Music To My Ears, and Eyes

I'm telling you, Julie Rehmeyer is fast becoming one of my favorite science writers. Her Science News Math Trek piece this week follows up on a paper by music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko that represents musical chords in hyperdimensional geometries. Even cooler than Rehmeyer's very accessible written description of the work, though, are the accompanying videos (1 2). It turns out that Tymoczko's techniques explain some of what goes on harmonically in Chopin's E-minor prelude, and the videos capture the effect beautifully.

Still, I was initially skeptical about Tymoczko's ideas in the last graph:

What's particularly amazing, Tymoczko says, is that the mathematics needed to describe these spaces wasn't even developed in Chopin's time. Nevertheless, he says, "it is unquestionable that he had some cognitive representation of the space. So there was this period of history where the only way Chopin could express this abstract knowledge was through music. His knowledge of four-dimensional geometry was most efficiently expressed through piano pieces."

I'm not sure I share Tymoczko's certainty that Chopin knew anything about what we would call four-dimensional geometry, abstractly or otherwise. But the more I watch these videos, the less I doubt that he "had some cognitive representation" of some idea that Tymoczko's merely learning another way of exploring. I doubt he'll be able to fully grasp whatever that idea is any more meaningfully than Chopin could, but it's hard to fault either for trying, and in the meantime we all get to bask in the beauty.

Sorry to get all heavy on you. I think today's Daily Office reading sort of puts you in the mindset to want to ponder these things: "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known."

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I've been warned by a psychologist friend about the strength of the science in some of these fMRI studies, but I nonetheless thought this piece was also interesting. Douglas Adams would be pumped about the music & math/science vibes in this week's Science News coverage.

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Congrats to the Badgers for clinching sole possession of the Big Ten Championship today at Northwestern. Speaking of Northwestern, I stumbled across this post from a Northwestern student giving online dating a go. Good writer, interesting stuff.

Shake a Tail Feather

So I'm up doing some work and watching a little PBS, and I just saw something I simply had to share. The special I'm watching is on evolution in rain forests and how a few pieces of new technology have affected some studies of same.

Thus, thanks the wonders of high-speed (and regular-speed) camera equipment, I give you the best moonwalking that the animal kingdom (and ornithological research community) has to offer:

Some Notes On Movie Reviewers I Like and Technologists Whom I Fear Will Bring About the End Humanity As We Know It

Couple more items to share from the last week or so...

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Manohla Dargis writes the funniest movie reviews this side of the AV Club. In fact, I think in the case of The Other Boleyn Girl, her review tops Tasha Robinson's. Then again, the latter is definitely my least favorite AV Club regular. (C'mon, she doesn't even like The Big Lebowski.) A.O. Scott's your man if you want to be reminded of just how wonderful the cinema can be, but if you're looking for tongue-lashings, it doesn't get any better than Ms. Dargis, at least in my book.

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Everyone should take a quick look at Andrew C. Revkin's commentary on the "Grand Challenges for Engineering" report unveiled at a AAAS meeting a couple weeks ago. Revkin's main point is that many of these challenges are really "opportunities waiting for shifts in policy and/or spending." I think his line of thinking is related to my standard job/scholarship interview riff on why one might bother complementing a nuclear engineering degree with technical communication, editing, and writing tutoring work: because most of the nuclear industry's serious problems are more rhetorical than technical.

I kinda shivered when I saw that Ray Kurzweil was on the committee that came up with these goals (the reverse-engineering of the brain thing is obviously at least partly his). Prescient and brilliants as he may be, and as bitchingly realistic as his keyboard sounds are (believe me, I've got an SP-76), the guy scares the hell out of me. Listen to Bill McKibben! Kurzweil's thinking is dangerous.

...Seriously, go out and buy Enough right now. You wanna talk about clear thinking? McKibben has done something I didn't think was possible: drawn an unambiguous line in the technological development sand without the usual neo-Luddite hand-wringing.