Smooth Pebbles

Louis Armstrong & Johnny Cash A-Jammin'

The wonders of YouTube. Couple of highly distinctive voices here. Wonderful stuff.

Hat tip: kottke

Words & Music from a Pioneer of Fear, Joe LeDoux

For those in or near NYC, a notable event: Fear researcher Joseph LeDoux, whom I profiled a while back in Scientific American Mind, will lecture about fear -- and then, fearlessly, play with his R&R band, 'The Amygdaloids.' (The amygdala is the brain's fear center.)

I can't make it, much to my chagrin, but having met LeDoux -- who is highly enjoyable company and has done Nobel-Prize-level work defining fear's neuralogical pathways -- I know this will be a highly fascinating, fun, and funny evening.

at the NY Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
(250 Greenwich St @ Barclay), 40th floor
Map & directions

More info (including registration, recommended) at the NYAS announcement.

Joe LeDoux speaks and plays live with his band, The Amygdaloids!

November 11, 2008
7:00 - 8:30 pm

In the world today it can often seem like there is much to fear, making it more important than ever that we understand how that fear makes us feel. Renowned NYU neuroscience researcher Joseph LeDoux presents his latest research about the mysteries of emotions and the workings of the brain, with a particular focus on how the brain reacts to fear.

To demonstrate some different points about the brain and emotion, LeDoux will then also play live with his band, The Amygdaloids. The groups is made up of scientists and musicians, including environmental biologist Tyler Volk, to perform songs about love and life inspired by the lab. You can hear samples of their music on our Facebook page in the music area.

LeDoux is a University Professor and Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, and a member of the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology at NYU. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of emotion and memory. Read the recent article on LeDoux's work from Scientific American.

Reception and book signing to follow.

Both Obama and McCain computers were hacked - Newsweek

Wow. From Newsweek:

At the Obama headquarters in midsummer, technology experts detected what they initially thought was a computer virus—a case of "phishing," a form of hacking often employed to steal passwords or credit-card numbers. But by the next day, both the FBI and the Secret Service came to the campaign with an ominous warning: "You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," an agent told Obama's team. "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system." The following day, Obama campaign chief David Plouffe heard from White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, to the same effect: "You have a real problem ... and you have to deal with it." The Feds told Obama's aides in late August that the McCain campaign's computer system had been similarly compromised. A top McCain official confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the campaign's computer system had been hacked and that the FBI had become involved.

Officials at the FBI and the White House told the Obama campaign that they believed a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps' policy positions—information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration. The Feds assured the Obama team that it had not been hacked by its political opponents. (Obama technical experts later speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese.) A security firm retained by the Obama campaign took steps to secure its computer system and end the intrusion. White House and FBI officials had no comment earlier this week.

Lemmings as climate-change canaries

photo: E. Leslie, via New Scientist

As Science News reports, drawing on a paper in the Nov 6 Nature (paid subscription required), climate change -- in particular a lack of the fluffy snowpack that lemmings depend on as cover for ground-level foraging -- appears to be putting the hurt on lemming populations in Norway. This crimp in their diet has left some to starve to death and may be the reason that a particular area in south-central Norway has not seen one of the famous lemming population booms since 1994.

Lemmings are famed for their population booms: Occasionally, across small regions, their numbers can briefly swell a hundredfold. Dramatic increases of the rodents typically occur every three to five years, says Nils Christian Stenseth, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Oslo in Norway.

But at one site in south-central Norway, lemming populations haven’t spiked in such a way since 1994, he notes. In the Nov. 6 Nature, Stenseth and his colleagues suggest that climate change has interrupted the normal boom-and-bust cycle of lemming populations.

The effect is spreading to the rest of the ecosystem:

With the recent lack of population booms among lemmings, predators such as arctic foxes and snowy owls have turned their attention to other prey, including ground-nesting birds such as ptarmigan and grouse, whose numbers have declined.

Hat tip to Boing Boing.

Blackboard scribblings from Einstein & others

From "Bye-bye blackboard ... from Einstein and others," an exhibit at the Museum of the HIstory of Science in Oxford.

‘I wrote the music on this blackboard while I was giving a lecture about Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Holywell Music Room on 22nd March this year, before performing them. I was trying to make a connection between Bach’s super-sensitivity to the contemporary styles around him – very very acute in this piece – and today’s musicians. There’s a lot of information in the Goldbergs – structure, harmony, a ladder of canons – and coded information we can only guess at – myths, cosmological allegories, and a soulful journey. It all starts with the bass line.’

