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July 08, 2006
"All the changes, all the permutations of reality that we see are expressions of the purposeful growing and unfolding of this single entelechy; it is a plant, a flower, an opening rose. It is a humming hive of bees. It is music, a kind of singing."
OMG someone actually submitted a comment to my blog post yesterday! There's some bonus irony too, since my last post's title was an allusion to my dearth of readers...
For those not keeping score at home, that would be the twentieth comment I've gotten in over a year and a half of blogging and over three hundred and fifty posts, and only the tenth comment from someone I don't know in meatspace.
Ryan feels that the shorter blog posts I've been publishing of late are preferable to the voluminous ones I once tended towards, and I am somewhat in agreement. In fact, one of my goals for this summer is to redesign this blog so that I can migrate to posting one link at a time.
However, I'm also a contrary person by nature, so here's a really long post just for the hell of it =P
No [via] citations since these links are stale (most of 'em have been mouldering in NetNewsWire since, like, April) and finding the proper attributions would take hours.
Digs in the Norte Chico valleys are rewriting Peruvian history by demonstrating that the region had a highly-developed culture two millennia earlier than previously thought. Hell, world history—these pyramid-builders were already established as a civilization 500 years before the first Egyptian pyramid was built. There's a good, related Horizon documentary about the ruins of Caral called "Hidden Pyramids of Peru" by the National Geographic Channel and "The Lost Pyramids of Caral" by the BBC.
Archaeologists used radiocarbon dating to chart the rise and fall of the little known culture, which reigned over three valleys north of Lima.
The society, whose heyday ran from 3000 to 1800BC, built ceremonial pyramids and complex irrigation systems.
The find casts doubt on the idea that Andean civilisation began by the sea.
The ancient society had a close inter-dependent relationship with nearby coastal settlements, which were uncovered much earlier by archaeologists.
The people of the inland Norte Chico area grew cotton, which they traded with their coastal neighbours in exchange for fish. In turn, the coast dwellers used the cotton to make their fishing nets.
According to one Biblical scholar/philologist, there's no evidence of cannabis in the Bible. I remain zetetical, as the research seems a bit sloppy. The scholar cites the correct passage (Exodus 30:23), but he's supposed to be rebutting cannabis as an ingredient in the anointing oil, not in the sacred incense...
1. There is no credible evidence that the etymology of cannabis (Latin "hemp") is connected to Hebrew קנה בשם qeneh bosem (Exodus 30:23), literally "reed of sweet spice."
2. The best guess as to the identity of qeneh bosem, an ingredient in the incense used in the tabernacle, is that it was lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus). (See the entry in Immanuel Löw's Flora der Juden, 1924-34.) Nobody knows for sure.
Zorbing—that new sport where you strap yourself into an inflatable plastic ball and roll down a hill—is...how shall I phrase this as to maximize puntential?...causing a revolution in recreation.
Mr Akers explained that there are a number of reasons New Zealanders why have developed an attraction to developing these types of activities.
"We're so far away from anywhere that we've really had to make our own fun," he said.
"Also, if you injure yourself, then the government is going to pay for you to not only get back on your feet, but they're going to rehabilitate you and get you back into the workplace as well.
"This means that we have a non-litigious society, and so a lot of things start up that possibly would not be able to start up anywhere else in the world."
How-to: cure asthma with hookworms
This is my personal account of curing my asthma and hayfever by deliberately infesting myself with the intestinal parasite hookworm.
It isn't for the faint hearted and for some should not be read while eating.
It involves a great deal of research, a trip to Cameroon and a lot of barefoot walking in open air latrines in west Africa.
Covering the basics, some Australian scientists have discovered that vitamin A decides gender.
The cells that eventually turn into either eggs or sperm – known as germ cells – are identical in male and female embryos.
"Whether a germ cell develops into an egg or a sperm depends on the time at which meiosis begins," Professor Koopman said.
"In females, meiosis begins before birth and eggs are produced, whereas in males, meiosis begins after birth and the result is sperm."
Professor Koopman and his team found that retinoic acid, a derivative of Vitamin A, causes germ cells in female embryos to begin meiosis, leading to the production of eggs.
