Maybe We Do Need Some Education

In Scientific American, writer Lucy Tu describes a project that may one day help people speak who have lost the ability to do so. That condition, called "aphasia," is often a side-effect of injuries to the brain. People with damaged vocal cords can have the same condition.

Eye-movement-detecting computer screens allow many people to communicate, as did the late physicist Stephen Hawking. People without full use of vocal cords might touch a vibrating wand to their throats while speaking to make external sounds. Both techniques can sound mechanical.

But researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have gone several steps ahead of even that advance.

The team, led by researcher Robert Knight, used the electrical impulses read from research subjects as they listened to "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1", from The Wall. The subjects wore electrodes in the study so the electrical activity in their brains could be measured for another experiment on epileptic seizures.

Knight's later experiment involved people wearing the electrodes while they were undergoing surgery and the song was played during the procedure. All of the data was fed to an AI trained to decipher them, so researchers had a record of how the brain reacted to "Part One." It could distinguish which brain response reacted to which music sound. A different pitch made a different electrical response. Changes in rhythm -- which in "Part One" happen quite subtly -- also change what the brain does and the electrodes read.

Then the researchers used another AI to take the brain signals and change them into musical notes. The result, Tu writes, was a "roughly intact" melody and "garbled but discernible" lyrics. If you already know what's being sung, then you would probably be able to pick out the words. Ironically, this is the same technique used by religious rock-haters when saying that a Led Zeppelin song backwards is an homage to Satan. Sort of.

Knight said the research is in early stages and may one day actually allow people to speak in a normal human voice. He said the team chose "Part One" because it's musically complex and can bring a lot of responses in brain activity. And they like Pink Floyd.

In fact, Knight says, they might soon be able to have enough data to create a whole Pink Floyd album. Which almost certainly will get them sued by Roger Waters.

PS - Yes, I know that the post title is actually taken from lyrics in "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2." All the lyrics in Part 1 deal with the wartime death of the singer's father. Didn't want to be that much of a downer.

Cool Place to Live

So this week a bus tour group from Ohio and West Virginia stopped in Pawhuska and used our church Family Life Center for dinner, a Native American traditional dress style show and a presentation by top fancy dancer Mike Pahsetopah. Afterwards, while people were waiting to talk with Mike, one of the tour participants asked how we were able to get him to present for the group. I deferred to the tour people, since I hadn’t done anything but unlocked the door.

But it made me reflect, because this man — who was probably about 10 years my senior — was astounded by something I’ve seen more times than I can count, and I’m whiter than flour. Mike was great, and (to my limited knowledge) a very skillful dancer. The thing is how many people I have to compare him too. Heck, I remember when Woolaroc first built their cultural building and the “Arrows Skyward” presentation featured live dancers. We get cross-cultural encounters every day here, and we can explore a dozen nations without leaving the state. Maybe it takes getting old to do it, but I’m sure glad I grew up here.

Worth the Trip

It's always neat when one's preferred baseball team does something really cool, like covering admission for anybody who wants to visit the Negro League Baseball Museum during the month of February, designated in the United States as Black History Month.

The role that the Negro Leagues played in building African-American communities in many cities and in the long fight towards desegregation is one that people should know if they want to consider themselves aware of our nation's history. As a multiple-time visitor of the NLBM, I can recommend it as an excellent way to begin learning about this important era.

And in February, "tuition" is free...

All Things JWST

If you want to know about the developmental history of the about-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), then Natalie Wolchover's lead story at Quanta will tell you everything and then some. Wolchover digs deep into the origins of the multi-billion dollar project, its cutting-edge designs and the new technology necessary to make them work, and so on. She touches a little on the controversy regarding the telescope's name and she does refer to the extensive delays and cost overruns that have dogged the project.

But this is an article about a potentially amazing new scientific tool and the discoveries that could come from it appearing in a science magazine. Wolchover isn't cheerleading for the JSWT, but she leaves the exposés for other outlets.

Boldly Went

As many news outlets noted, Star Trek's William Shatner was given a ride into near-space on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins spacecraft. At 90, he becomes the oldest person to ever ride into space. And of course, his iconic role as James T. Kirk, captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, means he has finally had the chance to touch a sliver of the arena in which the imaginations of countless fans have been following him for more than half a century. Videos record how profoundly the experience affected him and I look forward to what he may share when he has had some time to reflect and process.

A lot of these billionaire space dudes are also major-league dorks. But they do sometimes take their piles and piles of money and do some cool things with it.

Too Long Gone

 

 

Today marks the 15th anniversary of the death of Buck O'Neil, one of the finest people on or off a ballfield whose absence from the National Baseball Hall of Fame is a reflection not on him but the hall. The song was a collaboration between Kansas City area performer Bob Walkenhorst and a class of elementary school students.

"I want to play on Buck's baseball team."

What Didn't Happen?

