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Pi, Einstein Tiles & the Mollies


Sky view with clouds in the shape of Pi

If you're a little nerdy you'll know that March 14th is Pi Day, the third month, fourteenth day of the year, 3.14. We're a family of nerds and we always celebrate Pi Day but this year it slipped away from us and we didn't even get to eat pie! This cloud formation I saw on my walk at the Airpark reminded me. There's even a Pi Day website where I got this fun fact:


Pi has been calculated to over 50 trillion digits beyond its decimal point. As an irrational and transcendental number, it will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern.

Can you imagine anything else like this number? I tried to think of something that didn't repeat but couldn't so I googled the question and came up with a recent discovery by four people at Cornell University. The site I found was an article written by Will Sullivan for the Smithsonian Magazine on March 29, 2023. You can read it here. Apparently, these four people discovered what's called an 'einstein' tile. It's a 13-sided polygon in the shape of a hat that doesn't repeat. The shape just goes on forever, like Pi, the number. The article says the discovery has not been peer-reviewed but is expected to be supported per Science News. Go figure!


Well, dang, I was going to write about how pi was completely unique just like humans are but then, upon more reflection, it works. The einstein tile is just as unique as pi. Maybe we should have an einstein tile day. I wonder what food we could celebrate with on that day? Ooh, we could all wear einstein hats! Seriously, the idea of a number that's infinite or a tile that doesn't repeat is mind-boggling. I began thinking of humans, how we're all one of a kind and imagined a story about Molly. In this fictional story she was born with something unusual that affected her life deeply:


On the day Molly was born, she looked, behaved and sounded like a normal baby. She cried when she was hungry, made gurgling noises and other sounds, too, like distinct bird sounds. At first the people around her and certainly her parents thought those sounds were cute. She'd coo and chirp when she was fed, and squawk when she was displeased. As she grew older, her parents became alarmed and started seeking medical advice. She could say the usual, "ma-ma" and "da-da" so experts said she would grow out of her bird sounds as she matured. A psychologist suggested that since humans learn sounds by listening, imitation and practice perhaps she heard bird sounds at an early age. Did her parents have birds in the home? No, they didn't.


Another expert recommended that Molly needed more human sounds to imitate. Her parents spent a lot of time reading to her and encouraging her to speak. When that didn't make too much of a difference, they came up with a novel idea. No-one knows who thought of it, but they were running out of options for a normal life for Molly. The day everything changed was the day Molly was taken to a bird sanctuary and as they walked through the trees and heard all the bird songs, Molly became instantly attentive to a particular bird. Apparently, zebra finches, songbirds native to Australia, use infant-like strategies to learn their song. This quote is not fiction:


In both infants and zebra finches vocal learning does not unfold in a pre-set manner, but rather emerges as an exercise in problem solving that leaves much room for external influences and individual learning styles," Nottebohm says. "We're not teaching our zebra finches how to learn their song -- how to get there is totally up to the birds." (Fernando Nottebohm, Ph.D. and Wan-chun Liu, Ph.D. citation here. Bold emphasis added.)

In the zebra finch bird world, only the male learns the song that will become their mating call, but it was how this bird learned his call that made everyone excited for Molly. The male finch babies apparently learn the adult male call in different ways, whether they're in the same nest or not. They all arrived at adult birdhood with the same song but how they learned it was individually different.


Molly's parents went to a child learning expert and a hearing expert for more information. Molly, they discovered, had exceptional hearing and she tended to use her singing voice to express everything. No-one knew how she learned bird calls, but as the parents watched her they were inspired to teach her human speech using her songs and bird calls. They began to sing the name of an object and as they sang it they showed her the object. Then they'd say the word. Over and over again, they sang the names of everything they could think of. Molly was very bright and eventually learned to speak human language well but when she was really happy, she sang her bird song.


 Did people think she was weird? Yes, but Molly spent hours with birds and loved to travel to different locations to hear them. She found that she could imitate other bird's songs, too. When she did that, she could sense and hear what they were saying back to her. She couldn't translate what they said literally but she had a way of knowing what they were communicating. When she would respond back to a bird, she noticed their behavior. After she graduated from grade school, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. In a way, she'd always known even as a very young child. She already was an ornithologist and eager to study more about the language of birds. She got her Ph.D. and was famous for her groundbreaking work particularly with bird abnormalities.


When asked about her bird calling ability, she would explain that from her earliest memory she heard bird calls and those were the sounds that helped her express her emotions. She teared up recalling her parents' struggle to help her learn human language and how singing words to her made her feel so loved. She also knew what her passion in life was going to be. In time she became a bird whisperer and was in high demand worldwide to help birds who had behavioral difficulties. She was also the leader of a group that advocated for bird habitats and was instrumental in founding bird sanctuaries in every country.


Her huge volume of work with birds eventually became critical through the climate change years. The zebra finch became known as the bird to follow to find water in very dry countries. (This is true! From Transcript of Evolution Earth - Heat) Others, inspired by her work, studied how to detect emotions such as fear and excitement in birds and other animals leading to a whole new field of interspecies communication.


The scientists suspect that other vocal learners, or species that learn their vocalizations from parents and models in order to survive, have this ability as well. "It is only a small group of species who do this in the world-humans, songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, bats, whales and dolphins, and elephants," said Congdon. "If humans and songbirds show an innate ability to understand the vocalizations of other species, would other vocal learners show this same propensity? (See article here. Bold emphasis added.)

Molly's groundbreaking work was instrumental in saving the world from a disaster on a global scale, but that's another story and the end of my story. My opinion and point? It's vital the Mollies in our species are encouraged to explore their uniqueness, not ridiculed and dismissed. The future is one that knows no borders as climate change, political change and habitat change affect all of humanity for better or for worse. We will need all of our unique problem solvers' abilities to think globally, to work collectively and co-operatively toward a future that exists. We need what's unique in math, science and humanity, the Pi, Einstein tiles and the Mollies of this world, to reveal the way forward.

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