It’s official: girl mice dig new tunes June 30, 2009

A couple of years ago everyone got really excited to learn that male mice will sing ultrasonic songs. The scientists assumed it was to woo mice women, but now they’ve proven it to be true!

From the New York Times:

Kurt Hammerschmidt of the German Primate Center in Göttingen and colleagues have provided a partial answer to that question. In a paper in Biology Letters, they report that male mice songs definitely elicit interest from the opposite sex.

The researchers exposed females to the recorded songs of males, to calls made by newborn pups and to control sounds. They found that the females responded only to the males’ songs, by approaching the source of the sound.

But Dr. Hammerschmidt said there were some surprises in the data. Females became habituated to the male songs very quickly, and only responded the first time they heard the sounds.

Dr. Hammerschmidt said that this may be because the songs are important only when males are close by. So if a female hears a song but then doesn’t actually see a mate, she may lose interest.

If the females lose interest after the first time they heard the song, I assume the male mice would have to come up with new songs all the time. Wow, now wouldn’t that be an interesting study to see how creative male mice get with their songs?

Literature honoring DIY June 30, 2009

I loved this post on GeekDad:

Somewhere along the line, some folks may have gotten the idea that Little House on the Prairie is “just for girls” and that the plot mostly involves Laura Ingalls running through the tall grass in a calico dress.

But I’m reading the book to my boys right now and there’s a lot more D.I.Y. than dresses.

Much of the book is about Pa building the house. This guy was a serious maker — to the point of being a little crazy: “A man doesn’t need nails to build a house or make a door.” Would it have been that hard to throw a box of nails in the Conestoga before heading West, Pa?

This is life before Home Depot. Basically, he’s got the few hand tools he brought on the wagon. No lumber, just trees. No bricks, just rocks. No cement, just mud. And so on and so on. And if he can’t get the project done before winter, it’s going to be one heck of a cold spell.

But Pa gets down to it. We hear in detail how he split logs into planks using a system of wood blocks, an axe and an iron wedge. We see the house go up log by notched log. And then the chimney stone by stone. See full post

I read the entire Little House series as a kid, and I too had forgotten just how much adventure and DIY there was in this book. The engineering required to build a log cabin is truly under-appreciated these days

There are less and less books these days celebrating the true pioneer spirit and DIY attitude.

One book I read recently, The Daily Coyote, by Shreve Stockton, also has a couple of chapters of DIY as Shreve fixes a half-finished log cabin up for a cold Wyoming winter.

I suspect these types of stories of pioneering engineering came up more frequently in old classic novels, although I don’t remember anything like this in Little Women. And I haven’t read Three Cups of Tea, which is about building schools, but to my understanding it’s more about the social and friendship building rather than actual building (which is awesome, by the way).

What are some good reads that truly celebrate the pioneering, DIY attitude?

For better improv, learn the basics June 29, 2009

I sometimes think reading scientific studies about creative activities like art and music are just hilarious, the way they a) state the obvious, or b) try to make a fairly ethereal concept into a hard science thing.

Take this study: Dimensions of Music Improvisation, by Michele Biasutti and Luigi Frezza, published in Creativity Research Journal, 21(2&3) 2009. In their abstract, the duo say they found “significant Pearson correlations between flow and anticipation, between flow and musical practice, between anticipation and basic skills, between repertoire and emotive communication, between repertoire and feedback, between musical practice and basic skills.”

In essence what they’re saying is the more skilled you are, the better you can improv music. Well, duh. They also mention that certain instruments are easier to translate over to other instruments, which again is a no-brainer.

Ah, science.

Odd design choice June 29, 2009

Designing a radio or stereo can be tough. For decades it didn’t go much beyond a black box. However, this might be taking it a bit too far (From GadgetLab):

Radio Valerie is an almost impossibly cute little radio, a squat curved cylinder with a speaker squashed into the end which is tuned by an inventive combination of aerial and dial. So simple and elegant is the design that we wonder if it could have come from the same person that designed the truly hideous website where it currently lives.

