Boom! And a Bear Comes Out

Boom! And a Bear Comes Out: “

I wrote a song! It has been running through my mind for a long time, and I finally said “You know what? It is time to FINISH THIS. Time to lay it down. Time to make it the PARTY HIT OF THE SUMMER.”

Boom! And a Bear Comes Out from David Malki ! on Vimeo.

(Download the MP3)

I hope you like it!

If you also have a nagging “cool thing” that you need an excuse to finish, why not submit something to the Machine of Death Talent Show? We’ve pushed back the submission deadline to April 20, and we will accept video performances from remote participants (although if you’re in the Los Angeles area, we’d love to physically put you on the stage)!

More info here. If you can’t submit something, we hope you’ll at least watch the show on the evening of April 26, either live in Los Angeles or livestreamed at MachineofDeath.net. Here’s the Facebook event!

I will tease you with this as well: everyone who’s able to attend the show in person will go home with a very special item that we’ll be unveiling the evening of.

Admission will be free, so if you can’t make it, send your Los Angeleno friends!


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The Revolution That Isn’t There

The Revolution That Isn’t There: “

Fascinating post at John Robb’s about the stirrings of a supposed “Jasmine Revolution” in China. The full post is worth your attention, but I’m pulling these bits from his correspondent:

…several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This… appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.

The blogs and websites themselves are largely invisible to ordinary Chinese as the Great Firewall keeps them out, but they can be seen by the security agencies, who have been swift to react. The organizers, whoever and wherever they are, have repeatedly called on people to gather in a range of popular and public areas in the centre of major cities across China – shopping malls and university campuses – and go for a stroll every Sunday afternoon to call for minor political change. These public areas are, at that time of day, normally filled with young people and out-of-town domestic tourists, all now potential ‘protesters’… but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists. So some young tourists get beaten up and taken away, and some journalists get smacked around.

The security forces are taking it seriously, the top leaders have come out in public to criticise the organisers for threatening social stability, and yet there is still no evidence of real-world substance to the protests, just China’s vast security apparatus chasing shadows on the streets and on the internet, and closing down large sections of China’s internet and SMS traffic…

A revolutionary movement that doesn’t exist, but still causes the kind of crackdown we associate with revolutionary movements, generated by persons unknown either to illustrate what would happen to revolutionary protestors, or to foment genuine revolutionary protest. The new fog of war.

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Mild brain shocks may improve learning and cognition

Mild brain shocks may improve learning and cognition: “

Around 1800, Italian scientist Jean Aldini zapped the brains of dead felons with electricity to make their bodies move. He later reported using the same technique to cure ‘melancholy.’ This sounds like the history of electroconvulsive (shock) therapy, but those were actually the first experiments in transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), tweaking the brain with very mild shocks, 1,000 times less intense than delivered by shock therapy. A resurgence in tDCS is now underway. (Experiment ‘Consent Video‘ above from the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation.) Indeed, neuroscientists at the University of New Mexico are using a tDCS device powered by a 9-volt battery to see if 2 milliamps shocks to certain regions of the scalp can improve cognition and learning. Early results are promising. (In fact, tDCS may even prime neurons to respond to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technique we’ve posted about on BB many times in which bursts from a magnetic coil near the head alter brain activity. TMS has been tested as a potential treatment for certain severe neurological and psychological disorders. Scientific journal Nature surveys the tDCS field in its latest issue. From Nature:


Last year a succession of volunteers sat down in a research lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico to play DARWARS Ambush!, a video game designed to train US soldiers bound for Iraq. Each person surveyed virtual landscapes strewn with dilapidated buildings and abandoned cars for signs of trouble — a shadow cast by a rooftop sniper, or an improvised explosive device behind a rubbish bin. With just seconds to react before a blast or shots rang out, most forgot about the wet sponge affixed to their right temple that was delivering a faint electric tickle. The volunteers received a few milliamps of current at most, and the simple gadget used to deliver it was powered by a 9-volt battery.

It might sound like some wacky garage experiment, but Vincent Clark, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico, says that the technique, called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), could improve learning. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded the research in the hope that it could be used to sharpen soldiers’ minds on the battlefield. Yet for all its simplicity, it seems to work.

Volunteers receiving 2 milliamps to the scalp (about one-five-hundredth the amount drawn by a 100-watt light bulb) showed twice as much improvement in the game after a short amount of training as those receiving one-twentieth the amount of current1. ‘They learn more quickly but they don’t have a good intuitive or introspective sense about why,’ says Clark.

The technique, which has roots in research done more than two centuries ago, is experiencing something of a revival. Clark and others see tDCS as a way to tease apart the mechanisms of learning and cognition. As the technique is refined, researchers could, with the flick of a switch, amplify or mute activity in many areas of the brain and watch what happens behaviourally. The field is ‘going to explode very soon and give us all sorts of new information and new questions’, says Clark. And as with some other interventions for stimulating brain activity, such as high-powered magnets or surgically implanted electrodes, researchers are attempting to use tDCS to treat neurological conditions, including depression and stroke. But given the simplicity of building tDCS devices, one of the most important questions will be whether it is ethical to tinker with healthy minds — to improve learning and cognition, for example. The effects seen in experimental settings ‘are big enough that they would definitely have real-world consequences’, says Martha Farah, a neuroethicist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

‘Neuroscience: Brain buzz‘


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The end of "rare" music and other digitizable media

The end of “rare” music and other digitizable media: “woodstock-front.jpg

This Rolling Stones former-rarity is easy to find online.

