Flannel Shirt

You Tube: Daddy' Shoulders

This is a song I wrote and recorded back in the early 1980s. It's a story about someone on death row, imagining a safe, loving childhood which had never happened.

I was reminded of this song by the school shooting in Ohio. Apparently, the shooter lived in a very abusive household.

Years after I wrote this song I read a book by Dr. Jonathan Pincus which pretty much confirms the plot of the song.

Neanderthals beat another bad rap

Anyone who knows me knows I try to absorb anything I can about Neanderthals. Oh, I like other hominins, but I really like Neanderthals.

These guys have gotten some bad press over the years. They were originally made out to be stupid, ugly non-humans, an evolutionary sidetrack that could compete with us smart modern humans. They've gotten better press over the last decade or two. When the news came out recently that a majority of humans are walking around with a few strands of Neanderthal DNA the common notion shifted to a more benevolent view of them.

Now it's beginning to look like modern humans didn't outcompete Neanderthals. In fact, most of the Neanderthals in Europe died out before modern humans got there, probably from the climate. (Glaciers were sliding back and forth over the land back then.)

The results indicate that most Neanderthals in Europe died off as early as 50,000 years ago. After that, a small group of Neanderthals recolonised central and western Europe, where they survived for another 10,000 years before modern humans entered the picture.

The study is the result of an international project led by Swedish and Spanish researchers in Uppsala, Stockholm and Madrid.

“The fact that Neanderthals in Europe were nearly extinct, but then recovered, and that all this took place long before they came into contact with modern humans came as a complete surprise to us. This indicates that the Neanderthals may have been more sensitive to the dramatic climate changes that took place in the last Ice Age than was previously thought”, says Love Dalén, associate professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm.

In connection with work on DNA from Neanderthal fossils in Northern Spain, the researchers noted that the genetic variation among European Neanderthals was extremely limited during the last ten thousand years before the Neanderthals disappeared.

Older European Neanderthal fossils, as well as fossils from Asia, had much greater genetic variation, on par with the amount of variation that might be expected from a species that had been abundant in an area for a long period of time. “The amount of genetic variation in geologically older Neanderthals as well as in Asian Neanderthals was just as great as in modern humans as a species, whereas the variation among later European Neanderthals was not even as high as that of modern humans in Iceland”, says Anders Götherström, associate professor at Uppsala University.

 

Scientists not so smart about the genetics of intelligence

It must be somewhere.

For decades, scientists have understood that there is a genetic component to intelligence, but a new Harvard study has found both that most of the genes thought to be linked to the trait are probably not in fact related to it, and identifying intelligence's specific genetic roots may still be a long way off.

Led by David I. Laibson '88, the Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics, and Christopher F. Chabris '88, Ph.D. '99, assistant professor of psychology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., a team of researchers examined a dozen genes using large data sets that included both intelligence testing and genetic data. As reported in a forthcoming article in the journalPsychological Science, they found that in nearly every case, the hypothesized genetic pathway failed to replicate. In other words, intelligence could not be linked to the specific genes that were tested.

"It is only in the past 10 or 15 years that we have had the technology for people to do studies that involved picking a particular genetic variant and investigating whether people who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have that genetic variant," said Chabris. "In all of our tests we only found one gene that appeared to be associated with intelligence, and it was a very small effect. This does not mean intelligence does not have a genetic component, it means it's a lot harder to find the particular genes, or the particular genetic variants, that influence the differences in intelligence."

To get at the question of how genes influence intelligence, researchers first needed data, and plenty of it.

Though it had long been understood, based on studies of twins, that intelligence was a heritable trait, it wasn't until relatively recently that the technology emerged to allow scientists to directly probe DNA in a search for genes that affected intelligence.

The problem, Chabris said, was that early technology for assaying genes was very expensive, meaning that such studies were typically limited to, at most, several hundred subjects, who would take IQ tests and provide DNA samples for testing.

