:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Monday, September 15, 2008 ::

Arsenic and Cold Lace

A previously unknown arsenic-loving bacteria may provide a way to keep one of Canada's most toxic sites from poisoning one of the country's largest lakes and river systems ... "We found bacteria that will grow below 10 degrees. You could theoretically use them to help remove arsenic completely from water."

Labels: Environment, science

:: Dan 15.9.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

Please forgive the lengthy quote:

"Evolutionary biologists claim that sociality is what has made humans such a successful species. We are masters at what anthropologists and others call "social intelligence." We recognize and keep track of hundreds of relationships, and we easily distinguish between enemies and friends.

More important, we run our lives by social calculation. A favor is mentally recorded and paid back, sometimes many years later. Likewise, insults are marked down on the mental score card in indelible ink. And we are constantly bickering and making up, even with people we love.

Sarcasm, then, is a verbal hammer that connects people in both a negative and positive way. We know that sense of humor is important to relationships; if someone doesn't get your jokes, they aren't likely to be your friend (or at least that's my bottom line about friendship). Sarcasm is simply humor's dark side, and it would be just as disconcerting if a friend didn’t get your snide remarks.

It's also easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, "Are we having fun yet?" and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy's contribution to the future of the human gene pool.

Fast forward a few million years and the network of human relationships is wider and more complex, and just as important to survival. The corporate chairman throws out a sarcastic remark and those who "get" it laugh, smile, and gain favor. In the same way, if the chair never makes a remark, sarcastic people are making them behind his or her back, forming a clique by their mutually negative, but funny, comments. Either way, sarcasm plays a role in making and breaking alliances and friendship."

[via sarcasmom]

Labels: Humour, psychology, science

:: Dan 17.7.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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'A psychology researcher has controversially claimed that stupidity is causally linked to how likely people are to believe in God. ...

That professional skeptics don't believe in a creator is perhaps not all that surprising. [University of Ulster professor Richard] Lynn argues, however, that it is their intelligence that directly gives rise to the boffinated classes' non-God-bothering tendencies. He said: "Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQs than the general population."

Lynn pointed out that most children do believe in God, but as their intelligence develops they tend to have doubts or reject religion. Similarly, as average IQ in Western societies increased through the 20th century, so did rates of atheism, he said.'

Labels: News, Religion, science

:: Dan 16.6.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Jesus Could Have Walked on Ice

Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist said today.

The study, which examines a combination of favorable water and environmental conditions, proposes that Jesus could have walked on an isolated patch of floating ice on what is now known as Lake Kinneret in northern Israel.

Looking at temperature records of the Mediterranean Sea surface and using analytical ice and statistical models, scientists considered a small section of the cold freshwater surface of the lake.

The results suggest temperatures dropped to [-4 degrees C] during one of the two cold periods 2,500 –1,500 years ago for up to two days, the same decades during which Jesus lived.

Labels: Environment, Literature, Religion, science

:: Dan 22.4.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity
Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor ... is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Labels: science

:: Dan 29.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Goatlab Radio with Dan Gusset, Ana Kissed and special guest James Binray - Jan 2008 [60MB MP3]
Tracklist:

• Robot Ninja Dinosaur Bastards - Come and Get Demented with the Dino Bastards (Wrong Music)
  
• Bernard Cribbins - Gossip Calypso
  
• Datach'i - I'm Not Afraid To Watch You Die (Planet Mu)
  
• Frog Pocket - Heavy Grunts (Planet Mu)
  
• Jimmy Soul - If You Want To Be Happy For The Rest of Your Life
  
• Bogdan Raczynski - Lowlands (Rephlex)
  
• Portishead - Machine Gun (ATP bootleg)
  
• The Tuss - Shiz Ko E (Rephlex)
  
• Lily Allen - Smile (acoustic)
  
• Hot Roddy - Crust Mantle Hell (Wrong Music)
  
• Phthalocyanine - Breakfast Beer (Planet Mu)
  
• DJ Lumpy's Penis Song (title not known)

I was feeling ill for this one so it's a bit more downbeat this month. Sorry to Chris Cook (Hot Roddy) who I couldn't remember what other artist name he went by, as his Same Actor work eluded me temporarily.)

WoBcast Unplugged - The return of the West of Bastard podcasts with DJ Lumpy, Andrewherring and Juxtaposeur. Worth the download for The Bony King of Nowhere from Bagpuss, Maypole (the oldest song in the English language, as heard in the Wicker Man soundtrack) and Destroying Something Beautiful's beautifully fragile acoustic version of Word Up.

