet, so I'll
let them off the prime numbers for now.
>Can you
>speak dolphin?
Err, no. Was that rhetorical?
> It can't just be all about fishing, racing against
>ships and sex. Can it?
No. Racing against ships probably isn't a significant conversation.
> Do dolphins have local accents and hierarchy?
Yes
>Upstream boy and downstream girl?
River dolphins only.
>Shouldn't we know by now?
No
> It might
>be important. Who knows what vital secrets they hold?
"So long and thanks for all the fish"
Hope that helped!
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