In light of the recent election in the UK, the Queen, of course, is supposed to make a speech regarding forming the government by the party that has won majority. Now, however, after the interesting results of the election, the Queen’s speech is delayed, and the reason for it is very interesting.

The Telegraph UK reports:

The Queen’s Speech is going to be delayed because it has to be written on goatskin paper and the ink takes days to dry.

Apparently, the British monarchy are more concerned than others would be about the archival qualities of the paper that they use.

[…] goatskin paper is not actually made from goatskin.

The material is in fact high-quality archival paper which is guaranteed to last for at least 500 years.

Well, okay, but still, why the delay?

Well, ink on this special paper takes a few days to dry. And the monarchy had “ready to go” versions of the speech for (a) a Conservative party majority, and (b) a Labour party majority. But the results of the election, that resulted in a hung parliament, has put all pre-made plans into disarray. Since the political parties themselves don’t know yet how the government will be formed, the Queen’s speech isn’t finalized yet either.

Once the details are set in stone they can be committed to the goatskin paper and sent away for binding before being presented to the Queen.

I love how even the most apparently mundane things become fascinating just by being associated with the British monarchy.

In this study, we continuously monitored Egyptian fruit bats for months, recording audio and video around-the-clock. We analyzed almost 15,000 vocalizations, which accompanied the everyday interactions of the bats, and were all directed toward specific individuals, rather than broadcast. We found that bat vocalizations carry ample information about the identity of the emitter, the context of the call, the behavioral response to the call, and even the call’s addressee. Our results underline the importance of studying the mundane, pairwise, directed, vocal interactions of animals.

This is brilliant. They were able to correlate their data analysis of the bats’ vocalizations with the behavior and responses that they observed… so now we know more about how bats communicate! Simply by listening to the vocalization, the context, addressee, and even “the outcome of the interaction can be predicted above chance level”. Fascinating.

From the discussion:

It is important to note that we used one set of acoustic features for classification. However, many other multi-dimensional spectro-temporal representations can be tested. The bat’s brain could thus be using some other representation that encapsulates much more information regarding different social aspects. The bat may be able to classify the context of an interaction with higher confidence, based on some acoustic feature which it evolved to use and is yet to be determined. Our analysis is thus probably only a lower bound on what a bat is capable of extracting from aggressive social vocalizations. For example, we did not include any temporal information in our analysis.

In any acoustic signal, and especially where communication is involved, the time parameter is usually crucial and will add rich layers of information. For example, just imagine taking a piece of human speech, and (a) only looking at the overal speech parameters, versus (b) observing how the speech parameters change during the speech. Case (b) will provide far more information than case (a). I think we will discover over time that bats have a pretty well-evolved communication scheme.

This is fascinating stuff.

Bayesian inference is a way to get sharper predictions from your data. It’s particularly useful when you don’t have as much data as you would like and want to juice every last bit of predictive strength from it.

Although it is sometimes described with reverence, Bayesian inference isn’t magic or mystical. And even though the math under the hood can get dense, the concepts behind it are completely accessible. In brief, Bayesian inference lets you draw stronger conclusions from your data by folding in what you already know about the answer.

An excellent, simple introduction to Bayesian inference. This uses practical examples and an abundance of visual guides: especially useful if you don’t have an extensive math background.

They’re remaking Duck Tales! Woo-hoo-ooo! (And now it’s stuck in your head, right? 😃)

(Featuring David Tennant as Scrooge McDuck!)

Looks great!

From the website of the company ‘Planet’, published the same day the ISRO satellites were launched:

Today Planet successfully launched 88 Dove satellites to orbit — the largest satellite constellation ever to reach orbit. This is not just a launch (or a world record, for that matter!); for our team this is a major milestone. With these satellites in orbit, Planet will reach its Mission 1: the ability to image all of Earth’s landmass every day.

This constellation therefore formed the majority (88 of 104 satellites launched) of the payload carried by the last ISRO launch. As of this launch, Planet is operating 149 satellites in Earth orbit — this is no mean feat.

Also, an interesting side note: ISRO’s previous largest payload that I referred to in my last post — 20 satellites launched in June 2016 — also seems to be for this same company:

This is our 15th launch of Dove satellites and second aboard India’s PSLV. The launch of Flock 3p comes off the successful launch of Flock 2p on the PSLV in June 2016