Link Banana

I’m pretty damn ignorant of the history of Northern Ireland, but this is shocked me:

There are three times as many so-called peace lines — elaborate walls separating working-class neighborhoods — than there were at the height of the Troubles, 88 of them at last count.

I’ve heard of alternatives to the dominant diatonic scale — the one with “octaves” — but as someone who, at best, has a passing knowledge of music theory, it was mostly Greek to me. This article, with the corresponding samples, is the first time I felt some comprehension of how such an alternate scale would work.

The unusual scale she played ended on a high note that was triple, not double, the frequency of the low note, and the interval was divided into 13 equal steps. This new system, called Bohlen-Pierce, was independently invented in the 1970s and 1980s by two engineers and a computer scientist as an alternative to the traditional musical system. Initially a mixture of math, music, and theory, Bohlen-Pierce has now grown into a living art, as people around the world have begun building instruments, composing pieces, and developing a music theory, all using notes that most people have never heard.

And for those looking for more, the Wikipedia page is always a good place to start.

In mice, evidence is growing that the flora of your digestive tract play an important role in maintaining a healthy weight:

When transplanted, their gut bugs turned other mice obese, suggesting that altered bacteria were not only an effect of weight gain, but a cause. The Science findings complement those, but also emphasize the immune system’s role and the possibility of appetite change.

Lloyd does a great job explaining the way psychics and mediums seem to know you so well. The video that he mentions of Derron Brown running a Forer experiment is on YouTube, and he’s got a copy of the reading Brown used.

I’d recently noticed that I’d almost completely stopped watching sports, so an article on the topic caught my eye. This was a large part of it for me:

You pretty much have to watch [sports] live. Sure, you can record a Sunday afternoon football game and watch it the next day, but the final score is harder to avoid than the twist in last night’s episode of Mad Men. Glimpse the back page of the local tabloid, and the game is spoiled. Even if your self-imposed media blackout does succeed, watching a day-old ballgame is like doing yesterday’s crossword. It just doesn’t have the same crackle. At the same time, other entertainment options are becoming easier to fit into my schedule. If I’m not in the mood for the TV shows I’ve DVR’d, I can always stream a movie on Netflix.

For every kid who ever asked, “But when will I ever use this?” when learning about an esoteric math or science concept.

The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day!

(via jimray)

Though I think that title doesn’t quite properly belong to Crash — this was the decade of Gigli, From Justin to Kelly, and many other terrible and unloved movies — this is exactly right:

Bad movies get made all the time. But what infuriated me about “Crash” was that so many people mistook it for something profound when it was truly the opposite. It shouts at the top of its lungs: “I’M SUBTLE! I’M NUANCED!” and [too] many people somehow agreed.

(Found like this: Jeff Goldberg linked to TNC, who linked to Postbougie who cited the title link. All of those links are probably worth perusing as well.)

This video offers an interesting experiment. But (after you watch the video) I thought these comments were worthwhile:

This is ridiculous! First of all these two people look like they could be brothers. Also, the blatant misdirection is never addressed. Every time somebody interacts with one of the two, their attention is always drawn away from the face of the person.

That is kind of the point of the experiment. Unless average humans make a point in looking at the other they work on assumptions. And one assumption is that things usually stay where they are.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. Working in retail, I can tell you that people just don’t pay attention to the people who serve them. Customer will come in asking for an employee who told them something last time, when you ask who it was or if they can describe the person, they often have no idea. … People pay attention to whatever they came in for, but they don’t pay attention to their surroundings.

Anyone notice that the Professor’s shirt color changes from the first shot of him to the next?

(via DF)

Obviously not, but this is the most interesting “Really?” article I’ve seen in months:

…when healthy subjects consumed about 4 teaspoons (20 milliliters) of white vinegar as a salad dressing with a meal that included white bread with a little less than 2 ounces (50 grams) of carbohydrates, there was a 30 percent reduction in their glycemic response, or rise in blood sugar, compared with subjects who had salad with a dressing made from neutralized vinegar.

Three historical facts relating to Sesame Street you may be interested in:

• In 1971, John Holt said Sesame Street sucks. Obviously, I’m oversimplifying. What he has to say about it’s over-ambition and the problems of structured learning are both very good. (via @longreads)
• In 2009, Samantha Shapiro reports the Palestinian version of the show has struggled to live up to it peace-building ambitions. Though the first version of the program, made almost a decade ago, had actual footage — if consciously selected for a lack of Jewishness — from the Israeli version, the current version has completely abandoned the idea.
• In 2004, the Kosovar version had similar problems. That’s documented well in The World According to Sesame Street, though it does a slightly better job covering the simultaneous creation of the Bangladeshi version.

