Obsidian Wings

get a load of this open Friday thread

electronically transmitted to you by liberal japonicus

Scientists have connected the brains of a pair of animals and allowed them to share sensory information in a major step towards what the researchers call the world's first "organic computer".

The US team fitted two rats with devices called brain-to-brain interfaces that let the animals collaborate on simple tasks to earn rewards, such as a drink of water.

In one radical demonstration of the technology, the scientists used the internet to link the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles, with one in the researchers' lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the other in Natal, Brazil.

I don't know if you are thinking what I'm thinking, but apparently, the main researcher is, and he says

"I don't think there's any risk of supersmart rats from this," he added. "There's a big difference between sharing sensory information and being able to plan. I'm not worried about an imminent invasion of 'rat multiborgs'."

Sure, he isn't. I guess it all hovers around your definition of 'imminent'. Discuss

Pope Benedict and the Grand Vizier Problem

by Doctor Science

I keep seeing references to how surprised Catholics, including those at the Vatican, are by Pope Benedict's nigh-unprecedented abdication. I cannot figure out why anyone knowledgeable was surprised.

I am by no means a serious Vatican-watcher, but I knew that Benedict repeatedly said that he thought resignation should be an option for a Pope who's no longer up to the physical and mental rigors of the role. I never thought he was just blowing smoke about this, because I believe he was particularly aware of what my family calls "the Grand Vizier Problem".

You know how in stories, when the Emperor or other supreme ruler is getting old and maybe sick, the Grand Vizier is there to help the old guy out, take some of the burden of rulership off his weary shoulders, shield him from all those tedious decisions? Yeah. As Terry Pratchett says in Interesting Times:

Grand Viziers were always scheming megalomaniacs. It was probably in the job description: "Are you a devious, plotting, unreliable madman? Ah, good, then you can be my most trusted advisor."

Absolutely no-one in the world knows better than Benedict how this works for a Pope, because when John Paul II was failing he was the Grand Vizier. And I think that from the start of Benedict's papacy, one of his goals was to make sure no-one grand-viziers[1] *him*.

Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac. Power just barely behind the throne: this is how you do it. Painting by Philippe de Champaigne.

A blaze of light in every word

by Doctor Science

Via Slacktivist and Jessica at Friendly Atheist, I've learned that WORLD magazine editor and developer of "compassionate conservatism" Marvin Olasky has re-written the lyrics to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, the better to "take the music captive" for Christianity.

Now, I don't agree with Jessica that "Hallelujah" is The Best Song Ever, but it's certainly one of the best. Importantly, it's one of the best and most popular religious songs written in the past several decades. "Religious" in the way Rufus Wainwright described it: "The music never pummels the words. The melody is almost liturgical and conjures up religious feelings."

The trouble for a Christianist like Olasky is that the complex and poetic lyrics Cohen wrote for "Hallelujah" don't lend themselves to a single, straightforward, doctrinally pure interpretation. That's one reason I think they *work*, but it doesn't make them comfortable in the way he prefers.

I'm cutting here because this somehow turned into 2000 words about "Hallelujah", religion, the Silmarillion, and Stargate: Atlantis.

A telescope Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Being a long term foreign resident is kind of dangerous if you are a pack-rat or a collector, because in some ways, you have a wider circle of acquaintances, and they are often moving, returning, downsizing, so it's very easy to get someone's guitar, or their weight set only used a few times, etc, etc. That explains how I am the proud owner of a reflecting telescope. Going to do some moon watching, and then maybe give it to my daughter's junior high school. 

So what sort of things have ended up in your attic or garage?

you, zombies and your cat

by liberal japonicus

Probably more of an open thread topic (but all my posts are basically open threads), but by way of introduction, I love the observation that zombies are a boy thing, vampires are a girl thing because, like every good joke, there is an uncomfortable observation at the heart of it. Boys like zombies because, when you are in a zombie apocalypse, questions of survival trump questions of committment. On the other hand, 'till death do us part' takes on a whole new level when you are part of the undead.

When we toss in the concept of free will, things get really interesting. While the etiology of zombies is a little more fluid than vampires, I think vampires have it all over zombies in terms of free will. Compelled by the blood lust but fighting it is a lot more appealing romantically than must eat brains, will eat brains.

That's a roundabout way to introduce cats and this article to the mix. 

Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.

The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDSepidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.

But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.”

a bit more below the fold, with an autoplay video.

A solfege Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

A bit early, but I have meetings all day tomorrow. My youngest daughter has started piano. The older daughter started at a Yamaha school and is now taking private lessons and the younger one had to have the same as her older sister is doing now, so she has started private lessons with the same teacher. With Yamaha, there were lesson books and homework, so there wasn't much of a chance for me to do anything, but the private teacher is starting with a 30 minute lesson a week and the youngest comes home and wants to do more. So I started having her write the solfege for the tunes in her piano book.

If you don't know about solfege, it's the system that is related to the syllables that Rodgers and Hammerstein used for the 'Do Re Mi' tune in The Sound of Music. Unfortunately, what I wanted her to learn was the movable do system, where do is the tonic, so that if the song was in the key of C, do would be C, but if it were in the key of F, do would be F. People who learn it this way learn the system as a set of relationships, so learning upon what do is, they can sing the melody and easily identify the intervals. I say unfortunately because the piano teacher said that she (and apparently most Japanese) learn the fixed do system, where the syllables are just names of different notes, so do is nothing more that C. Wikipedia on this point is a bit confusing, saying that Japan uses fixed do in one place, but movable do in another, but I think they correctly note that solfege with a movable do is a Germanic tradition. 

