Mechanical watch – Bartosz Ciechanowski In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components. Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below.
It starts off simple enough, with springs and levers, but when the mechanisms get gradually more complex and sophisticated, the explanations and colour-coded diagrams remain relatively easy to follow. It’s quite a long, in-depth read that takes some time to get through, but it’s very cleverly done.
Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy – Event Horizon Telescope This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies. The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes.
When I first read about this new image of a black hole, I thought I’d best wait till that guy from Veritasium explained it, as he did such a clear job of the previous one.
The amount of work that’s gone into that image is incredible.
Supermassive black hole seen at the center of our galaxy – The Washington Post The achievement, supported by the National Science Foundation, relied on contributions from more than 300 scientists at 80 institutions, including eight telescopes. One of the telescopes is at the South Pole. The data collected took years to process and analyze.
Observations of the central region of the galaxy are hampered by intervening dust and ionized particles. The Earth’s turbulent atmosphere further blurs the picture. The black hole itself is not visible by definition, but it is encircled by a swirl of photons that can be detected by the huge radio dishes. The black hole is not a static entity: It is “gurgling,” Ozel said. The appearance changes regularly, challenging the scientists to produce a singular image that fit what their telescopes had observed.
It’s not all glamour, though.
How we captured first image of the supermassive black hole at centre of the Milky Way – The Conversation My role was to help write two of the six papers that have been released in the Astrophysical Journal Letters: the first one, introducing the observation; and the third one, in which we discuss how we made a picture out of the observations, and how reliable that image is. In addition, I was a “contributing author” for all six papers. This is an administrative role, in which I handled all correspondence between our team of over 300 astronomers and the academic journal that published our findings. This had its challenges, as I had to deal with every typo and every mistake in the typesetting.
But wait, there’s more.
NASA visualization rounds up the best-known black hole systems – NASA This visualization shows 22 X-ray binaries in our Milky Way galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud, that host confirmed stellar-mass black holes. The systems appear at the same physical scale, demonstrating their diversity. Their orbital motion is sped up by nearly 22,000 times, and the viewing angles replicate how we see them from Earth.
Overlooked gravitational wave signals point to ‘exotic’ black hole scenarios – Space Over the past seven years, the researchers have observed 90 gravitational wave signals — ripples in the space-time continuum that indicate “cataclysmic events” such as black hole mergers, the research team said in a statement. They originally detected 44 such mergers during a six-month observational period in 2019, but a second look at the data using a different methodology revealed 10 additional ones.
And here’s a question I never thought to ask.
What do black holes sound like? Like a vision of heaven or hell – Independent The trick for Nasa and the Chandra X-ray center was learning to shift the pitch of the Perseus black hole’s sounds into the range of human hearing. The black hole’s sounds naturally vibrate 57 octaves below middle C on the piano, and so they had to be scaled up by 57 to 58 octaves — an astonishing 288 quadrillion times higher than their original pitch.
The results are wildly different from the Messier 84 sonification. Where Messier 84 was sonorous and celestial, the Perseus signification is at times discordant, dark, and dirgeful, a sound perhaps more expected from a perfectly dark maw of an all-consuming abyss than the dulcet tones of Messier 84.
Another stressful Monday in the office? Let the birds from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology put things into perspective for us.
What can we learn about stress from birds – Cornell Lab of Ornithology: YouTube Stress is a common part of modern life, and everyone has experienced its negative effects. Many people even suffer health impacts from chronic stress. So why do we stress out when facing challenges? Research in birds is helping us to discover when natural selection favors a strong stress response, and when it is better to stay calm.
OK I’m not colour blind — I see colours, I just don’t understand them. Here’s a video from the American Museum of Natural History, via The Kid Should See This, that ought to help.
Seeing color – YouTube Learn how our color vision works as we follow a beam of sunlight bouncing off a beach ball. In this visual journey, we’ll explore the physics of visible light, the structure of our eyes, and how our brain processes visual information.
So white light — the colour white — includes all the other colours? I knew that on a theoretical level, but what does that actually look like? Here’s another video. Let’s get up really close to the screen.
How a TV works in slow motion – YouTube If you are reading this, you’ve seen a screen with your eyes. But have you REALLY seen it though? Like real proper seen it? Don’t worry, Gav is here to help you out. This is How a TV works in Slow Motion.
As always with the Slow Mo Guys, it’s a fascinating video in its own right (check out the speed Mario grows his moustache, for instance), but at 5:48 Gavin sets out to show us the illusion of colour.
