What Makes the Stradivarius Special? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Soprano Voice, With Notes Sounding Like Vowels, Says Researcher

in Music, Science | April 27th, 2016

What makes violins made by the Stradivari and Guarneri families as valuable to musicians as they are to collectors? And how do we measure the optimal sound quality of a violin? One answer comes from violin maker Anton Krutz, who speculates that these highly-prized classical instruments sing so sweetly because they are “made with proportions and spirals based on Golden Ratio geometry.”

Perhaps. But Joseph Nagyvary, a professor emeritus in biochemistry at Texas A&M University, discovered another, less lofty reason for the distinctive sound of these coveted instruments. As Texas A&M Today reports, during his 25 years of research on Stradivarius and Guarneri violins, Nagyvary found that the two makers “soaked their instruments in chemicals such as borax and brine to protect them from a worm infestation that was sweeping through Italy in the 1700s. By pure accident the chemicals used to protect the wood had the unintended result of producing the unique sounds that have been almost impossible to duplicate in the past 400 years.”

Though violins have always been made to imitate the human voice, the uniqueness of the Stradivari and Guarneri violins, Nagyvary set out to prove, results in especially humanlike tones. In a recent 2013 study published in the stringed instrument science periodical Savart Journal, Nagyvary presented research showing, writes Live Science, that these prized Italian instruments “produced several vowel sounds, including the Italian ‘i’ and ‘e’ sounds and several vowel sounds from French and English.” Whether by chemical accident or grand geometric design, “the great violin masters were making violins with more humanlike voices than any others of the time.”

Seeking, as Nagyvary says in the short video above, to “define what was the standard of excellence for the violin sound,” he decided to measure the Stradivari and Guarneri-made instruments against the original model for their timbre: the female soprano voice. To compare the two, he had Itzhak Perlman record a scale on a 1743 Guarneri violin, then asked Metropolitan Opera soprano Emily Pulley to record her voice while she sang various vowel sounds. Nagyvary analyzed the harmonic content of both recordings with a computer program and mapped the results against each other.

His project, writes Texas A&M Today, effectively “proved that the sounds of Pulley’s voice and the violin’s could be located on the same map… and their respective graphic images can be directly compared.” The Guarneri violin does indeed exactly mimic the tones of the singing human voice, replicating vowel sounds from Old Italian and other European languages.

Nagyvary thinks his findings “could change how violins may be valued”—for their sound rather than for the label inside the instrument. A violin maker himself, the former biochemistry professor also suggests a more practical application for his research findings: they might teach violin makers how to improve the quality of their instruments. Nagyvary’s scientific approach may offer luthiers the exact chemical composition and the measurable tonal qualities of the Stradivarius, enabling them to finally duplicate these beloved Renaissance instruments.

Musician Plays the Last Stradivarius Guitar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

The Art and Science of Violin Making

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Act of Love: A Strange, Wonderful Visual Dictionary of Animal Courtship

in Biology, Comedy, Dance, Life, Science | April 15th, 2016

As various nature documentaries over the years have made explicit, the animal kingdom possesses courtship rituals of such yearning and grace, they can make the erotic fumblings of our species seem a very clumsy dance indeed.

The above spot for Japan’s first condom manufacturer, Sagami Industries, offers a vision of how humans might bring a little animal feeling to their tender moments.

(It’s worth noting that while this delight is sponsored by a condom company, humans are the only animal to take prophylactic measures to ward off sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.)

Like actress Isabella Rossellini, creator of the marvelous Green Porno series, director Greg Brunkalla has an eye for both the fascinating and the absurd.

But without Rossellini’s plainspoken narration, this Act of Love remains mysterious, until the end, when the identity of the creatures the human dancers are embodying is revealed. Those of us who aren’t zoologists will likely find that their clothing provides the clearest clues up until that point.

Bisexual behavior is rampant in the animal world, but outside of a not particularly kinky-seeming pink-clad group, the five couples in the ad are all heterosexual.

Sagami’s English website takes a broader view, with in-depth reports on the sexual practices of 73 different beasts, birds and insects. Taxonomy, habitat, and size range are noted — a scientific approach to what could very well serve as non-human online dating profiles.

Australia’s Superb Fairy Wrens are into open relationships.

Lionesses’ unabashed preference for virile young males gets them dubbed “true cougars.”

And E.B. White fans may find themselves shocked by the vigor of coupling orb weavers, seemingly the one fact of spider life Charlotte refrained from explaining to her piglet friend, Wilbur :

After mating, the male suddenly severs the mating thread so that both he and the female end up dangling at separate ends. This may look like a very abrupt parting of ways, but not so fast! The male immediately re-strings his mating thread and resumes his strumming. And despite having been cast off so suddenly, the female again falls under the spell of his courtship vibrations, transferring to the new mating thread to mate a second time. As soon as they do so, the male severs the thread once more so that the two spiders can go through the whole routine again…and again and again and again.