Joanna MacGregor
Pianist

Unfortunately, MacGregor, who is a sort of Brian Eno of the British classical scene (indeed; she has collaborated with him), has not recorded the Goldberg Variations -- though she does have a nice recording of Bach's French Suites.

The blackboard exhibit is definitely worth a visit, as is the larger Museum of the History of Science website, which I hope to revisit here (and visit in person as well).

Tennis meets perception science: Wait till McEnroe reads this

As an avid tennis player (though it's been a while), I had to love this and do: The busy bloggers at Neurophilosophy bring their usual lucidity to a paper by David Whitney, of the University of California, Davis, on how inherent dynamics of visual perception make line-call errors by tennis referees virtually inevitable.

Check it out at You cannot be serious! Perceptual errors by professional tennis referees:

The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged one of the referee's calls by throwing a tantrum, during which he shouted the immortal line "You cannot be serious!"

McEnroe's outburst was controversial, and he was almost eliminated from the championship because of it. But he may have been right to challenge the referee after all: according to a new study published in Current Biology, in such close calls, professional tennis referees consistently misjudge the location of a ball's bounce because of a perceptual error caused by an inherent property of the visual system.

Some great stuff here, including links to McEnroe, during his second epic match with Borg (the one he won in '81) hollering at the ump, "You cannot be serious!" -- an outburst that nearly got him DQ'd.

Ah, science. Ah, tennis. Ah, Mac.

Michelle Rhee interview

Earlier today I posted about Paul Tough's Clay Risen's* Atlantic profile of Michelle Rhee, the controversial Washington DC school chancellor. I forgot to mention that there is also an interview of Rhee on the Atlantic website.

*correcttion made 11/09/08

The Lightning Rod - The Atlantic (November 2008)

Michelle Rhee

photo by David Deal, from Atlantic Monthly

To my surprise, one of the most-read posts on this mostly-science blog is "Are Teachers Profesionals of Public-Service Workers?", which looked at a NY Times Magazine piece on school reforms by Paul Tough. Tough now has Now there is a piece by Clay Risen* in the current Atlantic Monthly about perhaps the country's most notable school reformer, Washington D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is aggressively pushing reforms -- higher-paid, non-tenured teacher contracts among them -- on the D.C. school district.

The nut graf is below. Catch the whole thing at The Lightning Rod:

Since her arrival, in the summer of 2007, Rhee, just 38 years old, has become the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide. She and her cohort often seek to bypass the traditional forces of education schools and unions, instead embracing nontraditional reform mechanisms like charter schools, vouchers, and the No Child Left Behind Act. %u201CThey tend to be younger, and many didn%u2019t come through the traditional route,%u201D says Margaret Sullivan, a former education analyst at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. And that often means going head-to-head with the people who did.

Rhee, responsible not to a school board but only to the mayor, went on a spree almost as soon as she arrived. She gained the right to fire central-office employees and then axed 98 of them. She canned 24 principals, 22 assistant principals, and, at the beginning of this summer, 250 teachers and 500 teaching aides. She announced plans to close 23 underused schools and set about restructuring 26 other schools (together, about a third of the system). And she began negotiating a radical performance-based compensation contract with the teachers union that could revolutionize the way teachers get paid.

.

*attribution corrected 11/09/08, with apologies to Mr. Risen.

Obama album, by Callie Shell

I'm brave, I'll call this one early: Go here for some wonderful photos of our next president.

© Callie Shell/Aurora for Time

Ian McEwan's libretto

I like several of Ian McEwan's novels and especially admired his novel Saturday, which, being among other things a riff on Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," updated that novel's m.o. by giving the stream of its narrator's narrative a decidely neuroscientific tint.

In another novel, Amsterdam, his protagonist is a somewhat pompous composer who, toward the end, is caught rather embarrassingly suspecting he is a genius even as he churns out a piece of career-wrecking unoriginality. "Genius," he dared think himself, and it proved otherwise.

I thought at the time the composer was partly a stand-in for the dangers of vanity and overassessment that face any artist. Now I learn that McEwan has written a libretto for an opera, For You, that examines the dangers of sexual jealousy.