No, no, no. It's NOT a straight linguistic code. Well, in a way. Red lights, green lights. These indicate *port or starboard*. It's a series of "driving directions", if you will. The ferrets cluster around the machine, and it tells them which way they need to travel to reach a certain destination. The concept is old, but not entirely original. honey bees do something very similar. If one lady bee finds a REALLY GOOD source of nectar, say a thick stand of flowering plants previously unknown to the hive, she will fly back to the hive and tell them how to get there to check it out for themselves. She does this by dancing. It's a frantic, strange kind of a little dance with much hiney shaking, but the other bees can easily interpret her dance as "This is the way you fly to get there." Many interested bees will stand in a circle around her while she does her dance, they will reach out occasionally to touch her, almost as if they are urging her on..."OK, you fly over the hedge ,we're listening, yeah, ...then past the oak tree...gotcha..." When she finishes her dance, many others who have NEVER EVER known about that tasty thick stand of flowers will fly there immediately, and start collecting nectar. They will come back to the hive, dance in their turn, and in a fairly short period of time, every bee in the hive will know how to fly to a place they have never been. I am *not* making this up. That's really how they do it. The FLO vacuum cleaner is doing the same sort of thing, but electronically, with blinking led lights strobing at precise intervals, that indicate "length of time to travel in that direction", until a direction-changing turn is indicated. Now WHY, is beyond me at this moment. I bet it's the work of that fiend, Sanka. Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML issue 5077]