Grimonmbiet: The best of 2007 mix [direct download and torrent]

CERN Poscast
Thanks to Bristle for pointing this out in the comments to the previous post. A chat-show style podcast of people visiting the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, including the likes of Dean of Guildford Cathedral the Very Reverend Victor Stock, comedians Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnery, and Torchwood / Shark Attack 3: Megalodon star John Barrowman. I think this is about as internet as it gets. Even the greatest of the surrealists never dreamt of shit like this.

If you're interested in what's going on with Addict Records (as I mentioned in the Goatlab radio show) have a listen to Meatsock's interviews with Dan Doormouse [70MB MP3] and Billy Stunt Rock [51MB MP] he recorded for the whus.org show.

New net-lab releases "available to download today for zero pennies..."

NL35 - X&Trick - Planes, Trains and Highways
X&Trick on top form presenting his unique blend of Drum ‘n’ Bass, Industrial, Hardcore and Breakcore with plenty of fantastically obscure noises, thick bass and dischordant synths. Introduced by a collaborative track with Chevron, “Brighton”, each track on the release is recorded in a different location around the world and named accordingly. Dark, hard hitting and at times definitely summarising the euro/belgium scene, the release is also quite diverse, with the more melodic starting track through to “Dubai”, which is reminiscent of an Evol Intent / Current Value style dark drum and bass, and then completed by the pounding techno of “Gent”

NL36 - Mully - Dalston 2066
A collection of delicate pieces constrasting Mully’s previously heard style of work, each track an amalgamation of flowing melody, micro-beats, and ambience. Many of the tracks have a warm, contemplative feel, though also with a melancholy vibe throughout. “Icelandia” and “Beach” are definite first listen favorites, with tracks like “She Will Lose” that take a few more listens to really appreciate.

Labels: GoatLab, MP3, Physics, Sci-Fi, science

:: Dan 18.1.08 [Arc] [2 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Stephen Hawking LEGO

Labels: Lego, Physics, science

:: Dan 17.1.08 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
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I mentioned Trevor Cox's new acoustics programme on Radio 4 last week. If you missed it you can listen again here: The Sounds of Science.
[13MB MP3 from podcast]
The second (and final) programme is on tonight at 9pm GMT.

Labels: Acoustics, Radio4, science

:: Dan 31.10.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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I've always been bad with faces, and Mrs P very good with them Often when watching TV she'll point to obscure actor and say "Hey look, it's the guy that was in that episode of Voyager, where the..." etc. I usually have to wait for them to speak and then identify them by the voice rather than the looks.



I was flicking through a magazine the other day and found this photo. If it wasn't sat along side many other pictures of this famous person there’s no way I would have worked out who it was. So I covered the text underneath it and held it up to ask Mrs P if she knew who it was. She glanced away from World of Warcraft and said, "It's Courtney Love," then turned back to skinning some beast she had just slaughtered. But how did she know. "It's obvious; the lips, the eyes." I, on the other hand, am instantly fooled by something as simple as a hair colour change.

Then, in another magazine, I found this: Identity crisis. "We can all forget a face, but some people draw a blank when looking at their colleagues, friends, even their parents. Alanna Maltby — who once failed to recognise her boyfriend — reports."

I think I may have an acute form of prosopagnosia. At least I have an excuse now.

Labels: Personal, science

:: Dan 6.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Andy Farnell recently asked me, "Do you know about the work of the Barrons (Forbidden Planet) I'm trying to get hold of any research material on these kooky pioneers of "snuff audio". If you know of anyone who has schematics of their self-destructing synthesisers please gimme a shout."

If you can jump in here please do so.

Now, my knowledge of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack extended to knowing that it was a pioneering piece of work in electronic music and that it still sounds amazing today. Unfortunately I don't even own a copy, although I do have Jack Dangers brilliant reworking. After an initial google the first place to go looking is of course Wikipedia. Here I find a page about the couple, Louis and Bebe, and their work.

It's a fascinating story and by the time I'd read that I was just as interested to know about how they worked as Andy. I noticed the reference in there to a book Lewis took his circuit building inspiration from; Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948). A quick search on this and I found that it is still in print, see Amazon link below. Wanting to keep it authentic (and cheep) I bought a second hand copy of the second edition (1961) and awaited its arrival. (In the mean time the Forbidden Planet DVD and OST CD were added to my wishlist.)




When it arrived I found a book absolutely packed with the level of mathematics I thought I'd left behind at university and nothing in the way of circuit diagrams. I still read it in the hope of finding some insight, and struggled through the maths, which although I could just about follow and found it difficult to derive meaning from. There is still interesting material in there but something aimed at a more novice audience would have been better.

Below I've typed up my notes from reading it. They will probably only be of interest to someone reading a copy of the book themselves, someone who wants to know how much it would tell them about electronics and audio, and myself as there are a few things I wanted to research further. Page numbers refer to the 1961 edition.