This could be considered a counterpoint to yesterday’s story, but those vaccines-cause-autism crusaders (who also loathe the Paul Offit profiled in the piece) may finally be having an impact:

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

(via Andrew Sullivan)

On seeing the headline I dismissed the idea as on-par with (falsely) pleading insanity, but this seems reasonable:

Another, more successful approach to the Asperger’s defense highlights its sufferers’ propensity for obsessive, repetitive behavior. McKinnon says he couldn’t stop hacking into government computers in his search for evidence of alien spacecraft. Is it fair to punish him for the combined impact of 100 separate crimes just because his compulsion played out in so many episodes?

Jesse Sheidlower’s piece abut the failings of dictionaries with respect to sexually explicit acts includes this unsurprising but unknown detail:

It was to be 170 years before fuck was again put into a general dictionary: In 1965, the British Penguin English Dictionary included the term, and its entire treatment read, “(vulg) (of males) have sexual intercourse (with).”

You’ve probably heard about all the perverse incentives in American medicine, but I’d never heard of this one:

Doctors do a job—like placing a coronary artery stent, reading an EKG, or spending an hour examining and diagnosing a patient with a complex problem like insomnia—and earn something called “relative value units.” In 2009, according to Medicare, the stent guy scores about 24 units for his relatively quick procedure, the EKG person gets 0.5 units for the 10 seconds his job requires, and the poor internist gets only 2.5 units for his hour of time. Figuring a doctor’s total take per task is straightforward: Medicare adds up a doctor’s total RVUs, multiplies the total by a fixed amount (roughly $40 right now), and writes the check.

Medicare and all major insurers place far more relative value on fancy procedures like stents, EKGs, skin biopsies, CT scans, and bowel clean-outs than they do on actual face-to-face time with patients. Procedures, they have decreed, require more mental effort and skill than seeing actual people.

The thought had never really occurred to me, but it turns most of those really cool pictures from space are Photoshopped (that word looks ugly any way you write it).

An object that would in real life comprise several indistinguishable shades of red might be represented to the public as the composite of three pictures in red, green, and blue. As a general rule, professional “visualizers” try to assign red to the image showing the longest wavelengths of light and blue to the one showing the shortest.

I’d not known this:

In 1884, when President Grover Cleveland signed the bill making Labor Day a national holiday on the first Monday in September, he and its sponsors intended it not as a celebration of leisure but as a promotion of the great American work ethic. Work, they believed, was the highest calling in life, and Labor Day was a reminder to get back to it. It was placed at the end of summer to declare an end to the season of indolence, and also to distance it from May Day, the spring event that had become a symbol of the radical labor movement.

There’s a great deal more that’s interesting in the piece about American’s attitudes toward work through history.

Fascinating:

The most widely known period of cargo cult activity, however, was in the years during and after World War II. First, the Japanese arrived with a great deal of unknown equipment, and later, Allied forces also used the islands in the same way. The vast amounts of war materiel that were airdropped onto these islands during the Pacific campaign between the Allies and the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of the islanders, many of whom had never seen Westerners or Easterners before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, tents, weapons, and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the islanders who were their guides and hosts. With the end of the war, the airbases were abandoned, and cargo was no longer dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors, and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cult members thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the deities and ancestors of the natives, who were the only beings powerful enough to produce such riches.

(via Big Contrarian, in the context of this video)

Curious:

Comparing scans from tests with and without the opportunity to cheat, the scientists found that for honest subjects, deciding to be honest took no extra brain activity. But for others, the dishonest group, both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.

(via Lone Gunman)

This article, about how surprisingly little we know about the people we’re closest to, called to mind a quote from A Tale of Two Cities:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Ever since the program started to run out of money — that seems to be the time most people found out it existed — the constant argument I’ve heard against the vehicle trade-in program is that junking those cars is clearly wasteful (even if it is stimulative). While that’s undeniable, the Green Lantern still thinks it may be good:

According to an early analysis from the Web site Cash for Clunkers Information—which estimated an average fuel-economy increase of 69 percent and total sales of 250,000 cars—the program would cut overall fuel consumption by about 76 million gallons a year and carbon dioxide emissions by about 737,200 tons annually. Using Chameides’ figures, it would produce about 1.7 million tons of CO₂ to manufacture those 250,000 cars, so we won’t really see those savings until a little more than two years from now.

Also worth considering, a thought from Steven Levitt’s about the economics of the program (from back when it was just a proposal):

Still, my guess is that unless the price the government pays for the clunkers is very high, the majority of vehicles that are turned in will not have been driven much, if at all.