Short Musical Quiz: Chimp Vs. Sumerian Zither

A Midi recording of the oldest known musical composition (from 1400 BC), which originally would have been played on some kind of dorky harp instrument:

The first known drum solo by a chimp:

Which do you like better?  So far I'm leaning chimp.  He reminds me a bit of Mickey Waller, who played for Rod Stewart back in the day.

Actually, if you have the chimp drum along to the zither it isn't bad either.

Gotta Get Me One Of Them Aztec Death Whistles

...'cuz it really does sound like the ‘scream of a thousand corpses’.  I can see these things being a great Halloween novelty, or maybe a stocking stuffer around Xmas.

Serious Question: What's Crapping On My Balcony?

I'm nine floors up in outer Scarborough (or, as we call it down here, The Bro), facing West, and every once in awhile I find animal poop on the balcony of my condo unit.  Too big for a mouse or rat--and how could they get up here anyway?-- not a furry pellet like owls produce, and not an acidy splat like pigeons or gulls. I figure I'm dealing with  a hawk of some kind, as I've seen them flying among the buildings and resting on balcony railings in the afternoon when nobody's home.  Its kind of neat to think a red-shoulder perched on my patio chair, sleeping, and they are welcome to do so.  Bit rude to abuse my hospitality like that, however.

Searching The Internet For Time Travellers

From the abstract:

Abstract. Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of  information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet 
communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given 
practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No 
time travelers were discovered. 

Here's one example of a search term they thought might be sufficiently unique to reveal prescient knowledge (and therefore indicate a time traveler from the future):

On 2013 March 16, the newly elected pope of the Catholic Church, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, chose the
official name of Francis. Bergoglio is the first pope ever to choose the name Francis. Therefore, the term "Pope Francis" is relatively unique and came into the public lexicon during our search period. Since Christianity is currently the most popular religion on Earth, Roman Catholics comprise the largest sect of  Christianity [20], and papal histories are well recorded, it seems reasonable to assume that "Pope Francis"  would remain memorable well into the future. Before 2013 March, however, there is little reason for  anyone without prescient information to mention a "Pope Francis". Discussions or even mentions on the Internet of Pope Francis before 2013 March were therefore searched for as potentially prescient evidence of time travelers from the future.

But, again, nothing.

On the other hand, as they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  If you're sitting around bored at work today and want to do some research that could overturn all of physics, you might consider throwing an hour or two at the problem.

History Of Paranormal Research In Russia And The Soviet Union: 1917 To Present

Unconventional research in USSR and Russia: short overview is a fascinating document.  I've just excerpted bits below and added a few comments.  Of course the Americans did this kind "research", so you would expect the Russians did as well.  I didn't know they were up to it this early, however:

No further work was done until the beginning of the Cold War:

Most of the recent research is considered pseudo-scientific in The West.  And indeed it seems as though a good deal of  modern day pseudo-scientific beliefs originated behind the Iron Curtain.  Some of us are old enough to remember "pyramid power" from the 1970s.  Interestingly enough:

There is debate over who coined the term "pyramid power." Author Max Toth has claimed he coined the phrase,[20] as has Patrick Flanagan.[citation needed] In the 1970s, both authors released books entitled Pyramid Power.[21][22] This led to a lawsuit by Flanagan against Toth, according to Toth.[20]

However, the term in the context of its current usage first appeared in print in Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder's 1970 book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.[23] They claim the term was coined by "Czechoslovakian researchers" in the 1960s.[24]

And indeed we see that research on like topics continued even into the new millenium:

In any case, one of the things that first made me love the Internet was Jessica Utts analysis of the Stargate Program .  It was made available as a downloadable document, charts and tables and all, and it made me think that the on-line would become a repository of secret knowledge.   A library of magic, perhaps.   In the end it it turned out to be a repository of hardcore porn, but for a brief moment...

