A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.

  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    14 days ago

    That’s not really how it works in the real world. Usually you have both bandwidth and noise constraints.

    Sure you can send something like a square wave but this isn’t practical for real communication channels. Typically you’re sending many sine waves in parallel with multiple amplitudes and phase offsets to represent a sequence of bits (QAM). Then on top of that you’d encode the original data with both a randomizer (to prevent long runs from looking like nothing) and error correction. So usually the system can handle some level of distortion.

    What you’re hoping is that by the time the data reaches the user (really, Layer 3), all the errors have already been handled and you never see any issues.

    The bird is just another type of noisy channel with its own distortion characteristics.

    • Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      14 days ago

      You are not addressing my critique of your statement, just piling on a bunch of useless extra knowledge just so that you can feel superior.