On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 12:25 PM, Bruce  Johnson
<xxxxxx@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Sep 8, 2015, at 8:15 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Now imagine the first contact…from THEIR point of view : “This THING! it does not speak, it shows no emotion! All it does is <indecipherable weird flashing patterns that means ‘thing that causes pressure waves before it attacks’>, KILL them all!” because that race long ago exterminated the echolocating animals that would feed upon their ancestors...
>>>
>>
>> Kinda like Hiver hand signs, but full body images?
>
>
> Yeah. I’m vaguely remembering that I started writing up such a race a long time ago; we were having a discussion about really alien aliens; I came up with something like these, and posited that they never developed binary math, or computers, but they had staggering command of analog computing by virtue of using this kind of communication.
>
> I’ll have to see if I still have those notes around somewhere...
>
>

I have this mental image of a critter like a Salamander or Gecko, with
the detachable tail.
They figured out how to pump fluid over the tail to keep it oxygenated
and fed and such like, so it'll act as a biological color storage
device.

Or maybe skin they can shed on demand, like a snake, but the layer
keeps the color.

They never develop "writing" per-se, they just express information on
the skin/tail/whatever, then drop it off.
The next one that comes by can read it.

Their concept of computers is a thing with a light source on one side,
a bunch of layers of skin, and a lens like a microfiche reader.
You put layers of skin in like punched cards, and the parts that
highlight are meaningful.
The light source would be color-variable, so you can "select data affinity"