Explore Sagami’s entire collection of not-so-private animal lives here.

Watch Family Planning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Production, Starring Donald Duck

The Turin Erotic Papyrus: The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

New LSD Research Provides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Potential to Promote Creativity

in Neuroscience, Science | April 13th, 2016

Talk to nearly any veteran of sixties counterculture, and you’re bound to hear a story or three about an acid trip. Some of those trips were bad, man, full of nightmare hallucinations and severe anxiety. In other accounts, however, LSD gets credit for opening up the mind, releasing old patterns of thought, and freeing up latent creative energy. From Ken Kesey to R. Crumb, these stories abound. Are they credible? Now that scientists have once again begun to study the drug—first synthesized in 1938 and used in experiments in the 50s and 60s until it was banned nearly everywhere—they are finding concrete answers using the latest in brain imaging technology.

And it appears that LSD—-in a controlled laboratory setting at least—“can be seen as reversing the more restricted thinking we develop from infancy to adulthood.” So reports The Guardian in regard to experiments recently conducted by neuropharmacologist David Nutt, former “drugs advisor” for the British government. Nutt gave volunteer subjects an injection of LSD, then captured the first images ever recorded of the brain on acid. You can see dramatic animations of those scans in the video at the top of the post, comparing the brains of test subjects on the drug and those on placebo, and see some static images above. The study, says Nutt, “is to neuroscience what the Higgs boson was to particle physics.” In an interview with Nature, he describes LSD research as a “way to study the biological phenomenon that is consciousness.”

What the subjects experienced won’t necessarily surprise anyone who has been on one of those legendary, mind-altering trips: researchers found, writes The Guardian, that “under the drug, regions [of the brain] once segregated spoke to one another,” producing hallucinations, “feelings of oneness with the world,” and “a loss of personal identity called ‘ego dissolution.’” However, prior to this study, Nutt says, “we didn’t know how these profound effects were produced.” There has been precious little data, because “scientists were either scared or couldn’t be bothered to overcome the enormous hurdles to get this done.”

Working with the Beckley Foundation, which studies psychoactive drugs and promotes policy reform, Nutt and his colleague Robert Carhart-Harris crowdfunded their study; in the video above, you can hear them both describe the goals and rationale of their research. What they eventually found, The Guardian reports, was that “under the influence, brain networks that deal with vision, attention, movement and hearing became far more connected, leading to what looked like a ‘more unified brain.’”

But at the same time, other networks broke down. Scans revealed a loss of connections between part of the brain called the parahippocampus and another region known as the retrosplenial cortex.

Nutt and his colleagues have more specific experiments planned, he tells Nature, “to look at how LSD can influence creativity, and how the LSD state mimics the dream state.” And just as the drug was tested decades ago as a therapy for addictions and psychiatric disorders, Nutt hopes he can conduct similar trials. But his research has an even larger scope: As Amanda Feilding, director of the Beckley Foundation, puts it, “We are finally unveiling the brain mechanisms underlying the potential of LSD, not only to heal, but also to deepen our understanding of consciousness itself.” We look forward to Nutt’s further research findings. Perhaps someday, LSD will be available with a prescription. Until then, it’s probably wise not to try these experiments at home.

Artist Draws Nine Portraits on LSD During 1950s Research Experiment

Ken Kesey Talks About the Meaning of the Acid Tests in a Classic Interview

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instantly Discovered His Artistic Style

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking

in Philosophy, Science | April 11th, 2016

Photo by NASA via Wikimedia Commons

It is sometimes said that science and philosophy have grown so far apart that they no longer recognize each other. Perhaps they no longer need each other. And yet some of the most thoughtful scientists of modernity—those who most dedicated their lives not only to discovering nature’s mysteries, but to communicating those discoveries with the rest of us—have been fully steeped in a philosophical tradition. This especially goes for Carl Sagan, perhaps the greatest science communicator of the past century or so.

Sagan wrote a number of popular books for layfolk in which he indulged not only his tendencies as a “hopeless romantic,” writes Maria Popova, but also as a “brilliant philosopher.” He did not fear to venture into the realms of spiritual desire, and did not mock those who did likewise; and yet Sagan also did not hesitate to defend reason against “society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda.” These undertakings best come together in Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, a book in which he very patiently explains how and why to think scientifically, against the very human compulsion to do anything but.