The site is Pix Studio and the man behind the little wireless is Valentin Vodev. The radio is exactly the kind of thing that should be on the shelves of the otherwise awful “design” shops where lazy friends shop for “novel” birthday gifts. Vodev should bang these out at $40 a pop and he’d make a fortune. Or at least, he’d make enough to pay for a website re-design.

Product page [Pix Studio (good luck via Noquedanblogs]

Biocentrism June 26, 2009

I saw this book featured on MSNBC and it peaked my curiousity. The abridgment published online is based on “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe,” by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books. The authors of the book say cosmology misses the big picture unless it includes biology.

…

The 21st century is predicted to be the Century of Biology, a shift from the previous century dominated by physics. It seems fitting, then, to begin the century by turning the universe outside-in and unifying the foundations of science, not with imaginary strings that occupy equally imaginary unseen dimensions, but with a much simpler idea that is rife with so many shocking new perspectives that we are unlikely ever to see reality the same way again.

In the past few decades, major puzzles of mainstream science have forced a re-evaluation of the nature of the universe that goes far beyond anything we could have imagined. A more accurate understanding of the world requires that we consider it biologically centered. It’s a simple but amazing concept that Biocentrism attempts to clarify: Life creates the universe, instead of the other way around. Understanding this more fully yields answers to several long-held puzzles. This new model — combining physics and biology instead of keeping them separate, and putting observers firmly into the equation — is called biocentrism. Its necessity is driven in part by the ongoing attempts to create an overarching view, a theory of everything. Such efforts have now stretched for decades, without much success except as a way of financially facilitating the careers of theoreticians and graduate students.

Could the long-sought Theory of Everything be merely missing a component that was too close for us to have noticed?  Some of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or the idea that we are close to understanding the “Big Bang” rests in our innate human desire for completeness and totality.  But most of these comprehensive theories fail to take into account one crucial factor: We are creating them. It is the biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations, and that gives names to things. And therein lies the great expanse of our oversight, that science has not confronted the one thing that is at once most familiar and most mysterious — consciousness.  As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.”

…

Read the full, not-so-abridged abridgement. (Not that I’m complaining.)

Got a book you think should be featured here? Reviewed? Let me know in the comments!

forget LEDs; it’s beads! June 26, 2009

From Gadget Lab:

Research into color-changing nanoparticles could pave the way for a new kind of display technology. A breakthrough promises tiny molecules that can change color in response to an external magnetic field that can be used to create outdoor displays and posters.

“We have developed a new way to induce color change in materials that can be fabricated on a large scale and is pretty close to commercialization,” says Yadong Yin, an assistant professor of chemistry at University of California, Riverside, who led the study that included contributions from South Korean scientists.

The technique centers on polymer beads, called magnetochromatic microspheres, which are dispersed in a liquid such as water, alcohol or hexane.

Inside the beads are magnetic iron oxide nanostructures. Changing the orientation of the nanostructures with an external magnetic field helps produce the change in color of the beads.

The process is similar to the way electrophoretic displays, more commonly known as electronic ink, work. The two systems share common properties such as being bistable (stable in two distinct states), being readable in direct sunlight and consuming very little power.

Read the full article

Here’s a Youtube video of the beady action. I just like the name, “magnetochromatic microspheres.”

Music sharpens emotional IQ June 25, 2009

From Scientific American:

Imagine a quiet night like any other. Suddenly, your infant’s cries break the silence. Fully loaded with emotion, the sound triggers an urge to stand up and run to your infant’s room. But, considering that your spouse is a musician and you are not, who will be the first to reach the crib?

According to Dana L. Strait and a team of researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois, the musician should win the race. Their latest study showed that years of musical training leave the brains of musicians better attuned to the emotional content, like anger, of vocal sounds. Ten years of cello, say, can make a person more emotionally intelligent, in some sense. So the alarm carried in a baby’s cry make a deeper impression; your spouse wins the race. 

