SCIENCE OF A HANGOVER

My friend Justin asked me forever ago to post about the science of hangovers--it seems appropriate after my last post showcasing musicians. In truth, only half the musicians in the last post were addicits (can you guess which were and which weren't?) Anyway, the regretful state of hangover is a combination of a few body responses. Alcohol is a sedative, and to make sure we don't pass out from it before we make it home to our comfy beds, our nervous system steps up a notch to overcompensate. The nervous system remains heightened, even when alcohol has left the body, resulting in sensitivity to light, sound, and sweating. In addition, alcohol is slow to metabolize in the liver. Fast drinking floods our system with acetylaldehyde, a half-metabolized form of alcohol on its way to acetate. Acetylaldehyde causes flushing of the skin, sweating, and rapid pulse. A combination of acetylaldehyde, inflated nervous system activity, and dehydration can create mental confusion. Some researchers say a drop in seratonin can create a bad mood. There are many more effects that alcohol has on the body--more than i will mention here. Next time you down a few celebratory libations, know you can trust the old addage..."beer before liquor, never been sicker, liquor before beer, in the clear." There actually is science behind it! Check it out here. I heard the movie sucked, though. Answer: Joe Cocker and Elliot Smith were hopeless drunks.

VID: OH HOW WE WALTZ

I've always been fascinated with the 3/4 timing in music....Eliot Smith's Waltz #3, Mazzy Star Fade into You, Joe Cocker's A Little Help From My Friends, Badly Drawn Boy Once Around the Block, even Billy Joel's Piano Man (all below). Leonard Cohen does rightful waltz tribute in the venerable Take This Waltz.

There are many many many more...these are great songs! What's up with the waltz beat?

A waltz beat has a very specific rhythm...a BUM da da BUM da da that my body seems to like. Rhythm, the relationship of the length of one note to another, is crucial to what turns sound into music. Rhythm is also the facet of music you feel most in your bones, the bass tones of rhythm in music are often very low, and therefore have very long and stretched out soundwaves that reach people from further away. We hear more of the bass beat from a medium distance than we do melody. (This is why you hear the beat of your neighbors stereo before you hear the melody of their always untasteful music.) Do we hear more rhythm more often since it carries further through the air and thus our body grabs onto it? Or have we evolved to love it because it mimics our own heartbeat or the pace of our feet while walking?

VID: NARROW ESCAPES

Yesterday, Wayne and I had totally forgotten to do something really important when, all of a sudden, we were reminded just in time. It was so lucky--I felt like we had narrowly escaped what could have been a sticky situation. In lieu of that feeling, here's a fun video of other narrow escapes and unlikely events.

Chance
by titounetsan

CATALOG OF LIFE AND TURING TEST

Browsing the vast sea of organized ones and zeros this morning, I discovered two very cool websites. One--a wiki whose goal is to catalog every species of life on earth, called the Encyclopedia of Life. It's a beautiful page, but im not sure how far along it is in its ambitious goal. As i browsed over the classification box, the group Chromista jumped out at me--who's that?! Evidently, the case was made in the 80s for the naming of this supergroup, which can be thought of as part of Protista or a whole kingdom on its own. Hello--where have i been? Proves there's no possible way to keep up with all that science is constantly accomplishing. Two--the web-presence of a bet between Mitchel Kapor and Ray Kurzweil. The bet is 27 years long: Mitchel Kapor, the 'predictor' thinks that computers will not pass the Turing test by year 2029. Kurzweil thinks they will. Computers can already surpass human intelligence when it comes to playing chess or competing in a game of Jeopardy, but will they be able to approximate the human sense, the human imagination, and complex social relationships by 2029? Time will tell...

MEETING BACTERIA IN PUBLIC PLACES

Went out Friday to see The Brothers Bloom--highly recommended new movie btw--i noticed, during a loud moment, the sheer number of people coughing and sniffing in the audience. A mucosal harmony--gross! Alarming! I became a bit paranoid--my body has been a bit too sensitive to bacteria/viruses lately, and, ive been home sick a lot, leaving some of my recent projects undone. No one likes to get sick. But, the more i learn about bacteria and viruses the more i think of getting sick differently. Turns out that the human body is composed of 10 times more bacteria than its own human cells. Tons of bacteria exist on the mucus membranse of the nose and mouth. There are also lots of bacteria on other parts of the skin. Behind the knee and under the heel are the most bacterially diverse spots on the human body while the back is the least bacterially diverse area--forarms, shoulders, ears, and forehead are somwhere in-between. Administrators at NIH are just beginning to acknowledge (see human microbiome project) what some medical researchers have known for years--the sheer number of bacteria in the body has the potential to affect human development, physiology, immunity, and nutrition. If these bacteria do turn out to be constant players in the status of our health and not just hitchikers along for the ride, will we start to think of getting sick as a misbalance of bacteria in the body rather than a unilateral attack-and-immune response?