My goal with the wireless-longhaul mailing list was to create a truly global list for discussing Wi-fi over long distances. Urban and rural. This month there was an exchange that I think shows it's worked at least somewhat. Looking at whois and google, one poster is from Istanbul, one is I think in Congo, one is in New Zealand and another is in California. Four people, four continents, and all different kinds of society.

It's not the dolphins. It's the people who study them. The whole field of people who are interested in dolphins are slightly weird. It doesn't take much googling to divide into some special camps: the protesters, the romantics, the healers, the fun-seekers. The noise makes it difficult to find useful information on the web.

With that said, hopefully this article about dolphin basics will succesfully encapsulate some hard scientific evidence in an easy-to-read format. And yes, I found peer-reviewed papers for all of the claims that are in there.

How fast can dolphins swim? Very fast, as fast as the fastest boats. What's their average cruising speed? According to [1] it's about 8 km/h. They do sleep and when they sleep they don't move much. It is difficult to track dolphin travel over long periods of time but lately there's been some progress it seems. Check out this graphical view ("Track the dolphins") of three dolphins around Bermuda. Even with tracking the crew reported difficulty in actually finding the animals with their boat.

Day 3 Satellite transmission received from Ace Boy at 7:00 am placing him near the south west of Bermuda. The next transmission told us he was headed north east around Bermuda. We tried to catch up with him but we could not find him.

[1] Rohr, J. J. et al. Observations of Dolphin Swimming Speed and Strouhal Number. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Technical Report No. 1769 (Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, 1998)