My consciousness was forever altered when I happened on Kamandi #3 at age 11. I wanted to read every comic Jack Kirby had created up to that point. But early issues of Fantastic Four were rare and expensive. I bought what I could afford and treasured them. Today I’m sure I could get my hands on PDFs of every issue of Fantastic Four in short order (but I don’t have to because I bought the cheap pulpy Essential Fantastic Four anthologies – the ones to get are Vol 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 — after that Kirby jumped ship for DC). Rare old comics, along with music and cult films, are no longer rare.

Bill Wyman of Slate explores ‘what it means to have all music [and other digitizable media] instantly available.’

A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?

…

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the poet Dan Chiasson wrote at length about Keith Richards’ autobiography and made an interesting point near the end, about how scarcity and rarity, long ago, actually fueled artistic endeavor:

[T]he experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up. Nobody will ever again experience what Keith Richards and Mick Jagger experienced in Dartford, scrounging for blues records.

Point taken–but let’s remember it’s a small sacrifice. I have this or that fetish object–the White Album on two 8-tracks in a black custom case, for example, or a rare Elvis Costello picture disc. And I remember the joy of the find. But it’s hard to feel bad about the end of rarity; didn’t a lot of the thrill come from feeling superior when you had something others didn’t? You really want to get nostalgic about that? We’re finally approaching that nirvana for fans, scholars, and critics: Everything available, all the time. (Certainly Richards and Jagger would approve.) It’s not an ideal state of affairs for a rights holder, of course. But for the rest of us, what is there to complain about?

Lester Bangs’ Basement


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Do bacteria control your brain?

Do bacteria control your brain?: “ourecolioverlords.jpg

A new study has found evidence suggesting that you are not what you eat, so much as you are what’s living in your gut. In mice, at least, the presence of normal gut bacteria has a significant impact on how an individual mouse behaves, and how its brain develops.

this new study is the first to extensively evaluate the influence of gut bacteria on the biochemistry and development of the brain. The scientists raised mice lacking normal gut microflora, then compared their behavior, brain chemistry and brain development to mice having normal gut bacteria. The microbe-free animals were more active and, in specific behavioral tests, were less anxious than microbe-colonized mice.

In one test of anxiety, animals were given the choice of staying in the relative safety of a dark box, or of venturing into a lighted box. Bacteria-free animals spent significantly more time in the light box than their bacterially colonized littermates. Similarly, in another test of anxiety, animals were given the choice of venturing out on an elevated and unprotected bar to explore their environment, or remain in the relative safety of a similar bar protected by enclosing walls. Once again, the microbe-free animals proved themselves bolder than their colonized kin …

Consistent with these behavioral findings, two genes implicated in anxiety — nerve growth factor-inducible clone A (NGF1-A) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) — were found to be down-regulated in multiple brain regions in the germ-free animals …

When Pettersson’s team performed a comprehensive gene expression analysis of five different brain regions, they found nearly 40 genes that were affected by the presence of gut bacteria. Not only were these primitive microbes able to influence signaling between nerve cells while sequestered far away in the gut, they had the astonishing ability to influence whether brain cells turn on or off specific genes.

Personally, I’d like to see more analysis on what these findings mean. The Scientific American story quoted above makes it sound like normal gut bacteria are, on the whole, kind of cramping the brain’s style. Given the evidence that exists about healthy gut bacteria’s importance to maintaining other aspects of physical health, I’m curious whether this study implies that we humans have accepted a bit of a trade off. We get gut bacteria that help us digest food and train our immune systems—but we loose some control over how our brains function, possibly to our detriment, but possibly not, depending on the circumstances.

Oh, and, before the rest of you get a chance, I’m going to jump in here and make the obvious comment: ‘I, for one, welcome our new E. coli overlords.’

Scientific American: The Neuroscience of the Gut

Via Matt Feltz


“

The end of "rare" music and other digitizable media

The end of “rare” music and other digitizable media: “woodstock-front.jpg

This Rolling Stones former-rarity is easy to find online.

My consciousness was forever altered when I happened on Kamandi #3 at age 11. I wanted to read every comic Jack Kirby had created up to that point. But early issues of Fantastic Four were rare and expensive. I bought what I could afford and treasured them. Today I’m sure I could get my hands on PDFs of every issue of Fantastic Four in short order (but I don’t have to because I bought the cheap pulpy Essential Fantastic Four anthologies – the ones to get are Vol 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 — after that Kirby jumped ship for DC). Rare old comics, along with music and cult films, are no longer rare.

Bill Wyman of Slate explores ‘what it means to have all music [and other digitizable media] instantly available.’

A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?

…

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, the poet Dan Chiasson wrote at length about Keith Richards’ autobiography and made an interesting point near the end, about how scarcity and rarity, long ago, actually fueled artistic endeavor:

[T]he experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up. Nobody will ever again experience what Keith Richards and Mick Jagger experienced in Dartford, scrounging for blues records.

Point taken–but let’s remember it’s a small sacrifice. I have this or that fetish object–the White Album on two 8-tracks in a black custom case, for example, or a rare Elvis Costello picture disc. And I remember the joy of the find. But it’s hard to feel bad about the end of rarity; didn’t a lot of the thrill come from feeling superior when you had something others didn’t? You really want to get nostalgic about that? We’re finally approaching that nirvana for fans, scholars, and critics: Everything available, all the time. (Certainly Richards and Jagger would approve.) It’s not an ideal state of affairs for a rights holder, of course. But for the rest of us, what is there to complain about?

Lester Bangs’ Basement


“