 

 

The ultimate squish

Here is an article on those awful sounds you hear in movies. Specifically, it's an argument for "Drive" winning best sound-editing Oscar tonight for the "head-stomping in the elevator" scene, which was, uh, graphic. And while I am not a connoisseur of gross movie scenes, I have to say that that scene was quite effective. It comes as a shock, an "uh-oh" where the "nice guy" Ryan Gosling character shows way too much of his dark side, where the viewer realizes that there won't be a happily ever after ending for this movie, where the violence is suddenly ratcheted up to another level and pitches the viewer into the action of the final reel, through which he walks with blood all over himself.

What makes the elevator scene so effectively gross, and so grossly effective? Let's start with the squish. According to Mark Berger, a multiple-Oscar-winning sound editor who now teaches at UC-Berkeley, each violent impact is orchestrated like a musical chord. An editor might start with a thumping base note, he says—the sound of a 2-by-4 being smacked against a side of beef—and then add in some upper frequencies with a bundle of dry twigs being snapped or a plastic cup getting broken. Then he'd finish off the effect by filling out its mid-notes with something gloopy, like the sound of a ripe melon dropped on cement. By tweaking the proportions of these ingredients, he can build something dry and tough, or moist and oozy.   

The wetter sounds have tended to be the province of horror films (like John Carpenter's Vampires, known for the moist and squirty hearts of its title characters) and ultra-violent video games. A few years ago, the Joystiq blog posted a charming clip of sound editors reaming cucumbers, squeezing oranges, and attacking watermelons and cantaloupes with a hammer to make the juicy sounds they needed for a first-person shooter. The dramatic squish from Drive isn't any sort of innovation on its own terms, but it does represent an unusually graphic sound effect for what was pretty much a mainstream film.

The makers of Drive weren't trying to make the sounds of violent impact seem realistic. Like most sound editors, Bender says there's no clear relationship between what you'd hear in a movie fight and what you might hear in real life. Since very few people know what it actually sounds like to stomp someone's face in an elevator, the audio for a movie beating has to come from a sound editor's imagination. Soundtracks may be even more stylized and coded than on-screen visuals. "The criterion isn't authenticity," explains Mark Berger, the Berkeley professor. "It's perceived authenticity."

and:

There's nothing quite so avant-garde in the elevator scene from Drive, but Bender and Ennis have made their own more subtle additions to the vocabulary of concussive violence. To depict the crushing of the skull, they used the slowed-down noise of cracking nuts; for the blood they recorded the sloshing of a viscous liquid. But to complement these "obvious" sounds, as he calls them—the squishing and gushing and head-crunching—Bender and his colleagues added another track, of Ryan Gosling breathing and snorting and firing spittle. Not every viewer will be aware of this additional noise, but it adds ferocity and intimacy to the scene. "We tried to create the personal experience of [killing someone], of going through the effort of doing it," says Bender.

I agree that this should win the best sound-editing Oscar. I wouldn't recommend the movie to those with delicate stomachs, though.

Almost perfect

According to Joan, I'm almost perfect. In the past I've been considered a lot more flawed than that, so this is definitely an improvement on my report card. Oh, she wants me to eat more vegetables. And then there's my clothes.

Working in the Post Office, where they supply you what you wear, I can't say that I've ever developed into a clothes horse. And, quite frankly, after I retired and much of my time out of the house was spent wandering the trails around Montara Mountain I didn't much pay attention to my slovenly dress.

There are two areas Joan has specific problems with. My baggy jeans and my sweatshirts. For some reason I seem to have lost my ass over the years. My jeans kind of slide down back there. It's one thing to be a gang-banger with your pants down, that's the style, it's another thing to be geriatric and have it happen. That just looks sad. Plus, since I left the Post Office I've lost a bit of weight, around 45 pounds since my high water mark, so while I'm not svelte I'm not as unsvelte as I used to be, which further enables the seat of my jeans to flap in a good breeze. She wants to get me into pants that fit, so to speak.

