This is the latest in a more or less monthly series of posts that are more personal and inward focused (but still looking at science and tech) than the ones I normally write. Why? To have some variety for both readers and for myself. It is absolutely not because I'm out of ideas for things to write about. Really, it's not!

I once made it a rule that I should learn one new programming language every year. Learning new languages has all kinds of benefits. To begin with, it's interesting. Plus, it increases your marketability. And it helps learn new concepts and new ways of approaching problems. It's nothing but winning all down the line!

Yeah. Anyone who has ever made and broken a New Year's resolution is probably already laughing at me. It's not that I didn't learn anything. But just like learning a spoken language, if you have no one else to speak it with, you forget pretty fast. So I have vague and sometimes inaccurate memories of Prolog, Nim, Clojure, Coffeescript, Elixir, Julia, Go, Arabic and Chinese, to name just a few. Yes, those are real language names. And don't even get me started on how much fun it is to Google for information on "Go." I guess the community calls it "golang" now, mostly because of that.

Speaking of language ... Sorry. Forgive me a crude segue but I gotta be movin' on here. So, speaking of language, we have a headline claiming that marmosets call each other by name. Marmoset Monkeys Use Names to Communicate with Each Other.

Marmosets. They're a kind of monkey. No, not like chimps. Chimpanzees are apes, not monkeys. They don't have tails. Understand?

Anyway, I almost skipped over this story because it seemed redundant. How many stories just like this have we had lately, only with different animals? Three? Five? I can't even keep track. Elephants. Prairie dogs, I think. Maybe crows. Every once in a while, someone makes the claim that they’ve found some other animal that uses names.

Like all of them, this study uses statistical evidence. That is, they noticed that a particular type of call gets a particular type of response more often than some other type of call. That's the way these things usually work. You can't just go up to an animal and say, "Hey, what's your name?"

Okay, really you can. But even if they answer you, how will you know what they said?

I'm thinking that we should move on from this piecemeal approach. Just take it as given that any highly vocal animal is likely to have a sort of signature sound that acts as a name. A few years ago, that might have been a revolutionary idea. Now, it's more like table stakes, which is a poker term meaning, "If you don't have at least this much, you can't even play the game."

We know that mammals, in general, have language centers in their brains. Specifically, a part of the brain called Broca's Area, which is used in producing speech. There's another area called Wernicke's Area that's used in comprehending speech. In humans, these are highly developed. In animals, not so much. The parts, or something similar, are usually there.

But it's hard showing what they can do. It takes persistence, equipment, and math.

No wonder I'm not a scientist studying the vocal patterns of some animal or other. It sounds interesting right up until it's time to do the work. The work, by the way, starts with raising money for the equipment, the helpers, the travel, etc. Raising money is something I'm particularly bad at. I'm not bad at spending it, though. I can do that.

If I were doing the research on animal speech, I would spend a lot of money and try to get samples from as many different species as I could. I wouldn’t be satisfied knowing that they can give themselves or each other names. I would want to know if there were regional commonalities to names. That is, do animals that live near each other, speak similar "languages?" (Or at least have similar accents?) Maybe. Maybe not. It's probably more likely among similar species'. Like, other monkeys that live near marmosets are more likely to use similar calls. Unless they’re more likely to use dissimilar ones, so they can tell each other apart.

Is there an advantage to being able to identify individuals across species? Or to identify threats. Here's a scenario: Chimps are known to have different calls for snakes and jaguars. They alert each other, not only to danger, but to the kind of danger. Some kind of monkey or bird or something living near chimps would definitely benefit from being able to understand some of the information in those chimp calls.

Does that happen at all?

See, this is why I would be a terrible biolinguisticologist, or whatever they call themselves (Meaning the scientists who record animal noises and look for patterns in them that might, or might not, approximate language). I'm too easily bored with the slow, basic research that lays the groundwork for more complicated stuff. I have that kind of brain that would lose interest half way through and start looking for something else to play with. I mean, study.

That's one of the things that makes it fun writing this column. I can come up with those questions and then, a few days later, ignore them and come up with an entirely different set about an entirely different topic. Not that marmosets aren't interesting. They are! Did you ever wonder why no one ever domesticated them? Probably because they're too smart. They'll learn exactly what you're saying about them and run away, fast!

There's at least 2 kinds of domesticated animals, you know. Pets and livestock. And sometimes, which one is which is a flip of the coin.

That's an okay ending to the article but I thought I'd share this link (below), about the possibility that marmosets are "self-domesticated." It's an interesting idea but the evidence is thin. I don't know how you would go about getting more solid evidence, though.

Princeton study suggests that monkeys, like humans, may have ‘self-domesticated’

Note: I started a multi-part article earlier this week and now here I am doing something entirely different. No worries. I'll get back to the other part soon. The idea of how to adapt creatures to Mars is too interesting to drop just yet!

Here's that prompt: "A group of playful marmosets perched on tree branches, each holding a small bullhorn, using it to communicate with a group of curious human tourists below. The marmosets are animated and expressive, with different facial expressions ranging from inquisitive to enthusiastic. The tourists are a mix of ages and ethnicities, looking up in surprise and amusement. The setting is a lush, green rainforest with dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves, creating a lively and whimsical atmosphere."