Speaker For The Diodes - March 18th, 2009

05:25 am - QotD

"Women's wear always takes ideas from men's wear, so why can't men's get influence from women's? Anyway, the biggest reason [for 'going gal', as the interview question put it] is men's wear is more boring than women's wear!!" -- Yu Masui, quoted in "The Next Level | Boys With Birkins" by Elizabeth Spiridakis, The Moment (NY Times blog), 2009-02-05 [thanks to sodyera for pointing out the article]

["Women's fashions are more (interesting|fun) than men's" is something many people have heard from my own lips as well]

09:59 am - Link Sausage

Bad week so far -- a chunk of yesterday was spent feeling grateful that "at least today things merely hurt like hell" -- so activity and communication will be spotty. But I did finally get around to rounding out a link-sausage entry that I started, uh, weeks ago, so I feel like I've accomplished something. Enjoy.

• Fascinating information (and speculation) about the function of music and dance in human societies, from siderea: Start with this:

  One of the outstanding questions of the cognitive science of music and human evolution is why it is that humans do music in the first place. This is not either as simple or as trivial a question as it may first appear. First of all, apparently all human societies make music, which, frankly, the more you know about music the less likely that seems. Contrast with pantomime and puppetry, neither of which are universal, and both of which are far less demanding of resources including cognitive ones, which brings us to....

  Second, it turns out that to make what we humans term music, you need to have all sorts of specialized mental capacities. [...]

  and after following some military connections, eventually get to: "Something that was once lore just became science." (And then read through the comments where, as seems often the case in Siderea's journal, there's a lot of additional insight, information, and pointers.)
  
  
• Creative poodle grooming -- translate 'creative' as "impressive and/or fabulous and/or silly and/or bizarre". Motorcycle-poodle goes "vroooom! bark!"
  
  
• Courtesy of Abstruse Goose: Why you need to learn math
  
  
• For those of my friends who have small children, A Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks:

  Like many of you, we are concerned about the state of science education in the public school system, especially in the lower grades. Specifically, we have noticed that there is absolutely no training in the K-6 grades that prepares students to become mad scientists. [...]"

  [ pointed out by speaker2animals] ... And while I'm at it, lolcat babysitting
  
  
• Loeb Music Library 'virtual collection' of digital scores and libretti:

  The scores and libretti in this Virtual Collection include first and early editions and manuscript copies of music from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by J.S. Bach and Bach family members, Mozart, Schubert and other composers, as well as multiple versions of nineteenth century opera scores, seminal works of musical modernism, and music of the Second Viennese School. [...]

  In the study of primary sources, detail matters: marginal notations or a copyist's handwriting can be just as important as the simple fact of the notes on a page of music. By providing digital versions of historical editions from its holdings, the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library seeks to make available primary source materials that scholars have found important for their research. [...]

  [ thanks (in more ways than one) to madfilkentist]
  
  
• A related project for text: Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts (link found via Science Daily article about it; I've forgotten who pointed that out to me). Quoting from the Science Daily article:

  "'Searching for medieval manuscripts gets you millions of hits, most of which have nothing to do with manuscripts, and when they do, they usually feature only images of a single page rather than the entire book,' said Matthew Fisher, an assistant professor of English at UCLA. 'Since finding these great projects is so tough, they're functionally invisible.'

  "[...] Fisher decided to collect links to every manuscript from the eighth to the 15th century that had been fully digitized by any library, archive, institute or private owner anywhere in the world.

  "[...] The UCLA-based Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts now links to nearly 1,000 manuscripts by 193 authors in 20 languages from 59 libraries around the world [...]

  "'We'll never replace the joy of sitting down with an 800-year-old book,' he said, 'but we will bring the wonder of these manuscripts to people who might never experience them otherwise.'"

  
  
  

• A bar graph illustrating what factors influence how likely someone is to believe an outrageous statement
  
  
• Ah, if 'twere dated three decades earlier I could use it as documentation for an SCA persona: 17th Century painting of a bearded woman with her husband and infant, along with a bunch of descriptive & historical text. The painting is dated 1631-02-16.

  "The painting, which is superb and unique, is a special case in Ribera's output, and one of the most curious works in Spanish painting--and, indeed, in European art of the period.

  "Its documentary nature is evidenced both by what we know of its origin and by the lengthy, explicit inscription. [...]"

  [The text also mentions that in the 1800s someone "mistook this painting for the portrait of another bearded woman, Brígida del Río, who arrived at the Madrid court in 1590 and had her portrait painted by S´nchez Cot´n," which is early enough ...]
  
  
• An Introverts Lexicon provides extrovert's and introvert's definitions for several terms side by side. [thanks to cellio]
  
  
• Computer-controlled mosquito-hunting laser -- filkers will the name of at least one of the scientists who developed it. And they have the very appropriate Rule 37 poster on the lab door. Is it the future yet?