Heat turns powder into creepy alien creature. No, really.
The first minute and twenty seconds is just a person scooping out the powder into a line, which is rather boring, so you might wish to skip that. You want to watch from the moment that heat is added.
Tonight, I’ll interview Eric Barnhill about Cognition, Movement, and Music. The topic is a bit obscure, but I’ve always been fascinated to hear Eric talk about his work. For me, this interview an excellent opportunity to have yet another interesting conversation… and you get to listen in!
Eric began his career as a Julliard-trained concert pianist, but now he’s a graduate student in medical physics in Scotland. Yes, that’s a bit of a strange path. Oddly, it’s been a path with a mostly steady trajectory, as you can see from his recent write-up for his alma matter. Here’s a bit:
During my time at Juilliard, I was introduced to an obscure field called Dalcroze Eurhythmics, which was developed by the Swiss composer and music theorist Emile Jaques-Dalcroze at the turn of the 20th century. In Dalcroze, movement is combined with vocal work and improvisation to create an alternative approach to teaching music. However, musical subjects are intermediate goals, used to develop attention, focus, coordination and physical performance via movement.
In Dalcroze I saw a methodology of unexplored potential that brought all my varied interests together. However, Dalcroze as a profession, to the extent that it exists at all, mostly consists of young children’s music and movement classes. To many colleagues, I had abandoned interpreting Schubert sonatas for sitting on a floor with 3-year-olds rolling balls around.
Early in my Dalcroze career I was reverse-commuting to a children’s music school in the suburbs (a rite of passage for many a Juilliard grad, in one form or another), where I frequently taught Dalcroze and piano to special-needs and learning-disabled children. I took them on as students because I had a blast teaching them.
However, I began to notice something interesting: The struggles they had executing musical patterns in movement seemed deeply connected to their core special-needs deficits. Similarly, to the extent that these students’ ability to execute rhythmic tasks improved, their core deficits seemed to temporarily recede. If I found a way to help a low-functioning girl keep a beat, she would then become just as present as anyone else. If I could tune up a boy’s ability to track measure, suddenly he would sit up and listen to an entire sentence. Stepping and skipping the rhythms of a nursery rhyme with these children would result in an afterglow of clear and expressive speech from them where none previously existed. This observation was the most exciting one I ever made. It has been the cornerstone on which I have built everything I have done professionally since.
You can read the rest here. Also, Eric gave a talk at TEDxBermuda — Empowering Through Rhythm — that’s an excellent teaser for tonight’s interview:
Fascinating, no? I hope that you join us for the interview!
What a charming interview with the creator of one of my favorite Facebook pages, I Fucking Love Science!
I love her broad interest in all things science-y — and I can very much relate to that, except that my interests center on normative domains, particularly philosophy, psychology, and literature.
Specialists are hugely valuable: the major work wouldn’t get done without them. But to spread the good work of those specialists beyond their scholarly bubbles requires advocates and champions. Those are the enthusiastic and knowledgeable people who translate awesome ideas into laymen’s terms, to show regular folks just how nifty and useful and exciting and beneficial those ideas are.
That’s what I aim to do with Philosophy in Action… and it’s lovely (and useful) for me to see I Fucking Love Science as such a great exemplar in another domain.
This is super-dense inanity: Crazy Homeopathy Lady Charlene Werner Explains Physics:
My favorite bit is when she concludes from a whole slew of completely ridiculous pseudo-physics that disease is when we “transform our energy state into something different.” The bit about us hearing strings vibrate was pretty awesome too though.
As it happens, I answered a question on whether pharmacies should sell homeopathic “medicine” in the 5 June 2011 episode of Philosophy in Action Radio. If you missed that episode, you can listen to or download the audio podcast:
I nearly cried from laughing too hard when watching this video of … er… how not to handle electrostatic discharge.
Georgia Rep. Paul Broun said in videotaped remarks that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell” meant to convince people that they do not need a savior.
The Republican lawmaker made those comments during a speech Sept. 27 at a sportsman’s banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell.
Broun, a medical doctor, is running for re-election in November unopposed by Democrats. He sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
“God’s word is true,” Broun said, according to a video posted on the church’s website. “I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”
Broun also said that he believes the Earth is about 9,000 years old and that it was made in six days. Those beliefs are held by fundamentalist Christians who believe the creation accounts in the Bible to be literally true.
It’s not surprising that this [unprintable term] is a politician, but it’s scary that he’s a doctor.
The following comments on the validity of a evolutionary approach to nutrition are from an email that I wrote to an Objectivist philosopher skeptical of the paleo diet. (The email was sent many moons ago, and I only just found it again.) My comments stand pretty well on their own, I think, and I hope that they’ll be of interest to folks interested in thinking about paleo in a philosophical way.
I cannot point you to a single study that definitively proves the superiority of a paleo diet. For a hundred different reasons — most of which probably aren’t on your radar — such a study is not possible. (Gary Taubes and Mike Eades have written on that problem.) Nonetheless, a whole lot of smaller, more delimited studies (as well as well-established biology) support the claims made by advocates of a paleo diet. Plus, people report looking, feeling, and performing better — with improved lab values — on a paleo-type diet. Each of us has our own experiences and experiments to draw on too.
Hence, as I said in a thread on Facebook: “I think I’ve got very good grounds for saying that a paleo diet is (1) healthy for most people, (2) far superior to the diet of most Americans, (3) exceedingly delicious and satisfying, and (4) worth trying to see if you do better on it, particularly if you have certain kinds of health problems.”
I’m not claiming certainty, nor do I assume that my current diet is optimal. We have tons to learn about nutrition and health. Yet that’s hardly a reason to ignore what we do know — or to suppose that we can just keep eating however we please without experiencing pernicious consequences down the road.