They also discovered an enzyme present in male embryos that wipes out retinoic acid and so suppresses meiosis until after birth, resulting in sperm production.
If you have Mac OS X Tiger, maybe you ought to be using Automator. I always felt they shoulda stuck with the development code name and just called it Pipe.
Open your Applications folder and look for Automator. You’ll recognize it by the icon of a robot carrying what appears to be a bazooka. It seems that many have started to call our little robotic friend “Otto.” And no, that is not a bazooka in his hand. It is, in fact, a pipe—representing the power of the Unix pipeline. Those of you with a better understanding of Unix than I have will understand what that means.
Initially, I wasn’t too impressed with the ability to save workflows as plug-ins, but I have changed my mind. When fellow editor Eric Blair saw a draft of this article, he pointed out that saving workflows as Finder plug-ins allows users to create their own contextual menu items. Imagine being able to right click files and upload them to a specific server, or create disk images with specific settings by working in conjunction with DropDMG (a utility from ATPM’s publisher).
This write-up of some recent zoological discoveries in an Israeli cave sounds like the exposition to a bad horror flick:
The cave, which has been dubbed the Ayalon Cave, is "unique in the world," said Prof. Amos Frumkin of the Hebrew University Department of Geography. This is due mainly to its isolation from the outside world, since the cave's surface is situated under a layer of chalk that is impenetrable to water. The cave, with its branches, extends over some 2½ kilometers, making it Israel's second largest limestone cave.
The invertebrate animals found in the cave – four seawater and freshwater crustaceans and four terrestial species – are related to but different from other, similar life forms known to scientists. The species have been sent to biological experts in both Israel and abroad for further analysis and dating. It is estimated that these species are millions of years old. Also found in the cave were bacteria that serve as the basic food source in the ecosystem.
"The eight species found thus far are only the beginning" of what promises to be "a fantastic biodiversity," said Dr. Hanan Dimentman of the Hebrew University Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, another of the researchers involved in the project. He said that he expects further exploration to reveal several other unique life forms.
The animals found there were all discovered live, except for a blind species of scorpion, although Dr. Dimentman is certain that live scorpions will be discovered in further explorations and also probably an animal or animals which feed on the scorpions.
The lake is part of the Yarkon-Taninim aquifer, one of Israel's two aquifers, yet is different in temperature and chemical composition from the main waters of the aquifer. The lake's temperature and salinity indicates that its source is deep underground.
Dentistry is old. Real old.
Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday's journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.
That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought — and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.
This was no mere tooth tinkering. The drilled teeth found in the graveyard were hard-to-reach molars. And in at least one instance, the ancient dentist managed to drill a hole in the inside back end of a tooth, boring out toward the front of the mouth.
The holes went as deep as one-seventh of an inch (3.5 millimeters).
Researchers figured that a small bow was used to drive the flint drill tips into patients' teeth. Flint drill heads were found on site. So study lead author Roberto Macchiarelli, an anthropology professor at the University of Poitiers, France, and colleagues simulated the technique and drilled through human (but no longer attached) teeth in less than a minute.
Researchers were impressed by how advanced the society was in Pakistan's Baluchistan province. The drilling occurred on ordinary men and women.
The dentistry, probably evolved from intricate ornamental bead drilling that was also done by the society there, went on for about 1,500 years until about 5500 B.C., Macchiarelli said. After that, there were no signs of drilling.
Here's a nice mathy page on Phi, the golden ratio.
Bertrand Russell, infinity, and the Tristram Shandy paradox of the slow autobiographer
Sterne writes about Tristram Shandy as an individual committed to writing an autobiography. However, he is so slow that it takes him one year in order to complete only one day. This means that the most recent event that could be recorded is the day that occurred one year ago. As Shandy writes an additional day, it takes him an additional year to complete the events of that day. Russell uses this example and believes that an actual infinite can be achieved through successive addition only if Shandy has an infinite number of days to complete it.