In one chapter of his book, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” Sagan laid out his method, proposing what he called “A Baloney Detection Kit,” a set of intellectual tools that scientists use to separate wishful thinking from genuine probability. Sagan presents the contents of his kit as “tools for skeptical thinking,” which he defines as “the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument.” You can see his list of all eight tools, slightly abridged, below. These are all in Sagan’s words:

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

See the unabridged list at Brain Pickings, or read Sagan’s full chapter, ideally by getting a copy of The Demon-Haunted World. As Popova notes, Sagan not only gives us succinct instructions for critical thinking, but he also makes a thorough list, with definitions, of the ways reason fails us through “the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric.” Sagan’s chapter on “Baloney Detection” is, like the rest of the book, a highly literary, personal, engagement with the most pressing scientific considerations in our everyday life. And it is also an informal yet rigorous restatement of Aristotle’s classical logic and rhetoric and Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy.

Related Content:

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Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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NASA Releases 3 Million Thermal Images of Our Planet Earth

in Science | April 6th, 2016

Since 1999, NASA has used ASTER (Japan’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) to gather images of the Earth’s surface, providing a way to “map and monitor the changing surface of our planet.” They’ve mapped 99% of the planet’s surface over the years, generating nearly three million images, showing all kinds of things — “from massive scars across the Oklahoma landscape from an EF‑5 tornado and the devastating aftermath of flooding in Pakistan, to volcanic eruptions in Iceland and wildfires in California.”

And now, NASA is letting the public download and use those images at no cost. (Read the NASA announcement here.) You can access most of the images through a NASA database, and a smaller subset via an ASTER website.

To be completely honest, you’ll need some patience and technical chops to figure out how to download these images. The method wasn’t obvious to me. If anyone has some clarity on that, please let us know in the comments, and we’ll update the post to include your insights.

Up top, see an aerial shot of The Andes Mountains in Chile/Bolivia. Further down a shot of the Lena River in Russia.

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via ABC h/t IllyBocean

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Download the Sublime Anatomy Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Available Online, or in a Great iPad App

in Art, Science | March 28th, 2016

I’ve always found anatomical drawing fascinating. At its best, it occupies an aesthetic space somewhere between mystical fine art and cutting-edge scientific observation—a space carved out during the Italian Renaissance, when the boundaries between artistic training and scientific inquiry were permeable and often nonexistent.

Famously, the period introduced renderings of the human figure so anatomically accurate that “until about 1500–1510,” writes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the artists’ “investigations surpassed much of the knowledge of anatomy that was taught at the universities.”

Artists like the great Michelangelo Buonnarroti and Leonardo da Vinci—as well as lesser-known figures like Antonio Pollaiuolo and Baccio Bandinelli—undertook “detailed anatomical dissections at various points in their long careers,” producing hundreds of sketches and studies alongside and in preparation for the muscular paintings and sculpture for which they’re best known.

Most Renaissance artists “became anatomists by necessity,” the Met points out, “as they attempted to refine a more lifelike, sculptural portrayal of the human figure.” Leonardo’s studies in anatomy, however, held a scientific interest all their own, akin to his investigations into the physics of flight, weapon and battlement design, architecture, and other pursuits.

Many of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings contain detailed notes on his observations, as you can see in the study of a heavily-muscled torso and of a human cranium, further up. He wrote these notes using his proprietary right-to-left “mirror-writing” technique, which he reserved for his private notebooks. “Only when he was writing something intended for other people,” Boston’s Museum of Science informs us, “did he write in the normal direction.”

Now we can see several dozen of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings of human and animal figures (such as the bear foot above) all in one place, thanks to Buckingham Palace’s Royal Collection Trust—who have digitized their sizable collection. Leonardo not only studied anatomical structure, but also performed dissections in order to understand human physiology; he approached the workings of the human body as though it were an organic machine, as confident in the rational ordering of its parts as he was of its privileged place in the natural world. (See just above Leonardo’s well-known drawings of a fetus in the womb, with copious notes on human reproduction on both sides.)

In addition to the many intriguing sketches, studies, and detailed illustrations in the Royal Collection Trust’s online archive, iPad owners can also search and view the collection on their devices with the free Leonardo da Vinci Anatomy app (screenshot above). “For the first time,” writes the description, “it is possible for anyone with an iPad to own and explore this remarkable testament to Leonardo’s scientific and artistic genius…. All 268 pages from Leonardo’s notebooks are presented here at the highest resolution, optimized for the pin-sharp retina display of the iPad.” The app includes incredibly helpful features like English translations of the notes, as well as essays and interviews with experts discussing the significance of Leonardo’s discoveries.

