Ever since Tom Wolfe in a 1970 essay coined the term “radical chic”, upper-class flirtation with radical causes has been ridiculed. But by separating aesthetics from politics Wolfe was actually more reactionary than the people he criticized, writes Johan Frederik Hartle.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The liberated libido. In the West, a dalliance is no longer punished by death. The ideal of sexual freedom is powerful - but, unfortunately, far from universal... more
I’m only supposed to be checking that the link is good and that the story is interesting. Ten minutes later …
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Earliest recorded music via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
The first ever audio recording we know of was made by Éduoard-Léon Scott in 1857. As Maggie has previously posted here, the recording device he invented, the phonautograph, etched sound waves to paper. They weren't intended to be “played back” and it wasn't until 2008 when researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used a scanner and “virtual stylus” to listen to the sounds inscribed on the paper. It was a recording of a tuning fork and someone, likely Scott, singing Au Clair de la Lune.
I listened to it over and over this morning and was trying to imagine a time when there was no recording, and every sound was temporary. That led me to what appears to be a fascinating book from 2009, titled Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music [Amazon.com] by Greg Milner. The opening paragraph is fantastic:
The story goes that, late in his life, Guglielmo Marconi had an epiphany. The godfather of radio technology decided that no sound ever dies. It just decays beyond the point that we can detect it with our ears. Any sound was forever recoverable, he believed, with the right device. His dream was to build one powerful enough to pick up Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.For more about the Éduoard-Léon Scott project, visit FirstSounds.org
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How do you tell if a mouse is depressed? via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Image: Mouse, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from iboy's photostream
Because there are some things you can’t ethically test on humans, human medical research involves animal models. Such models are useful and important. There is a lot we wouldn’t know – and a lot of people whose lives would be much worse &ndash if it weren’t for these animals.
That said, animals models are not perfect. Especially when it comes to relatively subjective problems like mental health. We test anti-depressants on mice. But how do you know whether it’s working? After all, the mouse can't tell you that it’s feeling better. And you can’t really watch what the mouse does and see behaviours directly relatable to the human experience of depression, either. (Does the mouse feel more like going to his job and interacting with his friends today?)
At Scientific American Mind, Robin Henig explains the three commonly used tests that give scientists a glimpse into the mouse psyche. These are flawed proxies. Given the very real questions about how effective anti-depressant drugs actually are, it’s worth putting some effort into developing better ways of monitoring their effectiveness in animals. But, for now, this is what we have to go on.
Forced swimming test. The rat or mouse is placed into a cylinder partially filled with water from which escape is difficult. The longer it swims, the more actively it is trying to escape; if it stops swimming, this cessation is interpreted as depressionlike behaviour, a kind of animal fatalism.Find out about the other two tests at Scientific American Mind
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Stephen Hawking is brilliant. And his paralysis makes him a symbol of the unfettered mind. His real genius, however, is for self-promotion... more
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Why I Froze My Eggs via Big Think by Leigh Gallagher
When Fortune magazine's assistant managing editor Leigh Gallagher turned 38 she made the decision to freeze her eggs, an experience she recently wrote about on the women's website The Hairpin. In her recent Big Think interview, Gallagher discusses her decision as well as the bioethics and social implications involved in delaying parenthood.
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Forza Cornwall! A Journey in Two Legs via Big Think by Frank Jacobs
Why travel all the way to Italy when you can visit a place much closer by that is shaped like Italy? That is the alluring ruse proposed by this poster, created in 1907 by Arthur Gunn for the Great Western Railway.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Attention, novelty junkies: New is not always improved. Ideas that succeed are those that stick around long enough to become old... more
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Shoot the Aliens via How-To Geek by Asian Angel
In this game aliens have slipped into town and stolen something from the local gun fighter, which sets off a quest for revenge. Are your shooting skills good enough to help the gun fighter defeat the aliens or will they sit back and laugh at your poor aim?
Asian Angel’s walk-through is here or you can go straight to the game here.
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‘Traitor to the British working man’ via The National Archives blog by Audrey Collins
Census returns are full of useful information for genealogists, local historians and other researchers. But some of the most interesting entries are the ones where the householders supplied more information than was asked for, or made comments of some kind. …
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