It Might Get Loud, and I Hope it Does

I saw a fantastic documentary the other night at the Red River in Concord about the Edge, Jack White, and Jimmy Page.

By the time it was done I was bouncing around with inspired energy (it doesn’t take much). The movie focuses on their roles as guitarists but also revolves around the three of them meeting and the conversation that emerges. All aspects of their personal stories are enhanced by creative elements of clever filmography, animation, and archived video footage of artists that inspire the trio. One really exciting component to it, is that none of their stories are told in the same manner or exact same format. Each story is told in a manner that compliments the musician. Jack White’s segments are bizarre and  (several scenes involve him talking to a nine-year old version of himself) no nonsense, Edge’s are clean and reflective. Jimmy Page seems a suprisingly gentle and relaxed sort of fellow; out of the three, his voice seems to be the most embodied in the instrument itself. It’s amusing to see the sense of awe laced on the faces of edge and white when page starts noodling around on his double-necked guitar. The film so satisfyingly ends with a collective rendition of the Band’s song “The Weight” (you know it… “Take a load off Fanny/Annie  and put the weight right on me”).

Check out the official website here

Head in the Fascinatingly Strange Clouds…

I came across a picture of morning glory clouds posted on the New England Aquarium’s Right Whale Aerial Survey Blog (although the above is from a WIRED feature).

I came across several other interesting links dealing with unusual clouds:

WIRED: Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them

The Cloud Appreciation Society

It did make me think about how vast and strange our sky is. You think you understand something you see over your head everyday but the clouds deform themselves into strange twist, curls and disks and make you wonder.

It takes a village… of spiders?

So,  well worth reading the article here

But the gist is this fellow spent four years working on a textile made from spider silk. The spiders were Madagascarian (is that how you indicate “from Madagascar?”  You know, like Canadian?) golden orb spiders that some suckers had to wrangle up (well they were paid suckers) during the rainy season.  I get the heeby-jeebies just thinking about handling these guys. Apparently this dude recreated this little bitty device that harvested spider silk from 24 unfortunate spids at a time. So if you’re ever looking for a hobby….

Brava, Win for the curvy girls

I applaud Mark Fast’s descisions to use full (read: average) figured models in a recent runway show a la that episode of Ugly Betty where they have a feel-good fashion show featuring the regular gals. I even appreciate the drama of two of his team quitting over the decision. If you look at the pictures at the bottom of the article with the slimmer models, they actually look less flattering in his designs which really seem at home hugging those curves.

IF you’re looking for something even more authentic check out the flickr photostream: the revolution of real women

Everything looks better from space

Check out these beauties here. It’s amazing what we’re able to capture.

Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red Herrings

This was a story featured on the WIRED website. I just posted in the original title because it’s really an interesting story without needing much in the way of commentary.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

The key point of the whole thing is as follows:

Neuroscientist Craig Bennett purchased a whole Atlantic salmon, took it to a lab at Dartmouth, and put it into an fMRI machine used to study the brain. The beautiful fish was to be the lab’s test object as they worked out some new methods.

So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”

The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”

If that were all that had occurred, the salmon scanning would simply live on in Dartmouth lore as a “crowning achievement in terms of ridiculous objects to scan.” But the fish had a surprise in store. When they got around to analyzing the voxel (think: 3-D or “volumetric” pixel) data, the voxels representing the area where the salmon’s tiny brain sat showed evidence of activity. In the fMRI scan, it looked like the dead salmon was actually thinking about the pictures it had been shown.

This sorta leads to a bigger question in general when doing research… Are my results real?  Sure the statistics are built in such a way to include the likelihood of chance events – “There is a 95% likelihood my results are due to real effects and only a 5% possibility they occurred due to a snowball’s chance in hell…” – but when your results do actually fall into that %5 (or less), what are the implications? Are false positives worse than false negatives (this is a more interesting question when you get into medical research)?

Check out this interesting article asking the question – what if a new test for screening terrorists was only 90% accurate? Brings some of these ideas into a new focal point…

Any thoughts?

