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Archive: OTHER

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Need a sound?

OK, maybe you aren't likely to need a sound, but someone has put together a terrific, expanding database of various sounds. For example, click on the hippo!

FindSounds (via kottke.org)

The Masked (white) Man

For several centuries, the Chewa men of Malawi have reaffirmed their brotherhood through a secret masked society.

But Doug Curran is neither Chewa nor anything remotely approaching African.

He is a twice-divorced white man from North Vancouver. He grew up a military brat, photographs publicity film stills for a living (working with the likes of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner), and drives an Audi.

So how is it that this middle-aged British Columbian ended up a member of a closely guarded African fraternity?

That he's not only privy to a world where men become wild beasts and speak in riddles, but is also a guardian of its secrets?

Curran ferrets around in the recesses of his mind for an answer.

"Like everything else, because I was there," is the best he can come up with.

He clearly stopped trying to answer the question years ago.

Instead, the focus of his energy has been on unmasking the mystery of two masked dancers he first encountered 15 years ago in the south African nation of Zimbabwe.

It took $120,000 in travel expenses, years of trekking doggedly through remote villages and countless nights studying cryptic riddles and phrases.

But he did it.

And now for the first time, a Museum of Anthropology exhibition of Curran's masks, photographs and video footage is going to give B.C. -- indeed, the western world -- its first taste of what it means to be part of the Nyau brotherhood.

Read Lena Sin's full article here (via Mirabilis)

six petabytes

Even the relative Luddites among us have some vague idea of what a gigabyte represents: a bit too much information to burn onto a single CD (which holds 700 megabytes). But the world of terabytes and petabytes is different matter entirely. So let's gain some perspective by consulting a list of the ten largest databases in the world.

At the top of the list is – no, not Google – the World Data Centre for Climate. Their database consists of 220 terabytes of web data, and six petabytes of additional data. How much data is in six petabytes? Oh, roughly three times the amount of ALL the U.S. academic research libraries contents combined.

Here's the list (Google is fourth, and climbing no doubt)

The importance of Having a "Sonic Niche"

If you saw Bernie Krause, a sotto voce man with heavy, nearsighted eyes, seated amid the baffling array of high-tech sound-engineering gear in his Glen Ellen, Calif., studio, you might never guess that he was once flung down a Rwandan mountainside by a mountain gorilla. Or that he forced himself to sit coolly still in the stultifying blackness of an Amazon jungle night while a prowling jaguar mouthed a microphone he had set up only 30 feet down the trail.

As Krause tells these tales of peril, his voice resonates with a certain fearlessness developed during his worldwide, nearly 40-year quest to record the earth’s rapidly disappearing “biophony” — a term he coined to describe that portion of the soundscape contributed by nonhuman creatures. Biophony, Krause has theorized, is unique to each place; nowhere in nature sounds exactly like anywhere else. This idea has led him toward a controversial way of thinking that would broaden the scope of today’s evolutionary biology. Many animals, he argues, have evolved to squeeze their vocalizations into available niches of the soundscape in order to be heard by others of their kind. Evolution isn’t just about the competition for space or food but also for bandwidth. If a species cannot find a sonic niche of its own, it will not survive.

Krause’s “niche hypothesis” may seem more plausible after you’ve listened to his recordings of dense tropical jungles, polyphonous soundscapes packed with whistles and whinnies, whoops, hoots and howls, deep bass throbbings and shrieking buzzes. Krause employs supersensitive recording equipment and computer programs to create spectrograms of these group vocalizations, visual printouts indicating the stratified sounds according to time and frequency — not unlike a symphonic score. Using his trained eye, Krause is then able to locate the sonic signature of each animal. “What you’re listening to is an animal orchestra, very finely tuned and constructed and conducted — there’s no accident here,” Krause says. “They all coalesce in a way that’s not planned but cooperative or competitive, one creature in relation to another.”

Read Jeff Hull's full, interesting piece in the NY Times

Nap Time

A six-year Greek study found that those who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37% lower risk of heart-related death.

The researchers took into account ill health, age, and whether people were physically active.

[snip]

The researchers found those who took naps of any frequency and duration had a 34% lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who did not take midday naps.

Those who took naps of more than 30 minutes three or more times a week had a 37% lower risk.

Among working men who took midday naps, there was a 64% reduced risk of death compared with a 36% reduced risk among non-working men.

BBC article

Global Warming

If, like many of us, you are vaguely concerned about the climate change issue, yet get most (if not all) of your information through sound-bites and brief summaries of scientific papers, you should considering devoting a bit of time to the article Phaeton's Reigns. The article, which appears on the Boston Review site, was written by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT and the author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes.

The piece is a rather long, somewhat dense, and technical at times, but I found it to be an extremely thorough, engaging, and ultimately accessible explanation of climate change, and why human activity is almost certainly playing an important role. Here's a snippet:

An important and difficult issue in detecting anthropogenic climate change is telling the difference between natural climate variations—both free and forced—and those that are forced by our own activities.