At the informative site Back ReAction, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains why quantum mechanics is weird. Anyone who's read a little bit about it knows there's plenty of weirdness to go around, but Dr. Hossenfelder is addressing a particular feature of the theory by use of an experiment called "the bomb experiment."

You can read the post or watch her YouTube video for a full explanation of the experiment, but the upshot of it is that, because of quantum mechanics and its quirky nature, the bomb experiment can explain not only the events that did take place, but also the ones that didn't. And that's not the way experiments usually run.

Corny...But Awesome

I would have posted something about this yesterday when it happened but I was so surprised Rob Manfred got something right I have spent the last 24 hours in a coma collapsed on my keyboard.

Building an actual "Field of Dreams" in Iowa in the cornfield 30 years after the movie of that name came out? Use the White Sox and Yankees as the combatants, as in the ghostly game in the movie? Have it introduced by the movie's lead, Kevin Costner?

I'm almost as stunned to type it as I was to see it.

And if anyone knows how to clean reversed keyboard letters off human foreheads I'd appreciate a little help...

Big and Gone

Over at Bored Panda, we can find a page where a man uses Photoshop to show ancient extinct animals next to their closest modern-day relatives.

Judging by the sizes of a variety of sharp-toothed beasties, I am left with two observations about the world our ancestors inhabited: 1) I'm glad it wasn't me and 2) How in the heck did our species survive?

Fireworks

Seeing as how the 4th of July falls on a Sunday, the local community is wont to hold its Independence Day celebrations on the 3rd. These include an...extensive...fireworks show, as the ranch workers at a local establishment really like to blow stuff up and shoot stuff into the sky, and they especially embrace the combination of the two.

So when you walk back home from viewing said spectacle, and the city streets have enough expended pyrotechnical smoke that it looks like a London fog bank, you know you have well and truly marked that great day when His Majesty the King of England was told where to get off.

Be Vewy Vewy Quiet...

Despite the clear signs of intelligence displayed by many animals that indicate they are not nearly as far away from humans on the cognitive scale than some folks have liked to think, I still believe that there are aspects of intelligent life that we hairless primates possess that other critters do not.

 

As this gray whale demonstrates, comedic timing appears to be one of the ones that's shared. The mother whale popped up behind this group of watchers while their attention was fixed on her baby. Had she decided to go full funny and tapped the guy in the back and asked, "What are you guys looking at?" she could not have done better. Of course, at 40 tons with a flipper 6 to 10 feet long, "tapping" might involve sinking the boat.

The story at Neatorama points out that the behavior, called "spy-hopping," is not that uncommon and happens when the whale spots something it wants to look at more closely.

Star's Trek

An animation at Astronomy Picture of the Day shows what cosmologists and astronomers think it looks like when a star gets trapped and then consumed by a black hole.

A lot less gross than some people I know.

Skyview

People looking at the sky from urban areas often note how power lines, telephone polls and the like obscure their view, cutting it into sections with their dark, crisscrossing lines. Photographer Alex Hyner decided to take that literally, using a telephone poll with several lines that sliced the view into sections. He filled each section with a sky photo taken in a different place, combining their colors and features into an almost stained-glass looking image.

Big Flight

Flew a helicopter on Mars today. Not bad, humanity.

Q: Is This an Easy Problem or a Hard Problem? A: Yes

I'm not 100% sure of the solution to a famous mathematical conjecture proposed by Paul Erdős some 50 years ago -- by which I mean I'm not sure I understand it. Even this relatively simple explanation at Quanta magazine quickly gets esoteric for one whose math skills drop off once we travel beyond arithmetic.

The thing I thought most interesting about the story was that Erdős and a couple of friends -- Vance Faber and Lászlo Lovász -- dreamed up this problem as intentionally one of the simplest they could think of during a tea party. They dallied with it a little at the party and set it aside to finish the next day. "The next day" turned out to be January 2021, as five mathematicians from the University of Birmingham -- Abishek Methuku, Dong-yeap Kang, Tom Kelly, Daniela Kühn and Deryk Osthus -- finally figured out a way to prove their answer to the Erdős -Faber-Lovász Conjecture.

Although Erdős died in 1996, both Faber and Lovász are still living and congratulated the Birmingham team, which is technically known as the Combinatorics, Algorithms and Probability Team at the university.

The thing that struck me was how the problem was intentionally created to be simple and initially thought to be so by the conjecturing trio, only to turn into a mathematical hairball that took 50 years to figure out. Math, much like life, often winds up with intended simplicity giving way to unintended complexity.

Now as to whether or not I'll ever be able to figure out what any of the 8 mathematicians listed were talking about? I think that problem has a simple answer: Highly unlikely.

Cut the Cards?

Over at Twisted Sifter, you can find an entry for an artist who takes that figure of speech literally, cutting along the different designs on the back of an ordinary deck of playing cards until he creates a 3-D sculpture of them. An example may be seen below:

Spanning the Globe

When I first saw this globe-based device for checking out web radio stations from around the world at Neatorama, I thought it was pretty cool, so I went to the original link and found out it was even cooler, because the original link includes directions on how to make one.