Whether you own an iPad or not, you can benefit immensely from this collection. The online version allows viewers to download high-resolution images like the “Head of Judas” sketch in red chalk above (c. 1495). Once on the page, click the download arrow to the bottom right of the drawing and you’ll be taken to a larger version of the image. You can zoom in to examine details, like the very fine lines and subtle shading that mark each of Leonardo’s illustrations, from the most utilitarian to the most artistically-rendered, as the special creations of an extraordinary artist with a gifted scientific mind.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Handwritten Resume (1482)

Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (circa 1490) Is Much Cooler Than Yours

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Florence Nightingale Saved Lives by Creating Revolutionary Visualizations of Statistics (1855)

in Health, History, Science | March 28th, 2016

I’ve long counted myself as a fan of Edward Tufte, the preeminent living expert on the visual display of quantitative information. I like to think this puts me in the company of Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing as well as a prolific writer and still today a household name. Having lived in the Victorian era, she of course never got to enjoy the work of Tufte himself, though her own zeal for data and statistics, in a time that valued such things less than ours, made her, in some sense, a Tufte of her day: the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and an honorary member of the American Statistical Association. The video above, an outtake from Hans Rosling’s The Joy of Stats, offers a brief introduction to the statistical side of Nightingale’s career, and the important role data visualization played in her mission to save lives.

“When Florence Nightingale arrived at a British hospital in Turkey during the Crimean War, she found a nightmare of misery and chaos,” writes Science News’ Julie Rehmeyer. “By the time Nightingale left Turkey after the war ended in July 1856, the hospitals were well-run and efficient, with mortality rates no greater than civilian hospitals in England.”

But feeling great regret over all the lives lost there to preventable disease, she went on to save even more of them by bringing numbers into play. She specifically compiled “vast tables of statistics about how many people had died, where and why. Many of her findings shocked her. For example, she discovered that in peacetime, soldiers in England died at twice the rate of civilians — even though they were young men in their primes.”

Nightingale’s most influential presentation of her data, which she called a “coxcomb,” appears just above. This Is Statistics describes “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East” as “similar to a pie chart, but more intricate. In a pie chart the size of the ‘slices’ represent a proportion of data, while in a coxcomb the length, which the slice extends radially from the center-point, represents the first layer of data.” Her famous chart “was divided evenly into 12 slices representing months of the year, with the shaded area of each month’s slice proportional to the death rate that month. Her color-coded shading indicated the cause of death in each area of the diagram.” She stated the goal of her visualization clearly: “to affect thro’ the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.”

We all try to do the very same thing when we present information today, though few of us—even armed with a degree of number-crunching and graphic design powers that would have seemed magical to Nightingale and her contemporaries—achieve the kind of results she did. She galvanized systemic change in hospital design and operation as well as prompted a revolution in sanitation which increased Britain’s average national life expectancy by 20 years—something to bear in mind when we start to get big ideas about how our Powerpoint slide shows will change the world.

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If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

via @pourmecoffee

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Statistics Explained Through Modern Dance: A New Way of Teaching a Tough Subject

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Free M.I.T. Course Teaches You How to Become Bill Nye & Make Great Science Videos for YouTube

in MIT, Online Courses, Science, YouTube | March 23rd, 2016

If I had my way, more academics would care about teaching beyond the walls of the academy. They’d teach to a broader public and consider ways to make their material more engaging, if not inspiring, to new audiences. You can find examples out there of teachers who are doing it right. The heirs of Carl Sagan–Brian Greene, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye–know how to light a spark and make their material come alive on TV and YouTube. How they do this is not exactly a mystery, not after M.I.T. posted online a course called “Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show.”

Taught at M.I.T. over a month-long period, Becoming the Next Bill Nye was designed to teach students video production techniques that would help them “to engagingly convey [their] passions for science, technology, engineering, and/or math.” By the end of the course, they’d know how to script and host a 5‑minute YouTube show.

You can now find the syllabus and all materials for that course online at MIT’s OpenCourseWare site. This includes all video lectures and class assignments. Or, if you prefer, you can get the video lectures straight from this YouTube playlist.

Becoming the Next Bill Nye will be added to our meta collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Watch the Highly-Anticipated Evolution/Creationism Debate: Bill Nye the Science Guy v. Creationist Ken Ham

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

What Makes the Stradivarius Special? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Soprano Voice, With Notes Sounding Like Vowels, Says Researcher

Act of Love: A Strange, Wonderful Visual Dictionary of Animal Courtship

New LSD Research Provides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Potential to Promote Creativity

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking

NASA Releases 3 Million Thermal Images of Our Planet Earth

Download the Sublime Anatomy Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Available Online, or in a Great iPad App

Florence Nightingale Saved Lives by Creating Revolutionary Visualizations of Statistics (1855)

Free M.I.T. Course Teaches You How to Become Bill Nye & Make Great Science Videos for YouTube

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