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Music Appreciation: Global Bass

It’s midnight, early August, Toronto, 2012 in a hall on the waterfront. On the stage behind large stacks of computers and gear, three large, serene dudes that go by the name A Tribe Called Red bounce up and down as they play a ferocious remix of their track “Indigenous Power” made by Monterrey, Mexico based producer Javier Estrada, along with a stream of rap, dancehall, cumbia and miscellaneous unknown vicious
styles. The video projectors show a montage of cut ups of Hollywood Native cliches interspersed with traditional symbols and electric design. It’s a
hip-hop party, it’s an “Electric Pow Wow”, to use the name of the group’s party night in Ottawa; it’s
21st century cosmopolitanism in full effect: a perfect example of the bringing together of
worlds that is Global Bass.

Global Bass (a.k.a transnational bass or sometimes tropical bass) is probably most familiar to the world via the work of UK MC of Sri Lankan descent M.I.A.
and her sometime collaborator, US DJ and producer Diplo who on tracks like “Bucky Done Gun”
created a wildly successful sonic collage of digital dancehall styles from around the world, topped off with an anti-globalization rhetoric that celebrated
the dancehall pleasures of subaltern populations around the world. While commercially and artistically successful, MIA and Diplo have also been intensely
criticized for the cultural theft of styles
which do not belong to them, and for a vacuous political rhetoric which ultimately goes no further
than a feelgood sentiment of opposition which fits neatly into the marketplace for all things alternative and independent.

Beneath that story however is a thriving scene or rather group of networked scenes which is both global and bassed in very interesting and ever evolving
ways. At its core, global bass is two different things: first, the local production of electronic/digital dance musics around the world that are
i…

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The weird, black, spidery things of Mars

See those weird, black, spidery things dotting the dunes in this colorized photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010? Yeah. Nobody knows what the hell those things are.

What we do know about them just underlines how incredibly unfamiliar Mars really is to us. First spotted by humans in 1998, these splotches pop up every Martian spring, and disappear in winter. Usually, they appear in the same places as the previous year, and they tend to congregate on the sunny sides of sand dunes — all but shunning flat ground. There’s nothing on Earth that looks like this that we can compare them to. It’s a for real-real mystery, writes Robert Krulwich at NPR. But there are theories:

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, from Hungary, from the European Space Agency have all proposed explanations; the leading one is so weird, it’s transformed my idea of what it’s like to be on Mars. For 20 years, I’ve thought the planet to be magnificently desolate, a dead zone, painted rouge. But imagine this: Every spring, the sun beats down on a southern region of Mars, morning light melts the surface, warms up the ground below, and a thin, underground layer of frozen CO2 turns suddenly into a roaring gas, expands, and carrying rock and ice, rushes up through breaks in the rock, exploding into the Martian air. Geysers shoot up in odd places. It feels random, like being surprise attacked by an monstrous, underground fountain.

“If you were there,” says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, “you’d be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air.” The ground below would be rumbling. You’d feel it in your spaceboots.

Read the rest of Robert Krulwich’s post — and check out some spectacular photos of the things — at NPR

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Todd Akin on the scourge of doctors giving abortions to non-pregnant women

[Video Link] Salon: Among “abortionists,” Akin said in a floor speech in 2008, “you find that along with the culture death go all kinds of other lawbreaking: the not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who aren’t actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things.” Later in the video Akin also accuses death culture doctors of killing imaginary unicorns.

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Quadcopters playing catch

The ETH Zurich quadcopter folks have added to their already impressive collection of videos of cooperative, autonomous quadcopters doing exciting things (previously) with this video of the adorable little gizmos throwing and catching balls together.

To toss the ball, the quadrocopters accelerate rapidly outward to stretch the net tight between them and launch the ball up. Notice in the video that the quadrocopters are then pulled forcefully inward by the tension in the elastic net, and must rapidly stabilize in order to avoid a collision. Once recovered, the quadrotors cooperatively position the net below the ball in order to catch it.

Because they are coupled to each other by the net, the quadrocopters experience complex forces that push the vehicles to the limits of their dynamic capabilities

Cooperative Quadrocopter Ball Throwing and Catching – IDSC – ETH Zurich

(via JWZ)

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Ask science: Does sugar really make children hyper?

“Why aren’t my kids hyper after binging on sugar?” asked Gillian Mayman at Mind the Science Gap, a blog featuring the work of various Master of Public Health students from the University of Michigan.

The punchline: “A review of 12 separate research studies found that there was no evidence that eating sugar makes kids hyper.”

The post is great, but greatest of all? The animated GIFs used to illustrate it. (via @Boraz)