I never learned solfege, but the idea of learning a system where I could immediately place the intervals seems too cool for words. There is a lot of argument about which system is better and one of the arguments against a movable do is that music that does not have a clear tonality. On the other hand, the bulk of western music is tonal, with a clear and discerible tonal center. It's a bit strange, in terms of classical music, Japan had and continues to have a great affinity for Germanic music and Prussian education was the model on which Japan based its education system, but doesn't use the movable do. Since I've not done any musical education in Japan, I don't know if there are places that teach movable do solfege but it is not something that is in elementary school music. Anyway, helping my daughter now seems a bit more mundane. A related subject below the fold

Wednesday Book Meme

by Doctor Science

This has been going around on livejournal and dreamwidth, and seems a reasonable way of keeping track of my reading. Especially given that I'm surrounded by unfinished post drafts, and now the Accord's transmission is circling the drain -- and since it's a 2001 with 130K miles, replacing the transmission may be throwing good money down a hole. But I *hate* shopping for cars, and shopping for a used car is the worst.

Bus on the Place Pigalle, Paris (1882), by Giovanni Boldini.

It's particularly aggravating because it emphasizes one of the things I hate about America: lack of public transportation. The car will be for Sprog the Elder (and with her money, thankfully), which she cannot do without because, even though she works in a building with several hundred employees, on a major road, only a couple of miles from a train line and in a continuous urban area, there is no bus she can use to get to work. She couldn't expect to live less than 1.5 miles from work, and there's not even a way to walk there that would put her on sidewalks all the way. Basically, even in a fairly urbanized area of the Northeast, you can't hold most jobs if you don't have a car.

Is it unusual in other countries for people in great financial trouble to live in their cars? I'm pretty sure every American over 30 knows someone who's lived in their car at one point or another.

Anyway, on to the meme:

What are you reading now?

Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds , by Bernd Heinrich. A good combination of naturalist's story-telling and scientific insights. Reminds me of Konrad Lorenz's King Solomon's Ring, one of the most influential books in my life.

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovich. UK title: Rivers of London. Very good so far, a noir magic-detective dripping with London atmosphere, frequently amusingly witty, and with a modern, multi-racial cast. I can see why the e-friend who recced it said Aaronovich was her comfort-reading discovery of 2012.

What did you recently finish reading?

China Airborne by James Fallows. Fallows is both a licensed pilot and maybe the best American journalist writing about China; this book is two for the price of one. Great insights into the aircraft industry and to Chinese industrial and political development. Most important quotes:

The main surprise of living in China, as opposed to reading or hearing about it, is how much it is a loose assemblage of organizations and aspects and subcultures, an infinity of self-enclosed activities, rather than a "country" in the normal sense.

and

The smiley curve ... indicates the relative profitability of each stage of the process. The highest values are at its two extremes--the extra profit that goes to an Apple- or Mercedes-branded product, and the margin from retail sales and service. The lowest value is at the bottom of the curve, where the actual manufacturing takes place. And that lowest niche is the one that China has occupied [for the last] thirty years of its growth. The work was done in China, and the money went everyplace else.

Also, the idea that aerospace is an "apex industry", as big cats or eagles are "apex predators": they rely on, and so reflect the health and development of, the whole system.

One of the biggest problems in developing a Chinese aerospace industry is philosophical and emotional. To successfully build and run commercial aircraft requires many people buying into the goal of rigorous, even nit-picking, attention to long lists of rules in manufacture and maintenance. For instance, one reason there are only three core manufacturers of large civil aircraft engines in the world (GE Aviation, Pratt & Whitney, and Rolls Royce) is because six sigma quality standards aren't enough, they need eight sigma.

Chinese culture is still closely tied to the Confucian values of thrift, "making do", tolerance for small errors, flexible response to situations, respect for other people's status, and human understanding. This may be an effective way to run a society, but it's a terrible way to build a jet engine.

What do you think you'll read next?

Fiction: it will be my turn for Dodger by Terry Pratchett. Word from the rest of the family is that it's amusing, though predictable.

Non-fiction: probably Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde, which is waiting for me at the library (mem. to self: must pick up this eve). I've got History of Beauty by Umberto Eco, but it's looking a bit precious for my current mood.

Your Friday night metallic coin thread

by liberal japonicus

It seems like only yesterday talk of a 1 trillion dollar coin was bouncing around. I'm not sure what I thought about it, but the Virginia legislature knows a good thing when it sees one.

the chamber embraced Del. Bob Marshall's measure (HJ590) authorizing a $17,440 study of whether Virginia should establish a "metallic-based" alternative currency in case the Federal Reserve system suffers a major meltdown.

This WaPo article has more details. Or you could hit the original article to see what other brilliant ideas are a-percolating over there.

Are criminal elements in the air in China?

by Doctor Science

James Fallows at the Atlantic has been covering the ongoing terrible pollution problems in China. I think of Kevin Drum's discussion of lead and crime, and wonder if the high-crime American past is the Chinese future.

Gas, by Edward Hopper (1940). Drum lays out the evidence that the "crime wave" of the second half of the 20th century was largely caused by lead pollution, and that the drop in crime in recent decades -- which is seen across different cultures and continents -- is due to unleaded gas, not to any particular criminal or legal policy.