How much did the pirate pay to get his ears pierced? A buck-an-ear

Today was International Talk Like a Pirate Day…

it occurred to me that since I was part of International Coastal Cleanup Day that maybe the two really should have been combined…

****We interrupt this posting with a truly terrible pirate joke*****

Long ago, when sailing ships ruled the waves, a captain and his crew were in danger of being boarded by a pirate ship. As the crew became frantic, the captain bellowed to his First Mate, “Bring me my red shirt!”. The First Mate quickly retrieved the captain’s red shirt, which the captain put on and lead the crew to battle the pirate boarding party. Although some casualties occurred among the crew, the pirates were repelled.

Later that day, the lookout screamed that there were two pirate vessels sending boarding parties. The crew cowered in fear, but the captain calm as ever bellowed, “Bring me my red shirt!”. The battle was on, and once again the Captain and his crew repelled both boarding parties, although this time more casualties occurred.

Weary from the battles, the men sat around on deck that night recounting the day’s occurrences when an ensign looked to the Captain and asked, “Sir, why did you call for your red shirt before the battle?”. The Captain, giving the ensign a look that only a captain can give, exhorted, “If I am wounded in battle, the red shirt does not show the wound and thus, you men will continue to fight unafraid”. The men sat in silence marveling at the courage of such a man.

As dawn came the next morning, the lookout screamed that there were pirate ships, 10 of them, all with boarding parties on their way. The men became silent and looked to their Captain for his usual command. The Captain, calm as ever, bellowed, “Bring me my brown pants!!

You know you want to read more of these

Eddie Izzard… is a marathon runner?

This is pretty darn amazing.

For those of who who have missed the off-kilter, astute humor of Eddie Izzard, I do pity you a bit. But with the miracle of you-tube you can now figure out what you’re missing (or you could always legitimately buy the dvds…):

At any rate, he was a sort of hidden gem whilst I was in college, but he now is a much more visible entity in movies and television. Turns out he decided to do something rather crazy and admirable. He is running 43 marathons in 51 days to run money for the charity Sport Relief, which is essentially tied to Comic Relief who uses the money for the disadvantaged in the UK as well as the world’s poorest countries.

The BBC News article can be accessed here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8256589.stm

Go Eddie, Go!

The REAL loudmouths of the sea…

So another inclusion in the mention of marine noisemakers…

Shrimp in the family Alpheidae, known as pistol or snapping shrimp definitely vie with the cetaceans as ocean organisms that need to pipe down already…

Apparently groups of them have been known to interrupt sonar communications….

Cetaceans… the loudmouths of the sea

I am currently writing a couple science-based articles, one of which is focused on noise pollution which has a good dose of info on the nature of sound in the sea, some comments on natural sources of ambient marine noise, etc.

I am including some stellar online resources and can’t help but post a few of these here as I go along.

There is a spectacular website called “Voices of the Sea” with recordings of multiple species of cetaceans and pinnipeds available to listen to. The website is visually very slick and the sound files play effortlessly. There are also various videos with more info on species. I also like how they show the sound spectograms while the calls are playing to let you know the frequencies of the sounds you are hearing. (Just an FYI, it is somewhat likely at least a couple of these calls have undergone some audio manipulation to bring them within the range of human hearing….).

Cornell University, who hosts a well-known bio-acoustics program, hosts a Right Whale Listening Network , and their research has been essential in the study and protection of these very endangered animals.

During a right whale ecology cruise I was part of, I’ve also been able to view the deployment and retrieval first hand of some of their pop-bouys which are used for acoustic research. It’s pretty interesting business. The buoys are deployed with sandbags to keep them weighted down. They are retrieved at night (for the sake of making them easier to find, once at the surface they employ a sort of strobe light). Once the ship is close enough, a researcher sends them a “burn” signal which is a communication with the buoy telling it to release anchor (i can’t quite remember the specifics of hot the buoy does this…) and pop-up to the surface. The ship then unceremoniously navigates close by and they’re grabbed with a long hook (think of the kind of hook you’d envision really terrible preformers being pulled offstage with). On the same cruise I was also able to hear some recordings of Atlantic white-sided dolphins captured via hydrophone.