Giant Sloth: Its What's For Dinner

From The Archaeology News:

Most scientists agree that humans began arriving in the Americas between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, and the Clovis people of North and Central America are generally considered the "first Americans." But new fossil evidence from a streambed in southern Uruguay could challenge such theories.

Results published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggest the presence at the site of human hunters who may have killed giant sloths and other megafauna. That itself isn't odd, but the site, called Arroyo del Vizcaino, has been radiocarbon dated to between 29,000 and 30,000 years old—thousands of years before people were thought to be there.

My favorite bit of the article is this:

The date of Arroyo del Vizcaino may make some archaeologists cringe: South America's earliest human settlement at Monte Verde in Chile dates to only 14,000 years ago. 

Because this ignores the fact that a deeper layor at the MV site was dated to 33,000 BP.  But Tom Dillehay, who has done most of the work at Monte Verde, had so much trouble getting the earlier dates accepted that he never really pushed the apparently older material.

In any case, here's what the folks at Arroyo del Vizcaino actually found:

(c) Surface modification of bones

No carnivore tooth marks were identified. Nearly 59% of the bones collected show modifications with features identifiable as trampling marks [26], with over one-third of the bones exhibiting trampling abrasion on more than 25% of their surface area (see electronic supplementary material, figure S7). Furthermore, 40 elements (nearly 5% of the identified specimens, a percentage similar to the proportion in human sites [23]) show marks that have macroscopical features consistent with human agency (figure 4; electronic supplementary material, figures S8–S13). Ten of the bones that showed little or no trampling abrasion in the studied area of the anthropogenic-style marks were examined under greater magnifications. A total of 15 marks were analysed from the selected bones. Congruent with previous preliminary findings [27], most of these marks show microscopical features described in cuts made by human stone tools, such as shoulder effects, Herzian cones and even microstriations [12] (figure 4a–e; electronic supplementary material, table S6), the latter being very rarely preserved in prehistoric material [11,26]. 

Turns out I've written about Giant Sloths on previous occasions.  Here, for example.

More On The Piraha (My Favorite Folk)

The Piraha are a small tribe living along the Amazon with an extremely peculiar...simple, primitive...language:

Among Pirahã's many peculiarities is an almost complete lack of numeracy, an extremely rare linguistic trait of which there are only a few documented cases. The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantity—hói, a "small size or amount," hoí, a "somewhat larger size or amount," and baágiso, which can mean either to "cause to come together" or "a bunch."

I've written about the implications such a language has for certain theories of Chomsky and other linguist/philosophers here:

...it challenges Chomsky's ideas of a "Universal Grammar" and a "Language Organ". Essentially, in this idea the Language Organ is seen as an inference machine, a computer that is loaded with some version of First Order Logic elaborate enough to give you simple mathematics (as, for example, in Russel's Principia Mathematica). Thus, "number" should be present in all human languages.

And yet Piraha lacks this supposedly "universal design feature" (as I believe Everett calls it). Hence no Universal Grammar. And since a UG and, according to some (Fodor at one time), a universal lexicon are supposedly our heritage as a species, perhaps no Human Nature either.

Anyway, run off and read the Internet.  I've away most of today, and this may be all you see in this place.

Science Proves This Blog As Addictive As Cocaine!

Oreos, however, are not:. The study ref-ed is entirely without scientific value.  It's what you get when you allow college students access to cookies and drugs.

Fighting Dragons

Not exactly, but...  Click on pic for full effect.

I used to own a couple of Greens, which are not quite as spectacular.  They would fight, but a bit less energetically than these two.

Canadians Abroad

Apr. 25, 2013 — The rediscovery of a mystery animal in a museum's underground storeroom proves that a non-native 'big cat' prowled the British countryside at the turn of the last century.

The animal's skeleton and mounted skin was analysed by a multi-disciplinary team of Durham University scientists and fellow researchers at Bristol, Southampton and Aberystwyth universities and found to be a Canadian lynx -- a carnivorous predator more than twice the size of a domestic cat.