The new work is part of an emerging portrait of the broader connections between music, emotion and speech. These studies are finding that musicians are more accurate in detecting emotion — such as joy, sadness and anger — in speech samples. The effect has been found even in children as young as 7 years old, with as little as one year of music training. It is a fascinating example of how experience in one domain (music) benefits another (emotion perception). However, it is not until very recently, with the publication of the new study by Strait and her colleagues, that the biological foundation of the effect has been demonstrated.

Read full article at Scientific American

Calling out green artists in Santa Monica June 25, 2009

Not green as in new, green as in sustainable.

 (For some reason I can’t get their cool poster to show up in this post, so I’ll just put the boring and not very explanatory press release. Take that sunny Santa Monica!).

The City of Santa Monica’s Cultural Affairs Division and Office of Sustainability and the Environment’s have created a unique partnership with Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP), a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the cultural and creative sector become sustainable. AEP is a voluntary coalition of cultural facilities, theaters, museums, dance studios, art galleries, performing arts companies and individual artists collectively committed to achieving environmental sustainability.

On Friday, June 26th from 6:30 p.m. until 8:00 p.m., artists of any discipline and Santa Monica arts organizations of every type are invited to attend this launch event in order to learn more about AEP at a free event hosted at the Santa Monica Museum of Art at Bergamot Station (2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, 90404).

Information will be available for both individual artists and arts organizations to sign up and join the partnership. In addition, initiative sponsors City of Santa Monica Sustainable Works, LADWP and other partners will have information on sustainable practices for attendees. There will be wine and mingling before a brief presentation of the program and a Q & A session by the founders.

Membership in AEP is open to any artist or arts agency who wish to engage in sustainable practices. Members will be recognized as being “green” and be eligible for a free materials exchange program, energy audits, creative convergences, exclusive vendor deals and vetted resources.  Organizers hope that arts agencies will play a leading role in the greening of America, inspiring audience members and supporters to follow suit.

Arts:Earth Partnership founding partners include Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Division, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Santa Monica Sustainable Works and the LA Stage Alliance.  The Partnership is endorsed by the City of Los Angeles, City of Santa Monica, Santa Monica OSE, Arts for LA, Los Angeles Arts Commission, Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, Green LA, Green Theater Initiative and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.  This is the first launch party for this National Program. There are 8 regional open houses planned this summer all across Los Angeles at City of Los Angeles owned Cultural Facilities.

http://www.artsearthpartnership.org/

Amy Stein’s ‘Domesticated’ June 24, 2009

From NPR; how humans and animals interact, and how that dynamic is changing as human habitat changes, and takes the animals along with us:

If you’ve ever lived in (or been to) a developing suburb, you may have experienced something like this: You go out into your backyard to discover a deer eating your mother’s flowers. You attempt to chase it away, getting within just a few feet, but it just stares, blinks and resumes eating — as if your presence is a mere disturbance to an otherwise peaceful dining experience.

Or, if you’ve ever been camping, you may have been surprised by strangely aloof animals that allow you to come unexpectedly close to them, and they may even solicit for food. Domesticated, a photo series and new book by Amy Stein, explores these encounters between humans and animals in the “wild.”

Her book won the best book award at the 2008 New York Photo Festival and was featured at this year’s LOOK3 photo festival.

To check out some of Amy Stein’s photos, also go to NPR. To view more photos from the series, check out Stein’s Web site.

Desktop analysis June 24, 2009

There are a couple of blogs that focus specifically on what creative people’s desks look like. This is the first time I’ve seen it go into such in-depth analysis, although I know of a couple of psychologists that do this.

Oliver Sacks is an acclaimed author and physician, and a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center.

Says Sacks “This is what my work looks like to begin with—you see these long yellow sheets, then I go over them with pens, pencils of different colors, signifying different generations. The feeling of a pen or the machine-gun-like clatter of a typewriter appeals to me. But also, I’m afraid of erasure. I’m terrified of the notion that at any moment a computer may collapse and destroy what one has done.”

Read more about Sacks’ desk and what it means.