Blurb: "...as readable by the layman as the trained scientist..." John B. Thurston, The Saturday Review of Literature.
p72. "We now wish to define [the intergral from minus infinity to infinity of K(tor) d epsilon (t, gamma)] The obvious thing to do would be to define this as a Stieltjes' integral, but [epsilon] is a very irregular fuction of t and does not make such a definition possible." Ha. Of course! Why didn't I see that?
Do you see what I'm up against here?
p86. On electronic circuits: "The details of its construction are more for the specialist in electrical engineering than for the reader of this book. They may be found elsewhere.¹
"1. We refer especially to recent papers by Dr Y.W.Lee."
'Recent' in this case is thought to refer to 1948.
p98 "In this book, we have avoided mathematical symbolism and mathematical technique as far as possible" Lies!
p102. Fig 2 shows a block diagram of a simple feedback circuit, much as you would find in any analogue electronics textbook.
p112. Figs 3 & 4, as above.
p114. Fig 6, as above with addition of interesting filter system. [Will add scan, please check back]
p145. Explanation and definition of a minority report as a fault finding system within parallel computing systems.
p142 a. Reference to correspondence with Bristol University (also on p199)
p142 b. Contains a lobotomy joke! You don't hear those everyday.
p146. Quotes Lewis Carol.
p154. Section about people with red hair and stutters (would this by PC today!?) plus musing on extinction.
pp158-161. Thoughts on free markets and game theory (although it is not referred to as such), and the problem with capitalism.
p162. Refers to Western exploitation of the "flesh-pot of Egypt." Funny how things don't change.
p164 & 171. Notes on chess computers. Predictions seem to have been accurate.

Incidentally, I didn't only start taking notes half way through. There really wasn't anything worth noting in the first half apart from a disparaging remark about scientific fields becoming too specialised and acoustics given as an example.

Frequently used terms I decided I ought to look up:
Gestalt
A priori
A fortiori

And finally, a reference to the Rorschach Ink Blot test inspired me to have a look for the images, as even when studying psychology I can't recall actually seeing them. The disclaimer on the above site explains why (scroll down the images if you're still curious).

Labels: Cybernetics, Electronic Music, Electronics, Literature, psychology, science

:: Dan 12.6.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Freegan.info
"Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed."

Sounds great in principle but I wouldn't recommend going as far as eating out of supermarket bins. When I worked in a supermarket you couldn’t open the lid of the bin without retching. Given the choice I wouldn't go near one of those again never mind scamper around inside it like the image on the website gaily depicts.

Interviews from Radio 4:
"Tom Feilden reports on the political creed known as Freeganism which is based on the conviction that pretty much ever area of economic activity is based on some form of exploitation." [About 20 mins in here]
"We continue our discussion on Freegonism and are joined by Kevin Hawkins the director general of the British Retail Consortium." [About 10 mins in here]
And as an aside, "Research being conducted at the University of Hertfordshire suggests that robots can help children with autism form relationships. We speak to Dr Ben Robins who is leading the team." [About 10 mins in here]
[Real Audio links]

Dear Today programme,
Why have you stopped putting individual story links on your website? The half hour chunks are nowhere near as useful when sharing stories with others. Thanks.

Labels: Food, Politics, Radio4, science

:: Dan 31.5.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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"We like to think it's our choice to help an old lady across the road or push her into the traffic. But an increasing number of scientists say we’re fooling ourselves. Are some of us just hard-wired to be bad?"

Labels: psychology, science

:: Dan 15.5.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Popmatters interviews Steven Johnson about his new book The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Two Men Who Battled to Save Victorian London [paperback due in Oct]. The interview alone brings up some fascinating ideas and questions. If the book is anywhere near as inspiring as it sounds it'll be a good read. Remember, this is from the author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software so it should be good. Taking the "long zoom" look at society and networks. More intriguing in the connections it draws and more robust an approach than lateral thinking will ever get you. The Ghost Map concerns itself with the story of the cholera outbreak in Victorian London, allowing it to analyze that time of amazing flux in the same way Gibson and Sterling attempted (in fiction form) in The Difference Engine, although their attempt failed to pull it all together in the end. Evolving maps have always fascinated me too. The recent exhibition of London maps at the British Museum was mesmerising. I'm going to end this post now before I meander too much.
[via lmg]

Labels: Books, Literature, Maps, science

:: Dan 9.5.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Wired: "See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new ones."
...
"We humans get just the five. But why? Can our senses be modified? Expanded? Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic fields or hear ultrasound? The answers to these questions, according to researchers at a handful of labs around the world, appear to be yes."
[via dev.null]

Labels: psychology, science

:: Dan 3.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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