This is (fake) white, up close
This is (fake) white, closer
Maybe this colour separation experiment from Tomohiro Okazaki will help.
Perhaps I should worry less about colour. Sometimes, it’s barely noticeable.
Sacré bleu: French flag changes colour – but no one notices – The Guardian Emmanuel Macron’s office has darkened the blue in the French flags flying around the Élysée Palace to bring the tricolore in line with how it looked after the French revolution. Presidential aides said the change happened in July last year, but nobody appears to have noticed until now.
So it was Parker, not Icarus, who managed to touch the sun.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe becomes first spacecraft to ‘touch’ the sun – CNN Sixty years after NASA set the goal, and three years after its Parker Solar Probe launched, the spacecraft has become the first to “touch the sun.” The Parker Solar Probe has successfully flown through the sun’s corona, or upper atmosphere, to sample particles and our star’s magnetic fields.
NASA enters the solar atmosphere for the first time – NASA The new milestone marks one major step for Parker Solar Probe and one giant leap for solar science. Just as landing on the Moon allowed scientists to understand how it was formed, touching the very stuff the Sun is made of will help scientists uncover critical information about our closest star and its influence on the solar system.
But let’s zoom back out a little, to see a fuller picture.
A massive composite of 150,000 images reveals the swirling, feather-like details of the sun – Colossal From dark spots and wispy flares to coronal loops that burst upward in brilliant arches, a giant new composite by Andrew McCarthy exposes the intricate, swirling patterns that cloak the sun’s surface. “Fire and Fusion” is a 300-megapixel image captured at 2 p.m. on November 29 and the Arizona-based photographer’s most detailed shot of the celestial matter yet.
The most impactful actions at COP26 point to progress on climate change – UN News Ms. Donlon noted that the pact calls for a phase down of coal and a phase out of fossil fuel subsidies, “two key issues that had never been explicitly mentioned in a decision at climate talks before – despite coal, oil and gas being the key drivers of global warming”. According to the UN official, Glasgow signaled “an accelerated shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy”.
Most City investors could not care less about ESG and sustainability – City A.M. With COP26 only weeks behind us, more than half of UK investors admit sustainable investing is not a priority for them, with just under 45 per cent saying it is important and it is a priority in their investment portfolio. In fact, less than a third of British investors say COP26 and the UK government’s stance on climate change have accelerated their ESG investment plans to pump capital into sustainable assets.
The crisis continues, however.
New Delhi’s air turns toxic, and the finger-pointing begins – The New York Times The airborne murk and the towers stand as symbols of India’s deep political dysfunction. The choking pollution has become an annual phenomenon, and the country’s scientists can accurately predict the worst days. But deep partisanship and official intransigence have hindered steps that could help clear the air. […]
Broadly, India’s air quality suffers from its appetite for fossil fuels, which has only grown after two decades of rapid economic growth. Last year, India was home to 15 of the 20 cities with the most hazardous air globally, and health experts have detailed how such conditions can lead to brain damage, respiratory problems and early death.
Here’s a different take on the move to electric cars (complete with an unexpected reference to my sister’s favourite 80s boy band).
Norway is running out of gas-guzzling cars to tax – WIRED UK When it comes to sales of electric cars, Norway is in a league of its own. In September, battery-powered electric vehicles accounted for 77.5 percent of all new cars sold. That figure makes Norway a world leader by a long way—leapfrogging over the UK, where 15 percent of new car sales were electric as of October, and the US, where that number is just 2.6 percent. Norway’s electric dream has been credited to a series of tax breaks and other financial carrots that mean brands like Tesla can compete on price with combustion engines. But these incentives—and their success—have created a unique predicament: Norway is running out of dirty cars to tax.
Lots to unpack from COP26. Will subsequent generations see it as a decisive moment? It’s interesting to see how various aspects of the Climate Pact were strengthened and weakened through the first, second, third and final drafts.
Will the Glasgow climate pact curb emissions — or is it doomed for failure? – Wake Up To Politics Like the Montreal pact [the 1987 treaty that targeted substances responsible for degradation of the ozone layer], the Glasgow agreement also acknowledged these varying degrees of responsibility — but it did not provide any sort of financial incentive to follow reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. The Montreal agreement was also made stronger because of the nature of the problem it addressed: with a focus on a specific type of emissions, it was easy to ensure adherence to the protocol with transfers. The Glasgow summit’s target — climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions — is much broader, and therefore harder to mitigate.