A neat little discovery, and a good intro to Darren Naish, one of my favorite science bloggers, who has a much more detailed piece on the discovery here.  Darren's into crytozoology, among other things.  I've written about him before.

On Hair, Ancient And More Ancient

Janet Stephens, the "hair dressing archaeologist", has been much in the news of late for having successfully recreated the hair-style worn by ancient Rome's Vestal Virgin priestesses.

Here's how she got her start:

 “One day, I was killing time at the Walters Museum in Baltimore while my daughter was at a music lesson and I ended up in the Ancient Roman collection,” says Stephens. “They were making changes in the gallery and they had set some of the portrait statues in the middle of the gallery and I got to see the back of the head and that is where all the hairdressing happens.  Usually, they are pushed up against a wall because they expect you to be most interested the face but I’m a hairdresser--I don’t care about her face, I want to see the hair.  I looked at the back of these heads and mentally started dissecting the style.”

Once home, Stephens pulled out a long hair mannequin and got braiding and weaving, using reverse engineering and her hairdresser smarts to recreate the shape.

Since then she has managed to recreate many ancient styles, and debunk many previous theories about how these elaborate dos were put together. It turns out, for example, that many them really were the result of styling and not, as previously thought, wigs.  The one below is "classical Greek" (5th c. BC Athenian)

Some of Stephen's more elaborate recreations can be seen at her youtube channel here.  More on the archaeological significance of her research can be found here.

The Final Frontier

The bottom of Lake Whillans, a two meter deep body of water underneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, sandwiched between ice and rock.  And, yes, it harbors life.

Carry On Roma

With all the to-do about these folks lately, I thought the following might be apropos:

Dec. 6, 2012 — Despite their modern-day diversity of language, lifestyle, and religion, Europe's widespread Romani population shares a common, if complex, past. It all began in northwestern India about 1,500 years ago...

[...]

The genome-wide evidence specified the geographic origin toward the north or northwestern parts of India and provided a date of origin of about 1,500 years ago. While the Middle East and Caucasus regions are known to have had an important influence on Romani language, the researchers saw limited evidence for shared genetic ancestry between the European Romani and those who live in those regions of the world today. Once in Europe, Romani people began settling in various locations, likely spreading across Europe via the Balkan region about 900 years ago.

You can read abstract here.

Mathys Get Punked

A quick update to this post from April 2012, which is about a paper withdrawn from the journal Applied Mathematics Letters because it had "no mathematical content".  Now we have second paper retracted from the same journal because it made "no sense mathematically".  A summary:

There’s nothing new in this paper, so it’s consistent with something, we’re not sure what. But we have raised a very serious question! OK, people have been raising that question for centuries, but this is important, dammit. The fact that we haven’t actually added anything to the discussion of that question? Please move along, nothing to see here.

At the time, Dr. Dawg compared the situation around paper #1 to The Sokal Affair.  Since here many of the same people are involved (the journal editor, now replaced, and a co-author), I think his argument still holds good: the hard sciences are just as prone to being pranked as the soft.

Life On Mars?

UPDATE:  Slashdot says its a hoax.  But a good one.

Last week Curiosity was able to use its SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) device to confirm the discovery. A robotic arm with a complex system of Spectral Analysis devices was able to vaporize and identify gasses from the sample, concluding that it is in fact plastic. How plastic formed or ended up on the Martian surface is quite an exciting mystery that sparks many questions. The type of plastic sampled as we know so far can only be formed using petrochemicals, meaning not only that there could possibly be a source of oil on the Red Planet, but that somehow it got turned into plastic. Even more interesting is that oil or petrochemicals used to create this type of plastic are only known to come from ancient fossilized organic materials, such as zooplankton and algae, which geochemical processes convert into oil pointing to the earthshaking evidence that there was once life on mars.

This looks like a fairly credible claim.  It also seems to be a followup on stories like this.  So maybe not quite sealing the deal, but strongly suggesting, that our solar neighbor once harbored enough life for it to turn into an oil deposit.

