Finding dolphins and whales

I've covered quite a few kilometres looking for whales and dolphins, and I have decided that I am doing it wrong. The sea is very, very big, and from my deck I can scan only a very limited area. Even worse, the animals that I am trying to find spend much of their time submerged - I should be looking under the water, not over.

I've heard whales and dolphins on hydrophones before, and it was possible to get a sense of range simply from the volume. You can hear them a long way off, too - loud animals, and sound carries very well through water. What I think was missing from the experience was stereo - with stereo, it should be possible to estimate the direction from which the sounds are coming - and so steer closer.

What I would like to do is to trail two hydrophones astern of Briongloid and hook them up to a pair of stereo headphones. Now, sound travels much more quickly through water than through air, which might make it hard for the brain to process the data fast enough - but a simple fix for that would be to increase the spacing between the hydrophones so that the time sound takes to get from one to the other in water matches the time sound takes to get between human ears in air.

Since Briongloid is usually powered by sail (rather than a noisy engine), I imagine it would be possible to trail my pair of hydrophones throughout a voyage, monitoring constantly for cetacean activity. Interesting idea: now how do I actually go about building such a thing?

Error Propagation: an unexpected beauty

So, say you have a couple of measurements, x and y, with some associated uncertainty; the true value of x might be, say, 3 units above or below the measured value, and the same for y. The problem I'm currently working on required me to propagate error through several stages - and also to have a maintain a "confidence value" for that error (i.e., a probability that the observed error will not exceed the predicted limit).

It turns out that there is a little mathematical nook crammed full of simple and useful methods for dealing with exactly such a problem; a helpful colleague introduced me to "Error Propagation" (see link for handy formulae). The amount of error expected in x (up to 3 units) is termed dx, and similarly for y. In choosing dx, you are not really saying (contrary to what I first thought) that dx will never exceed 3 units; instead, you first decide how sure you want to be that your error won't be large enough to surprise you - say 95% - and then choose a value for dx that will rarely (1 time in 20) be exceeded. For x + y, the expected error of the result, d(x+y) is given by this very familiar formula:

d(x + y) = (dx^2 + dy^2)^1/2

Seems like that formulat is familar? Yes, Pythagoras all over again - dx and dx are now the first lengths of the first two sides of right-angled "error triangle", and the result is the length of the hypotenuse... wow, we started with probability, and now we have a result that can easily be expressed geometrically. Unexpected and beautiful!

What if you want an error value that will never, ever be exceeded? Then you'll need a much larger dx; to get, say, a confidence of 99.99%) you will need dx to be at the fourth standard deviation (see Wikipedia on "normal distribution"). The trouble with certainty is that it costs - you might have to increase dx quite a lot to reach that level, assuming your error is normally distributed).

The really neat thing, for my particularly application, is that once you've chosen dx and dy with a certain confidence, then d(x + y) will have a matching confidence: set the confidence for the input, and your output - umpteen calculations later - will have the same confidence for its error value. Time to go play with code and see if I really understand all this...