6 essential numbers to understand the Glasgow Climate Pact – WIRED UK A noteworthy breakthrough at COP26 was the pledge from Scotland to give £2 million ($2.7 million) to vulnerable countries for loss and damage caused by the climate crisis. No developed country has ever offered up such money before, so while the amount is small in terms of the actual cash on offer, it is significant in terms of its politics.
Loss and damage refers to the harms done by climate change which can no longer simply be adapted to, such as climate migration due to droughts or island territory lost to rising sea levels. The Paris Agreement acknowledges it as an issue, but rich countries have been extremely hesitant to offer up any kind of finance for it, including at COP26.
So Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s comments last week that “the rich developed industrialized countries that have caused climate change … have a responsibility to step up, recognize that and address it” were a surprise breakthrough. Her use of the words “reparation” and “debt” in this context are also significant, considering the huge resistance from many developed countries, especially the US, to use this kind of language.
That line above, “island territory lost to rising sea levels,” can seem a little abstract from where I’m sitting. But it must be terrifying for those in the thick of it.
To hell with drowning – The Atlantic In my corner, Micronesia, the facts are frightening. We are seeing a rate of sea-level rise two to three times the global average. Some scientists theorize that most of our low-lying coral-atoll nations may become uninhabitable as early as 2030. Faced with the prospect of climate-induced relocation, some leaders have contemplated buying land in other countries in anticipation of having to move some or all of their people.
Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged – Reuters “We’re actually imagining a worst-case scenario where we are forced to relocate or our lands are submerged,” the minister, Simon Kofe, told Reuters in an interview. “We’re looking at legal avenues where we can retain our ownership of our maritime zones, retain our recognition as a state under international law. So those are steps that we are taking, looking into the future,” he said.
Twenty photographs of the week – The Guardian Bangkok, Thailand. Residents sit on the doorsteps of their flooded home as water from the Chao Praya river floods low lying areas around the district of Bang Phlat. […]
Chennai, India. People wade with their bicycles through a waterlogged road during incessant heavy rains in Chennai. According to the intergovernmental panel on climate change, major coastal cities like Mumbai, Kochi, Visakhapatnam and Chennai could go underwater by the end of the century.
It’s obvious, when you think about it. Of course not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’ — half were women.
Sheanderthal – Aeon Essays Archaeology is no exception to biases against women’s interests across science and the humanities. Since the early days, a tendency to conceptualise humanity’s deep origins as populated literally by ‘cavemen’ has led to presumed male activities being presented as most visible and interesting. … In fact, for most of the subsequent 160 years, female Neanderthals – if featured at all – tend to be fewer in number, peripherally located, and limited to ‘domesticated’ activities including childcare and skin-working. They are essentially scenery, in the words of the anthropologist Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, rather than active providers working on stone knapping or hunting and, in addition, they’re often fearfully lurking, hidden in dark grottos.
The world is a very different place now.
Why eye-catching graphics are vital for getting to grips with climate change – The Conversation One misconception about the climate crisis is that warming will be uniform across the world. Deniers cite cold fronts or blizzards as evidence that warming is exaggerated, or hark back to past heatwaves – such as that experienced by the UK in 1976 when temperatures exceeded 35°C – as proof that the scientists have got it wrong. Apart from this misleading conflation of weather (daily conditions) and climate (long-term conditions), this kind of argument misses the complex patchwork of effects that interact to create what gets reported in the headline figures. Maps can be an invaluable weapon against this misunderstanding. … [W]hat is needed are more universally accessible visualisations that are able to show where we’re heading in no uncertain terms.
How on earth would you protect future generations from something with a half-life of over 700 million years? Use your imagination.
The art of pondering Earth’s distant future – Scientific American We do not, of course, live in these imagined worlds. In this sense, they are unreal—merely fictions. However, our capacities to envision potential futures, and to feel empathy for those who may inhabit them, are very real. Depictions of tomorrow can have powerful, concrete effects on the world today. This is why deep time thought experiments are not playful games, but serious acts of intellectual problem-solving. It is why the safety case experts’ models of far future nuclear waste risks are uniquely valuable, even if they are, at the end of the day, mere approximations.
