Amy Winehouse and Mos Def performance

Hey, you know what? Mos Def will be changing his name in 2012. To Yasiin.
Here's what he says: I'm actually doing it. That's it. Mos Def is a name that I built and cultivated over the years, it's a name that the streets taught me, a figure of speech that was given to me by the culture and by my environment, and I feel I've done quite a bit with that name. [But] it's time to expand and move on.

Yasiin is a name in the Qur'an's 36th surah, one of its most important verses. The rapper converted to Islam in his teens. "[I don't want] to deal [any more] with having any moniker or separation between the self that I see and know myself as," Mos Def said.

So there you go. Also, fun fact, he has the same birthday as you, Alex.

Article here.

Whales may embed their name in clicks...

New information on the clicks via an article at Wired:

Rendell and his collaborators, including biologists Hal Whitehead, Shane Gero and Tyler Schulz, have for years studied the click sequences, or codas, used by sperm whales to communicate across miles of deep ocean. In a study published last June in Marine Mammal Sciences, they described a sound-analysis technique that linked recorded codas to individual members of a whale family living in the Caribbean.

In that study, they focused on a coda made only by Caribbean sperm whales. It appears to signify group membership. In the latest study, published Feb. 10 in Animal Behavior, they analyzed a coda made by sperm whales around the world. Called 5R, it’s composed of five consecutive clicks, and superficially appears to be identical in each whale. Analyzed closely, however, variations in click timing emerge. Each of the researchers’ whales had its own personal 5R riff...

Moreover, 5R tends to be made at the beginning of each coda string as if, like old-time telegraph operators clicking out a call sign, they were identifying themselves. Said Rendell, “It may function to let the animals know which individual is vocalizing.”..

That individual whales would have means of identifying themselves does, however, make sense. Dolphins have already been shown to have individual, identifying whistles.

The video above (not part of the study) has several minutes of clicks.