[Absolutely fantastic, in-depth look at the origins of the NSA spying programs that have been recently revealed, and at some of the growing resistance to them. -egg]

On October 13, 2001, fifty computer servers arrived at the N.S.A.’s headquarters, in Fort Meade, Maryland. The vender concealed the identity of the N.S.A. by selling the servers to other customers and then delivering the shipments to the spy agency under police escort. According to a 2009 working draft of a report by the N.S.A.’s inspector general, which Snowden provided to Glenn Greenwald, of the Guardian, their arrival marked the start of four of the most controversial surveillance programs in the agency’s history—programs that, for the most part, are ongoing. At the time, the operation was code-named starburst.

In the days after 9/11, General Michael Hayden, the director of the N.S.A., was under intense pressure to intercept communications between Al Qaeda leaders abroad and potential terrorists inside the U.S. According to the inspector general’s report, George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A., told Hayden that Vice-President Dick Cheney wanted to know “if N.S.A. could be doing more.”

via Ryan Lizza: Why Won’t Obama Rein in the N.S.A.? : The New Yorker.

[Free 15-LP download of the full spectrum of American folk music? Well, OK, I guess 😉 -egg]

‘Folk Music in America” is a series of 15 LP records published by the Library of Congress between 1976 and 1978 to celebrate the bicentennial of the American Revolution. It was curated by librarian/collector-cum-discographer Richard K. Spottswood, and funded by a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The music, pulled primarily from the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song (now Archive of Folk Culture), spans nearly a century (1890-1976) and virtually every form that can be considered American music. This includes native American songs and instrumental music, music of immigrant cultures from all over the world, and uniquely American forms like blues, jazz and country.’

Dinosaur Discs.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/12/the-art-of-google-book-scan.html?mobify=0

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin

The central nervous system is in an ever-adjusting balance between inhibition and excitation. Ambien, like alcohol or an anesthetic, triggers the brain’s main inhibitory system, which depends on binding between gaba—gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter—and gaba receptors on the surface of billions of neurons. gaba receptors can be found throughout the brain, and when they’re activated the brain slows. Ambien encourages the process by sticking to the receptors, holding open the door to the neurotransmitter. Suvorexant, which Merck describes as “rationally designed”—rather than stumbled upon, like most drugs—influences a more precise set of neurotransmitters and receptors. Orexin neurotransmitters, first identified fifteen years ago, promote wakefulness. When suvorexant is in the brain, orexin is less likely to reach orexin receptors. Instead of promoting general, stupefying brain inactivity, suvorexant aims at standing in the way of a keep-awake signal. This difference may or may not come to mean a lot to insomniacs, but Merck’s marketing is likely to encourage the perception that suvorexant ends the dance by turning off the music, whereas a drug like Ambien knocks the dancer senseless.

via Ian Parker: The Search for a Blockbuster Insomnia Drug : The New Yorker.

[Intriguing, although the author has too little technical knowledge (or is too overawed by Wolfram) to ask the tough questions. -egg

In 1988 [Wolfram] released the first version of Mathematica, a platform for technical computation, and in 2009, he released the Wolfram Alpha search engine, a computational knowledge engine. His new project, he says, is a perfect marriage.“Mathematica is this perfect precise computation engine, and WolframAlpha is general information about the world,” Wolfram told me. “Now we can combine the two.”The combination is just part of the picture. Included in the new project is natural language programming — not that a program can be created exclusively with natural language, but that a developer can use some natural language. Also included is a new definition of literally anything in your application — from code to images to results to inputs — as being usable and malleable as a symbolic expression. There’s a whole new level of automation and a completely divergent approach to building a programming language, away from the small, agile core with functionality pushed out to libraries and modules and toward a massive holistic thing which treats data and code as one. And there’s a whole new focus on computation that knows more about the world than the programmer ever could.

via Sentient code: An inside look at Stephen Wolframs utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm | VentureBeat | Dev | by John Koetsier.

[“To my knowledge this is the first example, in any animal, of epigenetic transmission of a simple memory for a specific perceptual stimulus. The broader implications for the neuroscience of memory and to evolutionary biology in general could be paradigm shifting and unprecedented.”]

Brian Dias, a postdoctoral fellow in Kerry Ressler’s lab at Emory University, had reported that mice inherit specific smell memories from their fathers — even when the offspring have never experienced that smell before, and even when they’ve never met their father. What’s more, their children are born with the same specific memory.

This was a big, surprising claim, causing many genetics experts to do a double-take, as I discovered from a subsequent flurry of Tweets. “Crazy Lamarkian shit,” quipped Laura Hercher, referring to Lamarckian inheritance, the largely discredited theory that says an organism can pass down learned behaviors or traits to its offspring. “My instinct is deep skepticism, but will have to wait for paper to come out,” wrote Kevin Mitchell. “If true, would be revolutionary.”

The paper is out today in Nature Neuroscience, showing what I reported before as well as the beginnings of an epigenetic explanation. (Epigenetics usually refers to chemical changes that affect gene expression without altering the DNA code).

via Mice Inherit Specific Memories, Because Epigenetics? – Phenomena: Only Human.

Fatimah Ayed Hamed al Hajuri al Johaini, 72 or 73 years old, was a fire healer. She burned people for their own good. She had been doing this all day in a desert operating room that consisted of a dusty rug and a hearth. In the coals of the hearth she heated iron nails to orange hotness. These implements she pressed into twitching flesh at secret locations on her patients’ bodies. Nerves and veins taught by her father, by his father before him, and so on, going back thousands of years. “I’ve been doing this for 40 years. People keep coming. There is only me left do this. I am about to die. Thanks be to God. But I will cure whatever I can cure.”

via Fire Cure – Out Of Eden Walk.

[I like the idea of generative game/installation music as my next career. -egg]

We can often seem deaf to game audio in the same way we’re blind to animation. Maybe it’s because the best examples of both are so natural and chameleonic that they blend into a game’s broader objectives. Maybe it has to be Halo ostentatious or Amon Tobin trendy just to prick up our ears; or make the screen flash pretty colours. Or maybe Brian Eno has to be involved, as we’ll come to in a minute.Yet Weir’s work is fascinating, and goes some way beyond the more conventional fields of ‘horizontal re-sequencing’ shuffling pre-recorded segments of music and ‘vertical re-orchestration’ more complex dynamic mixes. It blurs the line not just between games and the real world – much of his work at sound design agency Earcom is generative soundscapes for shops, banks and hotels – but between melodies and chaos. What’s more, it invites games to become more than the linear B-movies imported from outgoing consoles, delivering something worthy of its ambition. He is currently an audio director at Microsoft.

via The Suite Science: Paul Weir Talks Generative Music | Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

#algopop — Much of Paul Weir’s work at sound design agency…
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