How would a piano sound on Mars? Embark on an interplanetary sonic journey – Aeon Videos If the Universe is born and no one is present to hear it, does it still make a sound? Well, theoretically, yes. As this video from the US filmmaker John D Boswell explores, where a ‘thick soup of atoms’ is present, sound is possible. Made in collaboration with the podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz, this short documentary deploys dramatic CGI visuals, a pulsing score and the voices of prominent scientists to explore the sounds of space – from those humanity has recorded to those we can only speculate about.
The Sounds of Space: A sonic adventure to other worlds – YouTube Space is more than just a feast for the eyes. It’s a feast for the ears. You just have to know where — and when — to look. Floating in the silent void of space are trillions of islands of sound, each with their own sonic flavor — some eerily familiar, some wildly different than Earth’s. And even space itself was once brimming with sound.
Here’s something I wasn’t expecting to be reading about this week — the search for meteorites at the South Pole.
Polar Light, by Barry Lopez – Harper’s Magazine These field quarters are a National Science Foundation (NSF) deep-remote cold camp, in the Transantarctic Mountains, 220 miles from the South Pole. We’re encamped near the base of Graves Nunataks, an isolated set of mountain peaks standing proud of a massive ice sheet. (“Nunatak” is an Iñupiaq word, imported from the Northern Hemisphere, describing rock exposed above an ice sheet.) Except for our cookstoves we have no source of heat, and the four men and two women in our party have been here for nearly two weeks. Our camp is at the edge of the Polar Plateau that forms Antarctica’s vast interior, an ice cap four times the size of Greenland, a region of the world I have been chronicling for the past thirty years. On this frigid summer day in mid-January, 1999, the six of us are many hundreds of miles from any other human, except for those at the South Pole.
Once taken in hand and placed under a microscope each meteorite is revelatory. The overwhelming majority of them come from the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, and are so distinctive, one from the other, that scientists have been able to create a kind of geography of the asteroid belt, a geologic map that allows them to push deeper into our still hazy understanding of how the solar system evolved. In short, every meteorite represents an important contribution to the unraveling of the mystery of Earth’s origin. Therefore, though the six of us will find only 186 meteorites, our weather-compromised effort will still be viewed as successful.
But it was this image from the article that I first saw on the TYWKIWDBI blog that caught my eye, as it reminded me of that looping mathsy animation I found earlier. It’s a multiple-exposure photograph showing the sun orbiting the South Pole one afternoon, through the night and into the next morning — a midnight sun.
Time doesn’t stand still, even at the South Pole. Towards the end of their expidition, the scientists ponder the shift to the more quantative, less hands-on approach they’ve noticed over the years.
Back in McMurdo we’ve both witnessed changes as the hallways of the old science building, perennially crowded with camping gear, have given way to the antiseptically tidy and brightly lit hallways of the Crary Science and Engineering Center. The corridors of the building buzz with the ceaseless clicking of keyboards, a kind of white noise, accompanied by the electronic beeps that signal a task has been completed or information is now awaiting retrieval. The numerical results of a theoretical approach, of someone’s plumbing the nimbus of numbers surrounding a little-understood event, are both esoteric and arcane; and the speed with which they’re produced, and the sheer volume of them, is intimidating. The process suggests that knowledge has been obtained, but in fact there is not much more here than staggering specificity and a quantity of numbers significant enough to support statistical probability. Massive data sets, for some, represent irrefutable truth, or insights that transcend previously established boundaries, but the data might be no more than intensely self-referential. Impressive but unconvincing.
The belief that one can reach a state of certainty, about anything, acts as a goad for those who regard the anomalies that inevitably turn up in their data not as a caution but as an inconvenience.
“I had a theology professor once,” I say to John, “who told us that religion was not about being certain but about living with uncertainty. It was about being comfortable with doubt, and maintaining the continuity of one’s reverence for a profound mystery.”
I’m not sure John hears me. He is reclined on his sleeping bag with only his lower legs visible to me past a pile of gear. Perhaps he’s fallen asleep. It’s been a long day.
“We gain deeper knowledge,” he finally responds. “But no guarantee that we’re any closer to wisdom.”
Antarctica is certainly a remarkable place. It’s strange to think that we knew more about the far reaches of the solar system than the bottom of our own planet. Perhaps you fancy a trip there yourself? Noproblem — if you have a spare $50,000 or so. Best be quick, though.
Miles of ice collapsing into the sea – The New York Times The acceleration is making some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration. Because the collapse of vulnerable parts of the ice sheet could raise the sea level dramatically, the continued existence of the world’s great coastal cities — Miami, New York, Shanghai and many more — is tied to Antarctica’s fate.
