Friday, December 28, 2012
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Friday, December 21, 2012
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Tommy Chong on Marijuana Legalization
Tommy Chong on The Young Turks discussing marijuana legalization:
H/T: DrugWarRant
Friday, December 7, 2012
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Monday, November 26, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Sunday, November 18, 2012
GMO Science-Science Journalism Collusion
Carl Zimmer calls it out:
On Wednesday, French scientists had a press conference to announce the publication of a study that they claimed showed that genetically modified food causes massive levels of cancer in rats.
The paper appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. That being said, outside experts quickly pointed out how flimsy it was, especially in its experimental design and its statistics. Scicurious has a good roundup of the problems at Discover’s The Crux.
But those outside experts were slow to comment in part because reporters who got to see the paper in advance of the embargo had to sign a confidentiality agreement to get their hands on it. They weren’t allowed to show it to other experts.
[T]he strategy was clear: prevent science writers from getting informed outside opinions, so that you can bask in the badly-reported media spotlight. Sure, the real story may emerge later, but if you get that first burst of attention, you can lock in people’s first impressions. The documentary about the primate fossil got the audience its producers were hoping for. The French scientists got the attention of the French government, and thus reinforcing opposition to genetically modified foods, although the study itself fails to make that case. Mission accomplished.Here he is on "On the Media"
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Monday, November 12, 2012
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
Saturday, November 3, 2012
An Interview with Maurice Sendak
Emma Brockes at the Believer interviewed the late author:
THE BELIEVER: Do you miss the city, living out here?
MAURICE SENDAK: I really don’t like the city anymore. You get pushed and harassed and people grope you. It’s too tumultuous. It’s too crazy. I’m afraid of falling over in New York. People are all insane and talking on machines and twittering and twottering. All that. I’m here looking for peace and quiet. A yummy death.
BLVR: A yummy death?
MS: I’m just reading a book about Samuel Palmer and the ancients in England in the 1820s. You were so lucky to have William Blake. He’s lying in bed, he’s dying, and all the young men come—the famous engravers and painters—and he’s lying and dying, and suddenly he jumps up and begins to sing! “Angels, angels!” I don’t know what the song was. And he died a happy death. It can be done. [Lifts his eyebrows to two peaks] If you’re William Blake and totally crazy.H/T: 3quarksdaily
Friday, November 2, 2012
The Cosmic Distance Ladder
2006 Fields Medal winner and UCLA Math prof, Terence Tao gives the 2010 Einstein Lecture on measuring the Universe. Check it out.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Thursday, October 25, 2012
DNA Swapping and the Fertility Clinic
Mitochondrial defects affect an estimated 1 in 4,000 children, and can cause rare and often fatal diseases such as carnitine deficiency, which prevents the body from using fats for energy.
They are also implicated in a wide range of more common diseases affecting children and adults, such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. Mitochondria have their own DNA and are inherited only from the mother, so replacing defective mitochondria in eggs from mothers who have a high risk of passing on such diseases could spare the children.
Three years ago, a team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive biologist at Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton, created1 eggs with donor mitochondria that developed into healthy rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Today, the same team reports2 the creation of human embryos in which all of the mitochondria come from a donor. The method needs to be tweaked to increase efficiency and gain regulatory clearance, but it is ready for the clinic, says Mitalipov. “You can expect the first healthy child to be born [using this method] within three years.”More in Nature
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Friday, October 19, 2012
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Renaissance of Quantum Physics?
Adam Frank in the NYTimes this past weekend on the new Nobel Prize in physics and quantum computing:
What does this all mean in practice? Take one area where quantum information theory holds promise, that of quantum computing.
Classical computers use “bits” of information that can be either 0 or 1. But quantum-information technologies let scientists consider “qubits,” quantum bits of information that are both 0 and 1 at the same time. Logic circuits, made of qubits directly harnessing the weirdness of superpositions, allow a quantum computer to calculate vastly faster than anything existing today. A quantum machine using no more than 300 qubits would be a million, trillion, trillion, trillion times faster than the most modern supercomputer.
Going even further is the seemingly science-fiction possibility of “quantum teleportation.” Based on experiments going on today with simple quantum systems, it is at least a theoretical possibility that one day objects could be reconstituted — beamed — across a space without ever crossing the distance.