Craig responds to Russell that the problem with this argument seems to be that while an infinite number of years is a necessary condition of recording an infinite number of days at the rate of one day per year, it is not a sufficient condition. What is also needed is that the days and years be arranged in a certain way such that every day is succeeded by a year in which to record it. But then it will be seen that Tristram Shandy's task is inherently paradoxical; the absurdity lies not in the infinity of the past but in the task itself.(7)
Craig continues and claims that instead of Shandy writing forever and catching up on history, he would eventually be infinitely far behind.
"Kepler would be pleased"—John Baez's tour de force post on math and neo-Riemannian music theory:
When Tom first mentioned "neo-Riemannian theory", I thought this was some bizarre application of differential geometry to music. But no - we're not talking about the 19th-century mathematician Bernhard Riemann, we're talking about the 19th-century music theorist Hugo Riemann!
Based on the work on Euler - yes, the Euler - Hugo Riemann introduced diagrams called "tone nets" to study the network of relations between similar chords.
Apparently Riemann's ideas have caught on in a big way. Monzo says that "use of lattices is endemic on internet tuning lists", as if they were some sort of infectious disease.
Dysart seems more gung-ho about it all. The "donuts" he mentions arise when you curl up tone nets by identifying notes that differ by an octave. He has some nice pictures of them!
In neo-Riemannian theory, people like Lewin and Hyer started extending Riemann's ideas by using group theory to systematize operations on chords. The best easy introduction to this is Fiore's paper "Music and mathematics". Here you can read about math lurking in the music of Elvis and the Beatles! Or, if you're more of a highbrow sort, see what he has to say about Hindemith and Liszt's "Transcendental Etudes". And if you like doughnuts and music, you'll love the section where he explains how Beethoven's Ninth traces out a systematic path in a torus-shaped tone net!
The transposition-inversion group has 24 elements. Mathematicians call it the 24-element "dihedral group", since it consists of the symmetries of a regular 12-sided polygon where you're allowed to rotate the polygon (transposition) and also flip it over (inversion). I hope you see that this geometrical picture is just a way of visualizing the 12 notes.
You should be left wondering why P, L, and R generate the group of all transformations of triads that commute with transposition and inversion - and why this group, like the transposition-inversion group itself, has exactly 24 elements!
It turns out some of this has a simple explanation, which has very little to do with the details of triads or even the 12-note scale.
Imagine a scale with n equally spaced notes. Transpositions and inversions will generate a group with 2n elements. Let's call this group G. If you take any "sufficiently generic" chord in our scale, G will act on it to give a set S consisting of 2n different chords. Then it's a mathematical fact that the group of permutations of S that commute with all transformations in G will be isomorphic to G! So, it too will have 2n elements.
The pretty math I've just described only captures a microscopic portion of what makes music interesting. It doesn't, for example, have anything to say about what makes some intervals more dissonant than others. As Pythagoras noticed, simple frequency ratios like 3/2 or 4/3 make for less dissonant chords than gnarly fractions like 1259/723. The equal tempered tuning system, where the basic frequency ratio is 21/12, would have made Pythagoras roll in his grave! Advocates of other tuning systems say these irrational frequency ratios are driving us crazy, making wars break out and plants wilt - but there's an unavoidable conflict between the desire for simple ratios and the desire for evenly spaced notes, built into the fabric of mathematics and music. Every tuning system is thus a compromise. I would like to understand this better; there's bound to be a lot of nice number theory here.
More generally: if you give me any voice leading between C major and E minor, I can give you an exactly analogous voice leading between D major and F# minor, or C minor and Ab major, etc. So "neo-Riemannian" progressions identify a class of harmonic progressions (functions between unordered collections of points on the circle) that are interesting from a voice leading perspective. (They identify pairs of chord progressions that can be linked by the same voice leadings, to within rotation and reflection.)
Posted by Jon Rubin at July 8, 2006 08:53 PM
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Comments
The only effect of your long posts is that I sometimes mark your feed not-to-expire, until I find a weekend to go through and catch up on something interesting.
Kinda surprised you don't have more readers-commenters: this is one of the more interesting blogs around, in my opinion. :)
Posted by: Ryan at July 11, 2006 02:05 AM