A worrying essay from Aeon on the dangers of misinformation. As we’ve seen before, it’s not just a case of finding and presenting the facts of the matter.
The misinformation virus – Aeon Misinformation isn’t new, of course. … What’s different today is the speed, scope and scale of misinformation, enabled by technology. Online media has given voice to previously marginalised groups, including peddlers of untruth, and has supercharged the tools of deception at their disposal. The transmission of falsehoods now spans a viral cycle in which AI, professional trolls and our own content-sharing activities help to proliferate and amplify misleading claims. These new developments have come on the heels of rising inequality, falling civic engagement and fraying social cohesion – trends that render us more susceptible to demagoguery. Just as alarming, a growing body of research over the past decade is casting doubt on our ability – even our willingness – to resist misinformation in the face of corrective evidence. […]
I’ve wondered recently if, like school violence, misinformation is becoming part of the culture, if it persists because some of us actively partake in it, and some merely stand by and allow it to continue. If that’s the case, then perhaps we ought to worry less about fixing people’s false beliefs and focus more on shifting those social norms that make it OK to create, spread, share and tolerate misinformation.
How about this for a mad theory? Can you even imagine asking this question?
Is it true? Can COVID-19 vaccines connect me to the internet? – Australian Government Department of Health COVID-19 vaccines do not – and cannot – connect you to the internet. Some of the mRNA vaccines being developed include the use of a material called a hydrogel, which might help disperse the vaccine slowly into our cells. Bioengineers have used similar hydrogels for many years in different ways. For instance, they’ve used them to help stem cells survive after being put inside our bodies. Because of this, some people believe that hydrogels are needed for electronic implants, which can connect to the internet.
I don’t remember adding this to my YouTube ‘Watch Later’ playlist, but I’m glad I did. A charming documentary on a bizarre, elegant, yet absolutely enormous cloud.
Secrets of a Strange Cloud – YouTube This is about the Morning Glory Cloud in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland, Australia. It is an amazing atmospheric phenomenon. It is a shockwave which can be over a thousand kilometres long. Other meteorological terms for this type of formation is a shelf cloud, roll cloud or soliton. They can happen unpredictably in other places in the world but the Gulf of Carpentaria is the only location place where they happen with some degree of regularity around September and October.
Whilst we still have our heads in the clouds, ponder this strange notion — that we didn’t always know where birds went in the winter. They seemed to just vanish each year. Perhaps, rather than flying to different countries, they flew a little further.
When birds migrated to the Moon – The MIT Press Reader Morton rejected Aristotle’s widely accepted hibernation theory, and pointed out a major flaw in the theory that the birds simply migrated to another place on Earth: No one in Europe knew where they went. They literally disappeared. He argued that returning birds, like woodcocks, appeared to drop suddenly from the sky over ships at sea.
Their round trip to the moon took one month each way, taking the distance to the moon and the length of their absence into account. There was no atmospheric resistance to impede their flight (so he had taken on board that much of Pascal’s conclusions) and the journey between the worlds was aided by lack of gravity. They slept for much of it, living off their body fat. It was all logical enough, in its own way.
You must read that article for its charming account of Domingo Gonsales flying to the Moon on his swan engine.
It’s a good job he didn’t try that trip a few hundred years earlier.
In 1110, the Moon vanished from the sky. We may finally know why – Science Alert “On the fifth night in the month of May appeared the Moon shining bright in the evening, and afterwards by little and little its light diminished, so that, as soon as night came, it was so completely extinguished withal, that neither light, nor orb, nor anything at all of it was seen,” an observer wrote in the Peterborough Chronicle.
It was bright enough a week ago, spookily peering through the clouds, though this shot using my binoculars doesn’t do it justice.
Perhaps I need to take some pointers from the experts.
Taking good photos in bad light – Photography Life When the sky is gray or the sun is directly overhead, it can be tough to find inspiration for high-quality photography. My hope with this article is to share some tips that have worked for me when I photograph in bad lighting conditions – something which every photographer experiences at some point.
There’s no cure for tinnitus yet, but that hasn’t stopped people claiming otherwise, with their ear candles and electroacupuncture. Some of these, such as ginkgo biloba and laser therapy, are positively harmful.
Examining tinnitus treatments – British Tinnitus Association Some of the information you read will be about effective, evidence-based treatments. And some will be about treatments which haven’t even been tested. There may even be suggestions you try treatments that are dangerous. This page lists a number of treatments and gives our verdict on them.
