In Honor of Dr. Dugga

“O.K., let’s slowly lower in the grant money.”
Todd Bearson
Arlington, Mass.

(From The New Yorker, July 20, 2009)

Human Echolocation

Dan Kish has achieved an amazing breakthrough by teaching other blind people how to use echolocation (think bats) to “see” the world around them.  Check it out.

There are more things in heaven and earth

The star PSR B1509-58 appears to take the shape of a human hand and reach out as it dies – 17,000 year ago.  The light just now reaches our eyes.

What’s really out there

Night Sky Over Flagstaff, Arizona. April 16, 2008

From NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day.”

Flagstaff, the first “International Dark Sky City,” maintains a lighting code that limits lights from polluting the nighttime view of the sky.

Clearly Arizona is hogging all the stars.

The peak of laughter

A study of laughter back in 1996 confirmed that laughter reduces stress, increases bloodflow and has a number of other salubrious effects on mind and body.  It also found that a child tends to first laugh at 2-3 months of age, and thereafter laughs more and more until reaching, at age 6, a peak of nearly 300 laughs per day!

At this point, apparently, laughter gets the Telegram, and the average number of laughs per day begins its decline.  The study posits social norms and a desire to fit in as the causes.  This will surprise no one, I’m sure.  Many days, I’m happy if I get in one or two.

Which is particularly sad when one considers that laughter is one of the two ancient secrets to long life and inner peace (the other, of course, being hot tubs.)

Stoplight

“The speed of light, as we’ve all heard, is a constant: 186,171 miles per second in a vacuum. But it is different in the real world, outside a vacuum; for instance, light not only bends but also slows ever so slightly when it passes through glass or water. Still, that’s nothing compared with what happens when [Lene Vestergaard] Hau shines a laser beam of light into a BEC [a form of matter called a Bost-Einstein condensate]: it’s like hurling a baseball into a pillow. “First, we got the speed down to that of a bicycle,” Hau says. “Now it’s at a crawl, and we can actually stop it—keep light bottled up entirely inside the BEC, look at it, play with it and then release it when we’re ready.”"

– from Smithsonian.com

Uh……wow.  I suppose stopping time isn’t far behind?

Dust antelopes

Anyone who believes too strongly in unremitting entropy hasn’t seen the massive dust formations plotting in the corner of my bathroom.

Sing yourself

Maybe this is what Whitman meant…

The composer John Cage visited a sound-proofed anechoic chamber in order to experience total and complete silence.  It didn’t quite work out that way.  Describing the experience, he later wrote, “I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.”

This seems to raise a lot of questions.  Are the two sounds always at the same two musical notes and keys, or do they vascillate and, if so, why?  Can they be in tune with each other, creating a kind of harmony, during which we feel good, or dissonant when we feel bad?  Is the music of our bodies naturally harmonious with the music of those we fall in love with?  Might we be prone to hate someone whose natural music is discordant with our own?

The sun will be blotted out

August 1, 2008

Stop trying to be so smart

Fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker (7/28) about where sudden bursts of insight come from (excerpt here.)  (Apparently they’re not so sudden.  It’s just that you’re not conscious of your mind working on the problem.)  Particularly interesting was the ability of the expert Zen meditator to consciously engage the proper regions of his right hemisphere in order to trigger sudden flashes of problem-solving insight.

I’m encouraged by the conclusion that the process of insight consists of Focus, Impasse and Relaxation, in that order.  In other words, first you tune out distractions and consciously try to solve the problem at hand until you hit an impasse (e.g. writer’s block) and get frustrated.  Then you stop trying, and “concentrate on letting the mind wander.”  Your right hemisphere keeps working until it discovers the solution, at which point your brain lets you know it’s here (the eureka moment.)

Oh, and the best time for those brilliant flashes of genius?  Early morning, right when you wake up.

Yet another reason to hit the snooze button.