Old School Tunes

And by "old," I mean sometime in the year 16,000 BC or so. In this Ars Technica piece by Kiona Smith, we can read how archeologists figured out that a broken conch shell found in 1931 was not a drinking cup as they first thought. 

The tip of the shell was broken off and scientists through the years thought that was something that had just happened as an accident or as a product of existing for 18,000 years. But biologists pointed out that the tip is a pretty strong part of the shell and would not be prone to breakage unless the force involved might break the rest of the shell too. The conical spiral of conch shells helps produce more than one note when played correctly so they are often used as musical instruments by hunter-gatherer people. 

The presence of some kind of residue around the broken end suggested that the shell was played with a mouthpiece, since the cut edge could injure a musician's lips. The story contains a sound file of the three notes that were played when a trumpet-like mouthpiece was inserted in the opening. Other clues suggest that the shell may have been decorated with paint or other attachments.

Since it was found in a cave near Toulouse, France, about 50 miles from a coastline, archaeologists think that it may help them understand trading relationships between people who lived in that part of Europe and other groups that lived nearer the coast.

Given all of the potential information that could be unlocked by realizing the shell was in fact a musical instrument, it would be interesting to get a peek at what archaeologists in the year 20,000 AD, if any exist, make of a kazoo.

New Message Available?

The key to developing the COVID-19 vaccine is something called "messenger RNA," which is a substance the body uses to, in essence, tell DNA what to do.

Broadly speaking, the vaccine is a certain kind of mRNA which tells the body to act like it is infected with the COVID-19 virus even though it is not. It thus produces antibodies for the virus and if the virus shows up later the antibodies necessary to give it a mitochondrial smackdown are already present. The minor side effects some people report from the vaccination -- soreness, tiredness and such -- come from the immune system ramping up, not from a very mild case of COVID. Neither live weakened virus or dead virus are ever injected into people with the vaccine.

One of the cool potential fallouts from the research that led to this vaccine was the way that mRNA could then be used to create other vaccines for things that go wrong in the body we currently don't have a way to fight. This week the company BioNTech and researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany announced what might be one of the first of these new series of vaccines -- targeting multiple sclerosis. MS, in which the myelin sheaths of nerve cells deteriorate and progressively damage the nerves themselves, is a disease without a cure. Physical therapy and some drug treatments slow or lessen its effects, but people diagnosed with it generally live five to ten years less than people without it. There is no cure...yet.

Tests in mice have shown the new vaccine prevents the development of the disease if the genetic conditions that lead to it are present. It also has halted MS in its early stages and reversed some of the loss of motor muscle control that had already happened. Could another scourge of humanity be next on the list for mRNA to promise relief from?

I mean medically, of course. The solution to that other scourge of humanity is the ballot box, but the problem is the frequent need for booster doses when the promised solution turns out to be a half-baked idea from an unbaked brain.

Mach 1 -- And Beyond

There are many tributes online today to General (USAF ret.) Chuck Yeager, who passed away yesterday evening at his home at 97. Yeager's list of accomplishments merits all of the tributes, with perhaps his peak coming in 1947 when he became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound in level flight. An act he accomplished with broken ribs and a sawed-off broom handle in the cockpit to lever the door closed because he was too sore to do it with his arm.

The Tom Wolfe book The Right Stuff put his accomplishments on a bigger stage by acclaiming him as "the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff" (although Yeager disagreed about the value of the phrase in describing what makes a good pilot). The 1983 movie of the book, directed by Philip Kaufman, served as a springboard for even more interest in Yeager and his place in the development of supersonic flying and space flight, and he published a biography in 1985 called Yeager. 

Yeager developed a scholarship program at Marshall University, which is located in his home state of West Virginia. The Yeager Scholars program is the top academic scholarship offered by Marshall and is not limited to science and technology coursework but includes studies in the arts and mastery of a modern language. Students will also spend a summer at Oxford University as well as as other international studies. He began this in 1986, even though he had never had the chance to attend college himself. Students who complete the four-year program, which pays all tuition, fees and room and board, receive a medallion with a bust of Yeager and the phrase "Only the Best."

His piloting skills were undeniable, his combat record amazing -- although Yeager himself flew a propellor-driven P-51 Mustang he pointed out that the first time he saw one of Germany's Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters he shot it down. Yes, he said, it wasn't very sporting because the jet was preparing to land and he surprised its pilot but it was still a jet and he still waxed it. His leadership was clearly excellent; he entered the United States Army Air Corps as a mechanic Private and retired as a Brigadier General. But his most lasting legacy will be the generations of young people who are given the chance, challenge and means to make a difference throughout the world because of the scholarship program at Marshall University. That's a pretty unbeatable record too.