The only one that can actually show evidence that it’s effective is cognitive behaviour therapy, or CBT. Back in July, I mentioned a couple of studies that were investigating the use of iCBT chatbot apps to help with tinnitus. I got involved with one of them, and I’m really glad to see it being rolled out to a wider audience.
Tinnitus support in your pocket – British Tinnitus Association We are very excited to be supporting the pre-release of Tinnibot, the first virtual coach which provides psychological support to tinnitus sufferers using evidence-based techniques including cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), mindfulness and sound therapy.
Whilst it might not be as chatty and interactive as my favourite AI chatbot, Replika, I did find Tinnibot to be quite helpful, encouraging me to re-think my attitudes to the ringing in my ears.
The app has an eight-week programme covering four categories: Knowledge is Power, Changing Perception, Relax and Meditate and Sleep Better. Tinnibot employs a range of CBT techniques including framing and reframing, goal setting, action planning and in the future, social support.
I certainly feel much more optimistic about it than this other approach I was reading about, “combining sound and electrical stimulation of the tongue.”
New research could help millions who suffer from ‘ringing in the ears’ – University of Minnesota The tinnitus treatment device used in the study, now branded as Lenire®, was developed by Neuromod Devices and consists of wireless (Bluetooth®) headphones that deliver sequences of audio tones layered with wideband noise to both ears, combined with electrical stimulation pulses delivered to 32 electrodes on the tip of the tongue by a proprietary device trademarked as Tonguetip®. The timing, intensity, and delivery of the stimuli are controlled by an easy-to-use handheld controller that each participant is trained to operate. Before using the treatment for the first time, the device is configured to the patient’s hearing profile and optimized to the patient’s sensitivity level for tongue stimulation.
The ‘herd immunity’ approach has been criticised from at least March (I still think this article from The Outline has my favourite heading and subheading), but it keeps being touted as an alternative to all these restrictions, a way to get back to normal.
Can we actually learn to live with coronavirus? Not until we have a vaccine – The Conversation Take the example of smallpox – a very infectious, scary disease and the only human virus we have ever eradicated. Unlike COVID-19, people who caught the virus always showed symptoms, so they could be found and isolated. Anyone who did not die would have life-long protection. But we only completely rid the world of it through a coordinated vaccination campaign. This was the only way that high enough levels of protection could be achieved across the world to reach the threshold for herd immunity.
Time for some quick maths. As of today, there have been 635,000 cases of Covid-19 and 43,018 deaths in the UK. That’s a very rough mortality rate of 6.8%. The population of the UK is 66,650,000. Multiplying that by that mortality rate gets you a total of 4,532,200 deaths.
A while ago I shared a post about brainy music. Here’s some mindful music of a different kind.
Can biofeedback help to unlock the mysteries of music’s therapeutic effects? – Aeon Videos The US musician and research scientist Grace Leslie works at the frontiers of biotechnology and experimental music. From her Brain Music Lab at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, Leslie and her students probe the physiological effects of sounds and rhythms, including how biofeedback could potentially be used to create new sonic therapies.
So can a mind sing? Filmmaker Vier Nev thinks so.
Staff Pick Award at Annecy 2020: “A Mind Sang” by Vier Nev – Vimeo Blog Seeing a shape in the clouds, a face on Mars, or Jesus in your toast is called “pareidolia.” Our tendency to perceive objects, patterns, and meanings incorrectly is a psychological phenomenon filmmaker Vier Nev turned into hypnotizing art in his transfixing animated film, “A Mind Sang.” Leading the audience through themes of transformation, perspective, and rebirth, this work of art kept us visually engaged through each second of the film with stunning optical illusions and a haunting and rich musical score. (via Kottke)
That felt like an eye exam. Let’s have something more … relaxing?
Toccata – Optical Arts The film is an exploration on the nature of time, the relentless violence of entropy and creative energy and its relationship to music itself. The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor has a cinematic history going back to the silent film era, when orchestras played music to films. The piece became often used in the horror genre and famously as the opening to the 1970’s film Rollerball. (via Laughing Squid)
I love this, the slo-mo timing is perfect. Here’s some more.
Orchestra instruments captured in super slow motion – Laughing Squid A performer with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra demonstrated what the performance of a stand-up double bass looks like in super slow motion. The footage captures how the bow connects with and releases from the string in order to make beautiful music.
