For my Physics final, I'm doing a project with my team (I'm using "team" loosely here. There four of us, of whom only two are doing actual work and stuff) about elephantine seismic communication (it's pretty cool. In a nutshell, the idea is that elephants thump the ground so that other elephants can hear them and thump back, and they can chat about things). There's this one woman, Caitlin O'Connell, who's THE elephant communication researcher. She pretty much discovered this method of communication the year I was born and has been working on it ever since.
So anyway, I was reading a preview of her book about elephants on Google Books, and she's making an analogy between seismic communication in elephants and the way people put their ears on the ground to hear things (awkward position, by the way, and what if an ant gets in your ear? That almost happend to me today as I lay on the grass at school), and then she adds,
Or, for Lord of the Rings fans, Aragorn putting his head to the rock to listen for the distant thumping feet of the fearsome Urukai as they bore Merry and Pippin away to Isengard.
Wow! How did she know?? That
totally struck home; that's exactly what I've been envisioning for the past month whenever I think about this elephant project. And then the bit where Aragorn (or was it Gimli?) says, "Legolas, what do your elf-eyes see?" and then Legolas stands on a boulder or something in his leggings and looks sexily across the plains.
I love Legolas.
By Caitlin O'Connell
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