May 11, 2004

» Music to throw up by

Its first CD, Overload: The Sonic Intoxicant, contains tracks ranging from "chill out," meditative music to a piece that generates a feeling of motion sickness in some.

"I want to do something that messes with people's heads," said Lance Massey, a longtime composer of commercials and the creative director of NeuroPop.

"We've gone through all the data to find what kind of sounds or signal gets a specific response, and then we can merge it back into an existing piece of music or sound," said Seth Horowitz, chief technology officer of NeuroPop and an assistant research professor at Stony Brook University in New York.

Horowitz said that if he wants to get a certain response from a listener to a piece of music, he looks at what part of the brain is responsible for the desired response. Then, using his own data or other published literature, he looks to find what kind of stimulus makes that part of the brain active.

» Two physicists say the rate at which the universe's expansion accelerates could limit the amount of information that can be stored and processed. They also reckon it'll splat Moore's Law. Take that, Kurzweil! The original paper

The acceleration of the expansion of the universe places limits on future developments in technology according to two US cosmologists. Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University have shown that the acceleration could put a fundamental limit on the total amount of information that can be stored and processed in the future. They also calculate that Moore's Law will remain valid for no more than 600 years -- although workers in the semiconductor industry are more pessimistic and think that the famous law will break down in the next decade or two.

» Hubble might have just taken the first picture of an extra-solar planet

The observations were made with Hubble's infrared NICMOS camera. The infrared light from the presumed planets is not reflected light from the host stars but instead represents heat emitted by the giant worlds.

The subtle detections involved using a trick developed by other researchers. After taking the first image of a white dwarf and its surroundings, Hubble was rolled slightly in space and a second image was made. By comparing the two images, scattered light created by instrument imperfections can be removed, Debes explained. That way the star is reduced more closely to a point-like source. Remaining nearby points of light then emerge as either dim orbiting companions or background objects.

Extrasolar planet

» Cicadas, which tend to swarm every 13 or 17 years — like Brood X appearing right about now — may do so to avoid a cycle that matches predator's lifecycles

Gould, a polymath who died in 2002, was among the first to propose that the cicada's unusual lifestyle is a strategy it evolved to avoid its predators.

"Some individuals hide, others taste bad, others grow spines or thick shells, still others evolve to look conspicuously like a noxious relative," Gould wrote. Periodical cicadas, he argued, did it by evolving a highly unusual reproductive cycle.

By springing forth from the ground by the millions, cicadas help ensure that no single predator can devour them, a tactic that evolutionary biologists now call the "predator satiation" strategy.

And by emerging every 13 and 17 years, Gould argues in his 1977 book, cicadas minimize the chance that their infrequent invasions will sync with the life cycles of birds and other creatures that dine on them.

» Soundtracking the V&A. Official site

In the entrance hall of the Victoria and Albert Museum, I pick up a set of headphones, a bespoke MP3 player and a map to follow a trail of sounds through the galleries. Over the next few months, Britain's foremost institution of art and design will become a temple to new music. For the first time, rock stars, normally used for decorative purposes at private views, have created sounds inspired by a museum's treasures.

» The pseudonymous author of a verbless novel says it's a protest against the tyranny of the verb

The author, a doctor of literature who admits that "Thaler" is a pseudonym, and who has not previously written books under the name, said it was liberating to write without verbs, which he describes as "invaders, dictators, and usurpers of our literature".

"My book is a revolution in the history of literature. It is the first book of its kind. It's daring, modern and is to literature what the great Dada and Surrealist movements were to art," said Mr Thaler, an eccentric who refuses to reveal his real name or age, beyond admitting to being in his sixties.

"The verb is like a weed in a field of flowers," he said. "You have to get rid of it to allow the flowers to grow and flourish.

"I am like a car driver who has smashed the windscreen so he cannot see into the future, smashed the rear-view mirror so he cannot see the past, and is travelling in the present."

» So what happens when The Smoking Gun or The Memory Hole get hold of this?

The technique he and Whelan developed involves first using a program to realign the document, which had been placed on a copying machine at a slight angle. They determined that the document had been tilted by about half a degree.

By realigning the document, it was possible to use another program Whelan had written to determine that it had been formatted in the Arial font. Next, they found the number of pixels that had been blacked out in the sentence:

» Molesworth, spirichual sukssessor to mity hero Odisius and top butler Jeeves, is fifty

But Molesworth breaks the bounds of the school story. He represents another favourite topos of fiction — the underdog who comes Topp in spite of trials and vicissitudes. From Odysseus to Superman, from Oliver Twist to Gladiator Maximus, we shout for those who face fearful odds, for the ashes (FAG) of his father, and the temples of his Gods. (Div is super becos everyone do v. bludthirsty things which are pleasing to all boys).

From Falstaff to Billy Bunter we love funny bad boys. Another stock theme is the employee who is cleverer than his theoretical master: eg, Jeeves and Bertie, Sherlock Holmes and all the amateurs of the golden age of English crime writing win against Scotland Yard, and Molesworth triumphs on a tour of the cages, or Masters one by one. In fact, Molesworth, you are in danger of becoming a national stereotype and a Marcus Aurelius of our time.