Moreover, people are doing themselves harm by eating the standard American diet. In my own case, I was on my way to type 2 diabetes (based on my doctor’s blood glucose tests) and liver disease (based on a CT scan showing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). We can’t assume that the standard American diet is a safe default just because it’s all around us — just as people shouldn’t assume that the standard American religion is a safe philosophical default.
To address your skepticism about an evolutionary approach to nutrition, let me ask you the following… Imagine that you were given a dog to care for, but you’d never seen or heard of a dog before. Would you say that the fact that dogs are very close relatives of wolves is irrelevant to the question of what you ought to feed this dog? Wouldn’t that evolutionary fact suggest that the dog needs meat, meat, and more meat — not tofu or corn or alfalfa?
That evolutionary inference certainly wouldn’t be the last word on proper diet for the dog by any stretch of the imagination. Yet that inference would help guide your inquiry into the optimal diet for the dog — and guide your feeding of him in the meantime. That evolutionary perspective would be particularly helpful if the government and its lackeys were busy promoting a slew of false views about optimal canine diet. Ultimately, it would help integrate and explain your various findings about canine nutrition, since the nature of the canine was shaped by its evolutionary history.
On this point, your comparison to evolutionary psychology is not apt. Evolutionary psychology is a cesspool. But that’s not because inferences from our evolutionary history are difficult, although that’s true. Evolutionary psychology is a cesspool because it depends heavily on some false philosophical assumptions — particularly determinism and innate ideas.
The same charges cannot be made against an evolutionary approach to nutrition. We know that every organism is adapted to eat certain kinds of foods rather than others. We know that human biology was shaped over the course of millions of years, during which time we ate certain kinds of foods but not others. That suggests the kinds of foods that we’re best adapted to eat. Moreover, we can see in skeletal remains that when people switched to other kinds of foods, particularly grains, they declined remarkably in basic measures of health. Then consider what know about the nature of wheat, including its effects on the gut. Top that off with the positive effects people experience — improved well-being, fat loss, better lab values, less autoimmunity — when they stop eating wheat. Then you’ve got a compelling case against eating wheat.
The evolutionary perspective is not merely a useful starting point in such inquiries, to be discarded with advancements in modern science. It’s relevant causal history: it explains why we respond as we do to wheat. That enables us to integrate disparate findings about wheat (and other foods) into a unified theory of nutrition. That’s hugely important to developing nutrition as a science.
This is why I majored in philosophy. Wait… OH SNAP!
On July 13, 2012, Rand Simberg (an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) wrote a blog post critical of Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann and his work on global warming: “The Other Scandal In Unhappy Valley“.
Mann subsequently demanded that CEI retract the post and apologize for it.
CEI declined. CEI general counsel Sam Kazman wrote:
Shortly after that post was published in mid-July, CEI removed two sentences that it regarded as inappropriate. However, we view the post as a valid commentary on Michael Mann’s research…
And regardless of how one views Mann’s work, his threatened lawsuit is directly contrary to First Amendment law regarding public debate over controversial issues. Michael Mann may believe we face a global warming threat, but his actions represent an unfounded attempt to freeze discussion of his views.
In short, we’re not retracting the piece, and we’re not apologizing for it.
In response, Mann filed a lawsuit against CEI and Rand Simberg, as well as National Review and columnist Mark Steyn (who quoted portions of Simberg’s piece).
CEI has stated they will defend their “First Amendment rights“. They’ve also posted their legal defense of Simberg’s blog post.
CEI is accepting donations to help them on this issue and their other work. I’ve gladly donated.
(BTW, their website notes, “CEI is a non-partisan, educational and research institute operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. CEI accepts no government grants or contracts, nor do we have an endowment. Contributions to our efforts are tax-deductible.”)
If you want to support CEI, you can donate here.
I’ll also be staying tuned for updates on Rand Simberg’s blog, Transterrestrial Musings, and will pass them along as appropriate.
[Crossposted from GeekPress.]
Wow, thanks to the University of Maryland Medical Center:
The University of Maryland released details today on the recovery of Richard Lee Norris, the 37-year-old man who received the most extensive full face transplant completed to date seven months ago. Norris, of Hillsville, Virginia, was injured in a 1997 gun accident, losing much of his upper and lower jaws as well as his lips and nose. The transplant surgery, completed on March 20, 2012 at the University of Maryland Medical Center, included replacement of both jaws, teeth, tongue, and skin and underlying nerve and muscle tissue from scalp to neck.
“For the past 15 years I lived as a recluse hiding behind a surgical mask and doing most of my shopping at night when less people were around,” says Norris. “I can now go out and not get the stares and have to hear comments that people would make. People used to stare at me because of my disfigurement. Now they can stare at me in amazement and in the transformation I have taken. I am now able to walk past people and no one even gives me a second look. My friends have moved on with their lives, starting families and careers. I can now start working on the new life given back to me.” …
Norris continues to gain sensation in his face and is able to smile and show expression. His doctors say the motor function on the right side of his face is about 80 percent normal, and motor function on the left side is about 40 percent. He eats primarily by mouth and is able to smell and taste.
Norris’ historic 36-hour full face transplant was led by Eduardo D. Rodriguez, M.D., D.D.S., professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and chief of plastic, reconstructive and maxillofacial surgery at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Norris’ surgery marked the first time in the world that a face transplant was performed by a team of plastic and reconstructive surgeons with specialized training and expertise in craniofacial surgery and reconstructive microsurgery.
Richard Norris has regained his capacity to live a full life, thanks to an amazing team of doctors.