When a revolution in science yields powerful new technologies, its effect on human culture is multiplied exponentially. Think of the relation between thermodynamics, steam engines and the onset of the industrial era. Quantum information could well be the thermodynamics of the next technological revolution.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
The social aspects of schizophrenia
Psychological anthropologist Tanya Marie Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (reviewed here) writes in the Wilson Quarterly about the social aspects of schizophrenia, highlighting some anthropological research done on schizophrenia within migrant populations:
The most remarkable recent epidemiologic finding relates to migrants: Some fall ill with schizophrenia not only at higher rates than the compatriots they leave behind, but at higher rates than the natives of the countries to which they have come. Dark-skinned migrants to Europe, mostly from the Caribbean or sub-Saharan Africa, are at risk of developing schizophrenia at rates as much as 10 times higher than those of white Europeans. This is a dramatic increase, and it has been shown by so many studies conducted with such methodological care that it cannot be dismissed as diagnostic racism, as if white clinicians confronted with angry black men simply called them “schizophrenic” (even though this sometimes happens). Nor does it seem that biology alone can explain the increased risk, although serious research is now being done to test the hypothesis that vitamin D deficiency plays a role.
Some observers think that the epidemiologic finding is a stark story about the way racism gets under the skin and drives people mad. It is probably more complicated than that. Another young anthropologist, Johanne Eliacin, spent two years doing fieldwork among African-Caribbean migrants living in London. Eliacin saw racism, and she felt viscerally her subjects’ stinging sense of being unwanted and out of place. But she also saw a social world shot through with hostility and anger, in which people were isolated and often intensely lonely. The African-Caribbean people in Tottenham spoke of there being no community in the community. They held up schizophrenia as the symbol of what had gone wrong. Yes, racism lay at the root of the problem, but the tangible distress was the sense of being hopelessly trapped.
Epidemiologists have now homed in on a series of factors that increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, including being migrant, being male, living in an urban environment, and being born poor. One of the more disconcerting findings is that if you have dark skin, your risk of falling victim to schizophrenia increases as your neighborhood whitens. Your level of risk also rises if you were beaten, taunted, bullied, sexually abused, or neglected when you were a child. In fact, how badly a child is treated may predict how severe the case of an adult person with schizophrenia becomes—and particularly, whether the adult hears harsh, hallucinatory voices that comment or command. The psychiatrist Jean-Paul Selten was the first to call this collection of risk factors an experience of “social defeat,” a term commonly used to describe the actual physical besting of one animal by another. Selten argued that the chronic sense of feeling beaten down by other people could activate someone’s underlying genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Monday, October 1, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Monday, September 24, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Fragile Complex Systems
George Sugihara in SEED on the sudden prevalence of complex systems and humans' failure to get with the program.
Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a variety of fields, typically in specialized contexts with little cross-connection. Only recently have we begun to look for generic patterns in the web of linked causes and effects that puts disparate events into a common framework—a framework that operates on a sufficiently high level to include geologic climate shifts, epileptic seizures, market and fishery crashes, and rapid shifts from healthy ecosystems to biological deserts.
The main themes of this framework are twofold: First, they are all complex systems of interconnected and interdependent parts. Second, they are nonlinear, non-equilibrium systems that can undergo rapid and drastic state changes.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Monday, September 3, 2012
Friday, August 17, 2012
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Monday, July 30, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Capital Grey- "Paint the Town"
Newest discovery. Perfect accompaniment for arranging references.
(H/T: Clifton's Corner at AQ)
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Weather Report- "1"
Weather Report in its first iteration back in 1971
Lineup:
Joe Zawinul -- keyboards
Wayne Shorter -- sax
Miroslav Vitous -- bass
Alphonse Mouzon -- drums, vocal
Dom Um Romeo -- percussion.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
Friday, June 29, 2012
Eric Dolphy Quintet- "Hat and Beard"
Line up:
Eric Dolphy — bass clarinet
Freddie Hubbard — trumpet
Bobby Hutcherson — vibraphone
Richard Davis — bass
Tony Williams — drums
Always incredible
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Jean Giraud (1938 - 2012)
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Peaking Lights Lucifer Mix Tape 5/"Beautiful Son"
Newest installment of the Lucifer Mixtape
Mixtape 5:
"Beautiful Son", a single off of the impending Mexican Summer release:
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Monday, May 14, 2012
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Monday, April 30, 2012
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Money, Power, and Wall Street Episode One
PBS's Frontline is doing a four part series about the global financial crisis, Money, Power and Wall Street. Parts one and two were released April 26th. Parts three and four will be released May 1st. Here is part one (four-chapters, three after the jump).
Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
The Original Neurophilosopher
Richard Marshall at 3:AM Magazine interviews famous Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia
New video documentary series from Vice looking at mind altering drugs. Lots of good science. NYTimes did a write up here.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Heron vs. Owl
This video was captured by the Lab of Ornithology's heron cam in the neighboring Sappsucker Woods. Early dawn Owl attacks. You can find the live stream of the heron cam here
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
The Wire's Visual Style
Erlend Lavik's video essay on the cinematography of The Wire.
Style in The Wire from Erlend Lavik on Vimeo.
H/T: WonkblogMonday, April 9, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
The Old Firm: Rangers F.C. vs. Celtic F.C. Part 5 (Final)
Just realized I never posted the fifth and final clip
Monday, April 2, 2012
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Monday, March 26, 2012
Algae Oil
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones posts a video from the ClimateDesk about the current state in the algae biofuels market
I couldn't support the points made about the risk of a genetically modified organism more. Ask Ian Malcolm.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Music for the Insomniacs
Over the weekend New Sounds did two shows titled "Night Music." Both are quite good.
March 17th, 2012, Nightmusic I
March 18th, 2012, Nightmusic II
March 17th, 2012, Nightmusic I
March 18th, 2012, Nightmusic II
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
13.6 miles up
Felix Baumgartner test jumps from 71,581 feet in preparation for his 23 mile jump this summer
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Valgeir Sigurðsson- "Draumalandið"
So this gorgeous record came out in nearly two years ago now, but it is worth mentioning again. Icelandic composer Valgir Sigurðsson collaborates with Nico Muhly and others on the sountrack to Dreamland.
Liner notes come with some words from the movie's director, Andri Snær Magnason, about the film and Sigurðsson's creative process:
Soundtrack is embedded below.
From the start I was determined to write poetry, plays, and fiction, but the material began to accumulate in my mind as each day something seemed to be going wrong in Iceland and maybe the planet in general. We should know by now that war is never worth it, but instead our government made the choice to support the war in Iraq. In a way the quality of life in Iceland had never been better but after privatisation of the fisheries and national banksan elite began to take shape -- a small group of people that would own billions and billions.
We wanted to grasp huge issues in this documentary, we travelled around the country in a helicopter, searched in new archives, observed the bird fight for their offspring. We captured footage of politicians and representatives of larger corporations during "mating season". But how would it all sound? What leitmotifs would bring the chapters of the film together, what feeling would the music evoke? What resonates with a Caterpillar digger, a private jet and flying over a beautiful, doomed landscape? It was clear that music needed to span a vast territory-- melancholic strings and deep, sonorous electro-vibes could act as a foreshadowing of impending disaster. Without making the audience feel manipulated, tension needed to be created to underline, to accent, to enhance or temper the film's effect in the appropriate places.
After receiving a copy of the film without sound, Valgeir Sigurðsson watched it in his Greenhouse studio; seeing what would start to take shape in his head. He proceeded to write the basic theme and then summoned to his side musicians like Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, Ben Frost and other friends of this odd Greenhouse. One could say that the essence of their approach to the score can be found in the Icelandic folksong Grýlukvæði: something is off and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what. There is a distortion, a din and a defamiliarizing quality that is difficult to put into words. Flying over the Fljótsdalur waterfalls that are no longer there, a solitary viola is our guide, and we can sense the threat. The music creates an intense atmosphere when we fly over the sand pyramids on Vatnajökull, in the direction of an areas that is to be destroyed because of a short-term gold rush. The shrill brass tones resonate and contrast the heavy, impenetrable silence.
Soundtrack is embedded below.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
A modern Russia?
Putin wins again. Rivals cry foul. Vladislav Inozemtsev at Eurozine writes about the future and modernization of the Russian state:
I prefer to talk about modernisation as, essentially, an economic process that leads to a modern, self-regulating economy capable of stable self-development. At the same time, the building up of an economy requires a serious, consolidated effort from both society and the state, directed at dismantling previous economic structures, opening up the country to the outside world and re-orientating social consciousness from traditional values and ideals drawn from the past, towards the future. In this particular context, I would say that the criterion for the success of modernisation is the absence of any need for new modernisations....