Bloop No More

This is terribly disappointing:

The broad spectrum sounds recorded in the summer of 1997 are consistent with icequakes generated by large icebergs as they crack and fracture. NOAA hydrophones deployed in the Scotia Sea detected numerous icequakes with spectrograms very similar to “Bloop”. The icequakes were used to acoustically track iceberg A53a as it disintegrated near South Georgia Island in early 2008. Icequakes are of sufficient amplitude to be detected on multiple sensors at a range of over 5000 km. Based on the arrival azimuth, the iceberg(s) generating “Bloop” most likely were between Bransfield Straits and the Ross Sea, or possibly at Cape Adare, a well know source of cryogenic signals.

The original, far more Romantic theory ran as follows:

...the sound nicknamed Bloop is the most likely to come from some sort of animal, because its signature is a rapid variation in frequency similar to that of sounds known to be made by marine beasts. There's one crucial difference, however: in 1997 Bloop was detected by sensors up to 4800 kilometres apart. That means it must be far louder than any whale noise, or any other animal noise for that matter. Is it even remotely possible that some creature bigger than any whale is lurking in the ocean depths? 

Apparently, the answer to this last question is a soul-deadening "no".

From The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

* The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, 
subcortical neural networks  aroused during  affective  states  in humans are  also  critically 
important for generating emotional behaviors in animals. Artificial arousal of the same brain 
regions generates corresponding behavior and feeling states in both humans and non-human 
animals.  Wherever  in the brain one evokes instinctual  emotional behaviors in  non-human 
animals, many of the ensuing behaviors are consistent with experienced feeling states, including 
those internal states that are rewarding and punishing. Deep brain stimulation of these systems 
in humans  can  also  generate  similar affective states.   Systems  associated with affect  are 
concentrated in subcortical regions where neural homologies abound. Young human and nonhuman  animals without neocortices retain these brain-mind functions.   Furthermore, neural 
circuits supporting  behavioral/electrophysiological states of  attentiveness, sleep and decision 
making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in
insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).

* Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of 
parallel evolution of  consciousness.   Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has 
been  most dramatically  observed in  African grey  parrots. Mammalian and avian  emotional 
networks and  cognitive  microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously 
thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit  neural sleep patterns
similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches,  
neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.

I'll still be eating chicken tonight, but it wouldn't surprise me if this kind of research doesn't eventually lead to changes in how we treat, for example, our industrial animals.  Also, though octopus made the cut, so far no reptiles are on the Cambridge list, although I think any Monitor or Boa owner will tell you that their pets can also feel and engage in "intentional" acts.

A bit more on the broader implications here.

Elsevier Pranked

Elsevier is a very large publisher of scientific and medical journals.  It has been boycotted recently by a number of high-profile scientists due to its high subscription prices for individual journals, bundling subscriptions to journals of different value and importance, and Elsevier's support for SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act.^{[44][45][46]  A couple of years back, this paper  appeared in one of its journals.}

Note the emails of the corresponding authors:

Now the paper has been retracted because it “contains no scientific content".   Obviously something the editors should have picked up, though some see a deeper significance to the debate over Elsevier's business model in the fact that Elsevier is charging $39.95 to let you read the retraction notice to a paper that it has acknowledged to be worthless.

I Want One

 ...because one of these:

...might eventually lead to one of these:

...which would be really cool.

h/t

PS.  Another lazy, newsless Sunday.  If you missed it, here's Kate's butt.

Spammers Have No Friends

A pretty picture that computer scientists are using to identify spammers.   Each dot is a purported IP address that has sent/recieved hotmail messages.  Normal folk are likely to be "enmeshed" in the resulting network--with both incoming and outgoing e-mail messages tracable to their IP.  Spammers are more likely to be on the outside firing messages into the larger body, with very little in the way of reply (because most people delete their spam without replying). 

Probably not perfect.  As noted, new hot-mail users (who have not sent or received many messages) may get tagged as spammers.