Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 486
June 12, 2013
The lowest of the low, flautily
The subcontrabass flute may or may not be exactly the same thing as the double contrabase flute. That depends on who you talk to about it, and how knowledgable they are, and how prone to suddenly become violent and attempt to pummel you for raising what they may regard as the spectre of heresy.
Several flutemakers make subcontrabass flutes. One of them Eva Kingma, offers this review, which makes clear the opinion of the reviewer as to the are-they-the-same-thing question:
Paige Dashner Long [pictured here], Director of the Metropolitan Flute Orchestra in Summer Residence at New England Conservatory: “This unique instrument is very versatile, and fills the gap between the Contrabass and the double contrabass. In choirs it supports the Contrabass, and it literally propels the double contrabass.”
This video shows Stefan Keller playing, to the best of his and the instrument’s ability, a subcontrabass flute:
Anyone for fried lice?
As many a mainstream media outlet has noted, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has recently released a 200 page book which lays out the case for encouraging entomophagy – especially amongst somewhat resistant Westerners. ‘Edible insects : Future prospects for food and feed security’. Unfortunately for those inspired to investigate and experiment further, the document stops short of listing all the (known) edible insects. Turn instead then to a previous FAO document. ‘Edible Forest Insects : Humans Bite Back’ which reproduces a table compiled in 2005 by Dra. Julieta Ramos Elorduy Blásquez of the Instituto de Biología at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
NOTES:
[1] Involuntary entomophagia (eating insects without knowing it) is already a daily reality for many millions of Westerners – albeit in rather tiny amounts. See data from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with regard to ‘Food Defect Action Levels’
[2] ‘Edible Insects’ “… also covers other arthropod species eaten by humans, such as spiders and scorpions, which, taxonomically speaking, are not insects.”
[3] The slightly alarming illustration above is from Bug-A-Licious : Extreme Cuisine by Meish Goldish. (Bearport Publishing, 2009)
[4] Also see : Involuntary hippophagia
BONUS: Bill Bailey performs his entomomusical creation called “Insect Nation”:
June 10, 2013
A mysterious citation: “Murder with animal hair”
Citation databases contain some items that contain some degree of mystery. Here’s one such item from the Pubmed database:
Dtsch Z Gesamte Gerichtl Med. 1952;41(3):240-2.
[Article in Undetermined Language]
PROKOP O.
Mysterious nature of stiletto-heel-to-the-head assault reports
This photo shows stiletto heels, possibly of a different design than was used in either of the assaults described here.
Early reports of a professor’s death via stiletto heel reek of mystery. This report by ABC News, from Houston, Texas, USA, on June 10, 2013, is typical:
A Houston woman was charged with murder after she allegedly stabbed a University of Houston professor to death with a stiletto heel at a luxury high-rise condominium. Ana Trujillo, 44, was arrested and charged this weekend when police found her boyfriend, Alf Stefan Andersson, with multiple stab wounds to the head lying on the floor of an apartment early Sunday morning, Houston police said in a news release. Andersson, 59, worked as a research professor at the University of Houston Center for Nuclear Receptors and Cell Signaling since 2009….
The release makes no mention of whether police believe Trujillo was wearing or holding the shoe during the alleged attack.
A medical report nearly a decade ago from Liverpool, UK, also played up elements of mystery:
Logo of the Walton Centre, where the victim of the 2005 stiletto-to-the-head assault received medical treatment.
“An unusual case of a compound depressed skull fracture after an assault with a stiletto heel,” G Stables, G Quigley, S Basu, R Pillay, Emergency Medicine Journal, vol. 22, 2005, pp. 304–305. The authors, at Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Liverpool, wrote:
“A 23 year old man presented to the accident and emergency department of a university hospital after an alleged assault. He had sustained a blow to the left side of his head with the stiletto heel of a shoe…. Open depressed skull fractures can occur in a variety of settings. To our knowledge there has not been any previous report of a stiletto heel causing such an injury. This could in part reflect the relative strength of the particular heel involved in this case. We are informed that such heels are may be customised and reinforced when worn by members of the transsexual/transvestite community, of which the alleged assailant was a member…. A high index of suspicion should be maintained if a pointed object is implicated in assaults involving the skull.”
The Worms of a Preston Graveyard
Shakespeare wrote, in his Sonnet 71 :
“
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.”
But which worms exactly? For steps towards answers, turn to the Sept 3rd 2007 online edition of Wormdigest for an article entitled : ‘Earthworms of an Urban Cemetery’. Researchers Dr. Kevin Butt and Dr. Christopher Lowe from the Earthworm Research Group, at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK, (in association with Pam Duncanson from Preston Cemetery), performed a survey. “Objectives were to unearth which species were present and in what numbers …” Disappointingly the publication doesn’t list them by name – but no less than nine different species of earthworm were found in the graveyard. Of particular interest, Lumbricus terrestris, which is reputed to be able to burrow to a depth of 2 – 3 metres (Darwin, 1881). But in this case they only reached 30cm, primarily because of a below-ground concrete barrier.
June 8, 2013
A Rorschach Test
Look at this picture. What do you see? Some may see a portrait of Herman Rorschach, the inventor of the Rorschach Test. Others may see a pair of vases. Still others may see a circuit diagram for the Pentium II processor. A minority of people report seeing a collection of black dots on a white background.