On the one hand, it is said that Russia is already a country with a relatively high standard of living and high incomes, which is why it would be inappropriate to apply the classical method of industrialisation based, in most cases, on the use of cheap labour. Supporters of this view generally support those who advocate a "great leap forward" from a raw material economy into a post-industrial economy.
Others, on the other hand, draw attention to the fact that, in the 1930s, the Soviet Union had already built up a powerful industrial base and that, in the 1950s and 1960s, it became a leading force in world technology. The period of industrial development has therefore passed, they say: the right thing now would be to focus on resolving more long-term issues. This position strengthens and consolidates support for the development of a "knowledge economy".
I would consider the basic counter-argument to be that industrialisation and the development of scientific and technical progress in the Soviet Union took place without any adjustments in market legislation and without taking account of notions of competitiveness. The USSR remained a very closed economy (even in the years directly preceding its collapse, export represented no more than 4 per cent of GDP, 58 per cent of which was directed at socialist countries where there was no visible competition to Soviet goods). Its industrial production was characterised first by extremely poor quality and high energy intensity, and second by almost total lack of development (except in cases when this development was absolutely necessary, as in the military sphere). Yes, the Soviet Union was an industrial power, and its economy was the second in the world; but if one compares the presence of Chinese goods on the global market in the early 2000s with the presence there of Soviet goods at the beginning of the 1980s, the "price" of Soviet industrialisation becomes instantly clear. The specific feature of the time was that the Soviet Union existed as an industrial power, but was not globally recognised as such.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
The Yellowjackets- "Greenhouse"
Looks like Jimmy Haslip is taking a year-long hiatus from his role on bass, and Felix Pastorius, son of Jaco, is filling in. Exclusive interview over at No Treble.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Illustrating the Success of Health Care Reform
Jon Gruber of MIT walks us through health care reform:
Monday, January 16, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Phantom Tails- "Dressed Wounds"
New video from Minneapolis's finest, Phantom Tails.
Bandcamp player below:
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
New S.Maharba at BTS
New S.Maharba vinyl 12" release over at BTS. Limited Supply. You can find his BTS mix from 2010 here. Previous NeuroRhythms bloggage linking to his 2006 casstte "s/t" here.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Zebulon Pike
In honor of their new LP, Space is the Corpse of Time, I am posting some tracks by Zebulon Pike, Minneapolis's best metal band. Full disclosure I used to study with Erik Fratzke, the guitarist of Zebulon Pike and bassist of Happy Apple.
This Pyramid is the Ascending
Behold the Wizzard's Fountain
Mirrors of Blessed Miracles
And Blood Was Passion
This Pyramid is the Ascending
Behold the Wizzard's Fountain
Mirrors of Blessed Miracles
And Blood Was Passion
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Were the Founding Fathers tokers?
So these comments of Newt Gingrich's from NH has been floating around the web over the past few days.
"I think Jefferson and George Washington would strongly discourage you from growing marijuana, and their tactics to stop you would be more violent than they would be today."Well this point is clearly moronic and terribly inaccurate. Perhaps he should have studied harder in graduate school. Check this:
President George Washington wrote a letter that contained an oblique reference to what may have been hashish. "The artificial preparation of hemp, from Silesia, is really a curiosity." 38 Washington made specific written references to Indian hemp, or cannabis indica, and hoped to "have disseminated the seed to others. " 39 His August 7, 1765 diary entry, "began to separate the male from the female () plants," describes a harvesting technique favored to enhance the potency of smoking cannabis, among other reasons. 40 Hemp farmer Thomas Jefferson and paper maker Ben Franklin were ambassadors to France during the initial surge of the hashish vogue. Their celebrity status and progressive revolutionary image afforded them ample opportunities to try new experiences. Jefferson smuggled Chinese hemp seeds to America and is credited with the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Did the Founding Fathers of the United States of America smoke cannabis? Some researchers think so. Dr. Burke, president of the American Historical Reference Society and a consultant for the Smithsonian Institute, counted seven early presidents as cannabis smokers: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce. 41 "Early letters from our founding fathers refer to the pleasures of hemp smoking," said Burke. Pierce, Taylor and Jackson, all military men, smoked it with their troops. Cannabis was twice as popular among American soldiers in the Mexican War as in Vietnam: Pierce wrote to his family that it was "about the only good thing" about that war.H/T: Andrew Sullivan.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
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