T-Shirt

02006-08-25 | Travel, World

I AM NOT A TERRORIST
After reading about blogger Raed Jarrar’s experience at JFK (he was forced to take off a shirt with Arabic writing on it or miss his flight), I finally stopped being depressed about the war on terror and began being proactively pissed off. I made this shirt, which says “I am not a terrorist” in Arabic. I plan to wear it every time I go to the airport from now on.

Thanks for the link, Adam.

What Terrorists Want

02006-08-24 | Uncategorized

Schneier on Security: What the Terrorists Want
The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Go ahead and click on the link at the start of this post and please read the whole piece.

Brain Music

02006-08-24 | Brain, Music, Musings

Wired News: Music Makes Your Brain Happy
From an evolutionary perspective, why have humans developed music?

Levitin:
There are a number of different theories. One theory is that music is an evolutionary accident, piggybacking on language: We exploited language to create music just for our own pleasure. A competing view, one that Darwin held, is that music was selected by evolution because it signals certain kinds of intellectual, physical and sexual fitness to a potential mate.

Animals in Translation – Dr. Temple Grandin
Some scientists… think music is just evolutionary baggage with no real purpose, but so many birds and animals create music that it doesn’t make much sense to me that music could simply be so much evolutionary baggage. And if music is just evolutionary baggage, then why does the brain have different areas to analyze the five different components of music? Studies of patients with brain damage have shown that the five distinct brain-processing systems for music are melody, rhythm, meter, tonality, and timbre. My hypothesis is that music is the language of many animals.

I think all language started out as music. Some languages retain more of that musical quality, e.g. Chinese and other Asian languages that depend on tone/melody to convey meaning. Over time, and as language became more abstract, music became an artform… one did not use music to order breakfast, because words were generally more efficient at that task… but to this day certain emotions are easier conveyed with music than words…

Wired News: Music Makes Your Brain Happy
Are there any myths about music that neuroscientists have exposed?

Daniel Levitin:
I think we’ve debunked the myth of talent. It doesn’t appear that there’s anything like a music gene or center in the brain that Stevie Wonder has that nobody else has. There’s no evidence that (talented people) have a different brain structure or different wiring than the rest of us initially, although we do know that becoming an expert in anything — like chess or race-car driving or journalism — does change the brain and creates circuitry that’s more efficient at doing what you’re an expert at.

Just because there may not be a single “Music Gene” does not mean that a certain combination of genes isn’t important or necessary for musical talent. How often do we deny the existence of one thing, only to find out later that that one thing is actually a complex array of many things…