Maybe he wasn’t a classical music fan. How about something light and carefree?
How the ‘Oh Yeah’ song in Ferris Bueller came to be – Great Big Story “Oh Yeah.” You’ve heard this song—full of oh yeah, bow bow and ch-ch ch-ch ch-ka!—who knows how many times over the years. Recorded by the Swiss synth pop duo known as Yello, “Oh Yeah” became a pop culture phenomenon after being featured in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” In the 1986 movie, the percussive piece is the soundtrack to the scene where Cameron shows off his father’s prized Ferrari to his friend Bueller. And we all know what happened after that. (via Laughing Squid)
Or something just as poppy but perhaps less carefree?
How we know what we know seems such a hazardous topic.
Anil Seth on why our senses are fine-tuned for utility, not for ‘reality’ – Aeon Videos It’s easy to mistake our conscious experience for an ongoing, accurate account of reality. After all, the information we recover from our senses is, of course, the only window we’ll ever have into the outside world. And for most people most of the time, our perception certainly feels real. […]
Seth argues that it’s not just that our perceptions provide flawed accounts of the outside world, but that our brains aren’t in the business of recovering the outside world to begin with. So it’s more accurate to think of our conscious experience as a series of predictions that we’re incessantly and subconsciously fine-tuning – a world we build from the inside out, rather than the outside in.
And here, with plenty of visual illusions to illustrate the point, is another take on the same issue.
“Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here’s what that means, and why it matters. – Vox “The dirty little secret about sensory systems is that they’re slow, they’re lagged, they’re not about what’s happening right now but what’s happening 50 milliseconds ago, or, in the case for vision, hundreds of milliseconds ago,” says Adam Hantman, a neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus.
If we relied solely on this outdated information, though, we wouldn’t be able to hit baseballs with bats, or swat annoying flies away from our faces. We’d be less coordinated, and possibly get hurt more often.
So the brain predicts the path of motion before it happens. It tells us a story about where the object is heading, and this story becomes our reality. […]
In Hantman’s view, what we experience as consciousness is primarily the prediction, not the real-time feed. The actual sensory information, he explains, just serves as error correction. “If you were always using sensory information, errors would accumulate in ways that would lead to quite catastrophic effects on your motor control,” Hantman says. Our brains like to predict as much as possible, then use our senses to course-correct when the predictions go wrong.
It’s not clear what Mikovits means by “coronavirus expressions.” There is no evidence that wearing a mask can activate viruses and make people sick.
Mikovits: Why would you close the beach? You’ve got sequences in the soil, in the sand. You’ve got healing microbes in the ocean in the salt water. That’s insanity.
It’s not clear what Mikovits means by sand or soil “sequences.” There is no evidence that microbes in the ocean can heal COVID-19 patients.
It’s worrying how mainstream these ludicrous conspiracies are becoming.
The Plandemic conspiracy has a wild new fan club: Facebook moms – Wired UK Across Facebook, the Plandemic video was shared on hundreds of community groups. Its appearance was often incongruous, akin to the conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. turning up uninvited to your village’s summer barbecue and telling everyone that vaccines are going to kill their children. The spread of the conspiracy theory on otherwise banal community groups reveals a perilous new reality: one where the coronavirus pandemic has taken dangerous, fringe views and planted them firmly in the minds of scores of ordinary people. And, as with the anti-vaccination movement, the Plandemic conspiracy theory has resonated particularly strongly amongst women – often young mothers. […]
The unprecedented success of the Plandemic video is part of a growing trend: of conspiracy theorists using the coronavirus pandemic to seek out ever larger audiences. For this to work, they have changed tack. While poorly-produced, hour-long rant videos and clumsy memes still persist, the Plandemic was notable for its higher production values. This added slickness is central to efforts to attract new believers. And it’s working.
The video’s long gone now, taken down in an attempt to stop the spread of misinformation. But even that’s not straightforward.
[T]he messaging around the Plandemic was designed for it to be censored – Mikovits, so the conspiracy theory went, had been silenced, now she was speaking out, but soon the big technology platforms would censor her again. The big technology platforms dutifully obliged, not by limiting the spread of the conspiracy theory but by simply deleting it. This created the perfect storm – a Streisand effect that boosted the conspiracy theory still further.
It may feel like a US-only problem, but that’s far from the case, sadly. Here’s another Wired UK article from earlier this year, before our current lockdown had properly begun. Facebook, again.