But what really gets her girlfriend fashion stuff going are my sweatshirts. I have an old blue pullover which is frayed. There are stains down the front. This is what I have instead of a teddy bear to comfort me in moments of stress. Better than a bulletproof vest in a crossfire. Then there is my gray zip-up hoodie. I don't have as much attachment to it as to the blue sweatshirt, but it's very functional as an outer layer in my Portland dress. I guess her problem is that, along with the baggy jeans, I give off the aura of a homeless person. Not that there's anything wrong with a homeless person (aside from living on the edge, having personal hygiene issues and sometimes having mental and substance abuse problems). Another thing. These gray hoodies are de rigueur if you happen to rob drugs from pharmacies or hold up convenience stores. The other day someone in a gray hoodie robbed a bank.

 These are some recent robbers as caught on security cameras.

Okay, the last one was me. You get to absorb my entire sense of style in that picture.

It's not that I don't want to spend money on clothes. It's just that I'd rather spend it on other stuff. Musical stuff, for example. I love internet radios too. The other day I got a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog and if I had the bucks there's a lot of expensive junk I'd love to indulge in. What really caught my eye was the world's only "indoor pressure smoker" which from the looks and description appears to be a pressure cooker that also smokes your food. I like barbeque, and throwing into a gadget on the counter and coming back an hour later and eating all that smokey goodness does appeal to my stomach. But three hundred bucks for a indoor pressure smoker is
a little extravagent for my current budget. I noticed that there are a lot of devices for blood circulation in your legs, which suggests that the average shopper at Hammacher Schlemmer has aged a bit over the years. Then there's a nifty looking Celtic pocketwatch, although I haven't needed a watch of any kind since I got my cell phone.

But with a few exceptions (the self-heating slippers, the full-length Turkish bathrobe) there isn't a whole lot of clothes in that catalog, and I'm sure Joanie wouldn't particularly want to explore the neighborhoods and shops of Portland with me in a bathrobe and slippers.

Me at Joanie's

Joanie snapped a photo of me as we wait for some jasmine tea to steep.

At the movies: a good review of a good movie.

Here is an excellent review of "The Descendants", the movie I'll be rooting on Sunday night. It's an excellent review because it really captures what is good about the movie.

Perhaps Payne’s insistence on making human-scaled drama obscures his reach. Allergic to grandiosity, his movies depict losers, schlubs, and schmos dealing with domestic turmoil and personal crises in a nondescript, lived-in America. Across those movies, Payne has carved out an authorial identity defined by career-making performances (Reese Witherspoon in Election, Paul Giamatti in Sideways), adroit tone shifts, and the pitch-perfect rendering of life in these United States.

The Descendants shares many of those qualities, which might explain why the critical conversation surrounding the movie has seemed stunted, with most reviews amounting to little more than pronouncements of what “worked” and what didn’t. What such assessments overlook is a major American director working on his largest canvas yet and confronting some pretty fundamental questions. If Payne’s previous movies cast a sidelong glance at How We Live Now, this one emerges as an affecting inquiry into How We Live, period.

If you haven't seen it you should. Plus, I think I look sort of like George Clooney.

Music Friday: Earthquake Weather

Here it is, on You Tube.

I wrote and recorded this one back in 1994-5, on my last collection of songs as I was developing repetitive stress in my hands.

I like the idea of having the lyrics pop up. I'm running out of pictures to shuffle through, though.

Men won't become extinct

I don't really understand this article, but it's supposed to be reassuring that the Y chromosome won't disappear.

Now on You Tube: Adieu

I posted my first music video on You Tube. If you go t0 this link you can see it. I think.

The song is mine, "Adieu", but it's only the name of a song, not that I plan on going anywhere anytime soon. The photos are a two-minute autobiography. Left a lot out.

Now that I've figured out how to do it there'll be plenty more. I've written hundreds of songs.