One way to tell the difference is to make use of the fact that the increase in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols dates back only to the industrial revolution of the 19th century: before that, the human influence is probably small. If we can estimate how climate changed before this time, we will have some idea of how the system varies naturally. Unfortunately, detailed measurements of climate did not themselves really begin in earnest until the 19th century; but there are “proxies” for quantities like temperature, recorded in, for example, tree rings, ocean and lake plankton, pollen, and corals.

Plotting the global mean temperature derived from actual measurements and from proxies going back a thousand years or more reveals that the recent upturn in global temperature is truly unprecedented: the graph of temperature with time shows a characteristic hockey-stick shape, with the business end of the stick representing the upswing of the last 50 years or so. But the proxies are imperfect and associated with large margins of error, so any hockey-stick trends of the past may be masked, though the recent upturn stands above even a liberal estimate of such errors.

Read the whole article at Boston Review

Grouper? Are you sure?

MADEIRA BEACH, Fla. -- What the undercover agents ordered, over and over, was the grouper. What wound up on their plates could stifle anyone's appetite.

The alleged grouper at 17 of 24 area restaurants sampled by the investigators was actually another, less desirable species, according to a DNA analysis conducted for the state attorney general's office and released earlier this month. Asian catfish. Emperor. Painted sweetlips. And twice, types of fish that could not be identified.

"It's a rip-off -- like taking a cheap watch and selling it as a Rolex," said Bob Spaeth, who owns six commercial fishing boats and co-owns one of the largest grouper distributors on the Gulf Coast. "Someone should go to jail."

Read the rest in the Washington Post

The Good Citizen's Alphabet

The English philosopher Bertrand Russell is a favorite of my father's, and I was exposed early on to a number of his better known works. But for some reason, his charming and interesting book from which the title of this post was taken was not amongst them.

William Drenttel has a good post on both the design elements and current relevance of The Good Citizen's Alphabet at Design Observer.

Moon shot

If you have Quicktime (all Mac users do!), and if you have a good monitor (I do!), then you should view the remarkable full-screen 360º panoramic shots of the Apollo missions found, appropriately enough, at panoramas.dk

There are also many other impressive ones to choose from (try the Arc de Triomphe), so be sure to use the drop-down menu in the upper right corner.

(via kottke.org)

Ernst Leitz and the Nazis

Leica is synonomous with top-quality optics, and most are familiar with the Leica brand through their cameras, lenses, or countless famous images which have been taken with them. Ernst Leitz II took control of the company when his father died in 1920, and was running it when World War II erupted. Mark Honigsbaum has written a fascinating account of Leitz's complicated relationship with the Nazis in the Financial Times. Here's an exceprt:

Next comes a shot of one of Leitz's young Jewish apprentices, Kurt Rosenberg, beavering away at his workbench. This is followed by a slide showing Rosenberg's original apprenticeship contract and a certificate with the date he completed his training and left Germany. The documents clearly show that Rosenberg was apprenticed at Wetzlar from 1933 to 1937, and emigrated on January 28 1938, setting sail for New York on a Hamburg-America Line steamer. "Rosenberg's is the strongest case of all because there's a paper trail," explains Smith. "Not only can we show that he was a Leitz apprentice, but we have proof that Leitz paid his passage to New York and later gave him a job in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue."

According to Smith, both Rosenberg and Rosenthal's son, Paul, were beneficiaries of a remarkable series of transports designed to spirit German Jews to freedom out of Nazi Germany. Now these convoys and the man who masterminded them are to finally get the recognition they deserve. This week, on February 9, the Anti- Defamation League, a non-profit group devoted to battling anti- Semitism, will present Ernst II's granddaughter, Cornelia Kuhn- Leitz, with the Courage to Care Award, in recognition of Leitz's role in helping at least 41 Jews to flee Germany during the Nazi persecution of the 1930s. In addition, Leitz is being credited with helping a further 23 people to circumvent Nazi laws aimed at punishing Jews and Germans related to Jews by marriage.

Read the full piece

Clever Hans

In the late 1800s, a German high school mathematics instructor named Wilhelm Von Osten was pushing a few scientific envelopes from his home in Berlin. Among other things, he was a student of phrenology, the now discredited theory that one's intelligence, character, and personality traits can be derived based of the shape of one's head. But it was his keen interest in animal intelligence that would ultimately win him fame.

Von Osten firmly believed that humanity had greatly underestimated the reasoning skills and intelligence of animals. To test his hypothesis, he took it upon himself to tutor a cat, a horse, and a bear in the ways of mathematics. The cat was indifferent to his efforts, and the bear seemed outright hostile, but the arab stallion named Hans showed some real promise. With further tutelage, Hans the horse learned to use his hoof to tap out numbers written on a blackboard. Much to Von Osten's delight, jotting a "3" on the blackboard would prompt a tap-tap-tap from his pupil, a feat which Hans could repeat for any number under ten.