Brainwaves that have already happened in the future
Criminals beware! Reporters take notice! Today, Saturday, June 8, 2013, you can read a report — apparently from the future — that says: “In August, 2013, Government Works launched a program to commercialize Brain Fingerprinting and make this new technology available worldwide.”
That report appears on the web site of Dr. Lawrence Farwell. The complete paragraph there says:
Dr. Farwell is the founder of Brainwave Science, LLC and Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, Inc., where he is Chairman and Chief Scientist. Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories and Brainwave Science have recently entered a strategic partnership with Government Works, Inc., a federal contractor in Boston, Massachusetts. In August, 2013, Government Works launched a program to commercialize Brain Fingerprinting and make this new technology available worldwide.
Government Works, Inc. is a company based in Southborough, Massachusetts, USA. The company’s web site explains: “the science behind Brain Fingerprinting technology has been reported on and touted in major print and broadcast media”. The web site explains that the technology has been the subject of numerous articles in scientific journals. It lists those papers, all of which were written or co-written by Dr. Farwell.
Dr. Farwell’s own web site has lots to say about Dr. Farwell [pictured here, in an image that originates on his web site], including this:
Harvard graduate and former Harvard Medical School research associate
Inventor of Brain Fingerprinting
Selected by TIME magazine to the TIME 100: The Next Wave, the top innovators who may be “the Picassos or Einsteins of the 21st Century.”
A report dated Saturday, June 8, 2013, in The Sunday Herald Sun newspaper, in Australia, speaks of the relative value of this technology:
Brain fingerprinting, which measures a suspect’s responses to triggers related to the crime, has been used in America for over a decade…. Detective Sen-Sgt Ron Iddles of the [Victoria, Australia, Police] Homicide Squad said he believed brain fingerprinting would have value as an investigative tool…. He said it was regarded as more reliable than lie-detector testing
(HT Mo Costandi for news of the Australian news)
BONUS: “Officials of Government Works’ Brain Fingerprinting technology will be visiting Nigeria” and “With our recent agreement with Government Works Inc. (GWI) in United States, Skyhigh Ventures Limited now has the exclusive right to brain wave science in intelligence gathering in Nigeria.”
BONUS: “CSSPakistan is proud to being associated with Government Works, Inc.”
BONUS: “The Truth About Lie Detectors (aka Polygraph Tests)“
Lots more numbers, deemed “crazy sequential”
Inder J. Taneja, who several months ago wanted to show you some simple numbers, now wants you to see some numbers, and so he presents them to you in this paper:
“Crazy Sequential Representation: Numbers from 1 to 11111 in terms of Increasing and Decreasing Orders of 1 to 9,” Inder J. Taneja, arXiv:1302.1479, June 5, 2013. He writes, using the royal “we”:
“In this work we put the natural numbers starting from 1 to 11111 in terms of 1 to 9 in two different ways. The first one in increasing order of 1 to 9, and the second one in decreasing order. In both cases some numbers are difficult to achieve. The operations used are only addition, multiplication and potentiation. To carry out these crazy sequential representations, thousands of combinations were considered.”
Here are some of Inder J. Taneja’s new batch of many numbers:
June 7, 2013
The sunshine-spreads-a-smile experiment
“[…] the effect of sunshine on one nonverbal expression that facilitates social relationships (namely, smiling) has never been studied.”
Until now, that is. A new paper from professor Nicolas Guéguen at the Université de Bretagne-Sud, France describes a ‘Quasi Experiment’.
“In a field experiment, men and women walking alone in the street were passed by a male or a female confederate who displayed a smile to the passersby. The contagion effect of smiling was measured. The study was carried out on days that were evaluated as being either sunny or cloudy, but precaution was taken to control the temperature and not to solicit participants when it rained. It was found that the display of a smile results in a smile more often on sunny days. The positive mood induced by the sun may explain such results.”
The paper : Weather and Smiling Contagion: A Quasi Experiment with the Smiling Sunshine is published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior March 2013, Volume 37, Issue 1, pp 51-55
More Improbable coverage of Prof. Guéguen’s work :
June 6, 2013
Sex, Sex, Sex in the Bible, or maybe not [study]
Hunting for sex? This study finds that one purported hunting ground may be less well-stocked than its reputation suggests:
“Sleeping with the Enemy: Recent Scholarship on Sexuality in the Book of Judges,” Serge Frolov [pictured below], Currents in Biblical Research, June 2013 vol. 11 no. 3, pp. 308-327. The author, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, explain:
“Reviewing the publications of the last three decades, this article demonstrates that the period in question has been predictably marked by sharply increased attention to the sexual aspects of the book of Judges, and especially by sustained attempts to discover sexuality in the texts that had been commonly read with little to no reference to it. Refreshing as it is in many respects, this trend suffers from multiple vulnerabilities, including the exegetes’ tendency to stretch semantics of the biblical lexemes, ignore the syntactic layout and context of the discussed fragments, rely on problematic sexual symbolism, and produce interpretations that are less than edifying for contemporary Western audiences. As a result, much, although by no means all, of the recent quest for sexuality in Judges is unsustainable, as far as both the text and the reader are concerned.”
(Thanks to Dan Vergano for bringing this to our attention.)
Professor Frolov, author of the study.
BONUS: A dissenting view
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