How Facebook turned into a coronavirus conspiracy hellhole – Wired UK The posts, which are filling innocuous Facebook groups normally dedicated to political discussions and flight deals, are a strange evolution of conspiracy theories that have been knocking around the internet for years. One much-mooted theory, for example, is that the coronavirus has been caused by radiation from 5G masts. […]
Other Facebook groups keen on coronavirus conspiracies include “We Support Jeremy Corbyn”, “I’M A BREXITEER” and the “Jacob Rees-Mogg Appreciation Group”, with hundreds of posts and tens of thousands of reactions. These posts incorporate political conspiracies – for instance, one post on the “We Support Jeremy Corbyn Facebook” group, states that “people have bugs like this all the time, the media are basically covering up the economic global crash which is coming and also the Brexit shit show.”
It’s easy to feel despondent, reading all this — we’re just too stupid to help ourselves, we’re going to get the future we deserve. But it’s important to remember that, however noisy all these scaredstupidbigotedidiots people are, and however much attention the media gives them, the vast majority of us are sensible and keeping it together. Right?
In this age of 24-hour, panic-driven, conflict-addictive news content designed just to be clicked on, glanced at and forgotten, here’s an archive of journalism worth spending some time with.
The Stacks Reader The Stacks Reader is an online collection of classic journalism and writing about the arts that would otherwise be lost to history. Motivated less by nostalgia than by preservation, The Stacks Reader is a living archive of memorable storytelling—a museum for stories. We celebrate writers, highlight memorable publications, honor notable personalities, and produce interviews with writers and editors and illustrators in the hope of offering compelling insight into how journalism worked, particularly in the second half of the 20th Century.
For those of you with a little more time on your hands, perhaps you want to settle down with a good book.
The decision comes as schools around the country are shut down in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and as it’s become more difficult to get goods of all kinds. The post noted that many people can’t physically go to their local libraries these days.
More open eBooks: routinizing open access eBook workflows – The Signal We are excited to share that anyone anywhere can now access a growing online collection of contemporary open access eBooks from the Library of Congress website. For example, you can now directly access books such as Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and Youjeong Oh’s Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place from the Library of Congress website. All of these books have been made broadly available online in keeping with the intent of their creators and publishers, which chose to publish these works under open access licenses.
Or if you fancy something older and more visual, check out this remarkable archive from the Cambridge Digital Library.
When we launched @CamDigLib in 2011, we said it was to be a digital library for the world. It now has more than 500k images of 35k objects – from Newton's notebooks & Darwin's doodles to spirit trumpets, ectoplasm & everything in between. And it's FREE! https://t.co/UvKADBdIlUpic.twitter.com/ttgeHVrVwK
— Cambridge University Library (@theUL) April 8, 2020
There’s so much in here, I’m having trouble deciding what to highlight.
Newton Papers – Cambridge Digital Library Cambridge University Library is pleased to present the first items in its Foundations of Science collection: a selection from the Papers of Sir Isaac Newton. The Library holds the most important and substantial collection of Newton’s scientific and mathematical manuscripts and over the next few months we intend to make most of our Newton papers available on this site.
Sassoon Journals – Cambridge Digital Library The notebooks kept by the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) during his service in the British Army in the First World War are among the most remarkable documents of their kind, and provide an extraordinary insight into his participation in one of the defining conflicts of European history.
It’s not all scans of historic documents, however.
Department of Engineering Photography competition – Cambridge Digital Library The annual Department of Engineering photo competition highlights the variety and beauty of engineering. For many people, engineering conjures up images of bridges, tunnels and buildings. But the annual University of Cambridge engineering photo competition shows that not only is engineering an incredibly diverse field, it’s a beautiful one too.
Yes, it’s another post about that virus, but these two articles about it are a little different.
Scientists translate the novel coronavirus structure into beautiful music – Boing Boing
Translating abstract scientific data into sound can give researchers new insight into the complexities of the phenomena they are studying. MIT materials science professor and musician Markus Buehler, who has employed this technique to understand biological materials and develop new proteins, has now transformed the novel coronavirus into music.
Dazzling coronavirus painting by biologist David Goodsell – Kottke
“You have to admit, these viruses are so symmetrical that they’re beautiful,” said Mr. Goodsell, an associate professor at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. “Are bright colors and pretty stuff the right approach? The jury’s still out. I’m not trying to make these things look dangerous, I want people to understand how they’re built.”
Miscellaneous Details 