Encouraged by this success, Von Osten pressed his student further. The scientist drew out some basic arithmetic problems on his chalkboard, and attempted to train the horse in the symbols' meanings. Hans had no problem keeping up with the curriculum, and soon he was providing the correct responses to a variety of math problems including basic square roots and fractions. Hans was proving to be a clever horse indeed.

Read the rest of the Clever Hans story by Allen Bellows at Damn Interesting

Glass Half Full

Le Grand Content is a short film by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit (voice by Andre Tschinder). According to the YouTube description, "[It] examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential." I'd add that it does it in a very amusing manner!

(via India Uncut)

Across the Sahara

The German paper Spiegel has an excellent English on-line edition, in which Klaus Brinkbäumer has written an interesting story on the disparate people who attempt the arduous and dangerous trek across the Sahara towards Europe.

Sedaris and his Stadium Pal

If this is your first exposure to David Sedaris, and you enjoyed his wit, then you should explore some of his popular radio appearances at NPR

Should STatins be used Preventatively?

JOHN ABRAMSON, MD, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, AND JAMES WRIGHT, MD, BRITISH COLUMBIA, LANCET - The last major revision of the US guidelines, in 2001, increased the number of Americans for whom statins are recommended from 13 million to 36 million, most of whom do not yet have but are estimated to be at moderately elevated risk of developing coronary heart disease. In support of statin therapy for the primary prevention of this disease in women and people aged over 65 years, the guidelines cite seven and nine randomized trials, respectively. Yet not one of the studies provides such evidence.

For adults aged between 30 and 80 years old who already have occlusive vascular disease, statins confer a total and cardiovascular mortality benefit and are not controversial. The controversy involves this question: which people without evident occlusive vascular disease should be offered statins? With about three quarters of those taking statins in this category, the answer has huge economic and health implications. . .

We have pooled the data from all eight randomized trials that compared statins with placebo in primary prevention populations at increased risk. . . Total mortality was not reduced by statins . . .The frequency of cardiovascular events, a less encompassing outcome, was reduced by statins. However, the absolute risk reduction of 1.5% is small and means that 67 people have to be treated for 5 years to prevent one such event. Further analysis revealed that the benefit might be limited to high-risk men aged 30-69 years. Statins did not reduce total coronary heart disease events in 10,990 women in these primary prevention trials. Similarly, in 3,239 men and women older than 69 years, statins did not reduce total cardiovascular events.

Our analysis suggests that lipid-lowering statins should not be prescribed for true primary prevention in women of any age or for men older than 69 years. High-risk men aged 30-69 years should be advised that about 50 patients need to be treated for 5 years to prevent one event. In our experience, many men presented with this evidence do not choose to take a statin, especially when informed of the potential benefits of lifestyle modification on cardiovascular risk and overall health.

(via UnderNews)

Jung on Death

via Neatorama

Visual Data

I've posted before on some of the advantages of data visualization, the most obvious of which is that it makes otherwise dry statistics palatable. But the real importance of the art is that when done well, it can greatly facilitate the understanding of complex data sets.

Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, is also the founder of Gapminder, a non-profit company which specializes in this growing field. Rosling is an excellent speaker, and this presentation illustrates beautifully the power of well-designed and executed data visualization.

search Carefully

Why? Because if you are seeking prices of a product or service, how you choose to search may impact the prices offered. Micromotives has more:

The rise of e-commerce has provided companies with rich new sources of information on their customers, based on the clickstreams that users generate as they navigate through a commerce site. This finely grained data brings with it a host of potential new ways to segment customers and tailor a product or service to their specific interests and priorities. Ross Parker has found an interesting example of one such tactic on an online travel site. The site changes the price of a hotel stay displayed to the user based on whether the user sorts the results by lowest price first, or highest price first. The logic seems to be that customers who sort the results from high to low are less price-sensitive than others, and might be willing to pay a higher price for the same hotel room.

Read the full article

A Gift

The moving story of Robert Thompson, Phillip Greenspun and Craig McFarlane's gift to a poor family in China's Yunnan province can be viewed here (requires Quicktime).

More here (via Kottke.org)

Atypical

I've never owned an exotic sports car, nor am I likely to in the future. But I do appreciate fine design, and find dreaming to be a healthy activity, so I occasionally peruse the stock offered by some of the high-end vintage specialists around the world.

Generally speaking, I've not been overly enthusiastic about Ferraris. While impressively designed, to be sure, they have, for the most part, struck me over the years as being too rakish, too obvious. There is, however, is at least one glorious exception: the 275 GTS. Manufactured in the '60's, it strikes me as an exceptionally beautiful rendering of the classicly simple, convertible coupe. At first glance, it closely resembles the (far less expensive) Fiat 124 Spyder. But that superficial similarity, one which is easily explained by the common thread of the famous Pininfarina design firm which both companies employed, ends there. The lines of the 275 are exquisite, and the body exudes quality in every detail. The one pictured above is available at Mario Bernardi's exclusive dealership. Price on request, of course.

More other? click here!

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