Relevant History

LOLCats meets OCLC

...on the blog NCBI ROFL. NCBI is the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and its Web site has a number of scientific journal databases.

Some of these public articles on such cutting-edge subjects as "Disco clothing, female sexual motivation, and relationship status," which concluded that

females are aware of the social signal function of their clothing and that they in some cases alter their clothing style to match their courtship motivation. In particular, sheer clothing -although rare in the study- positively correlated with the motivation for sex.

It may be just me, but the only reason I can imagine this article being written is to help nerdy guys get laid.

The case study on accidental condom inhalation, the article on the dangers of beards in microbiology labs, and the study of canned cat food evaluation techniques are also must-reads.

However, I think the article title "Inappropriate use of a titanium penile ring: An interdisciplinary challenge for urologists, jewelers, and locksmiths" (umm, LOCKSMITHS???) may be the best thing ever written.

Thanks, Anthony!

[Update: Made it onto Boing Boing!]

Seed Magazine piece

I've got a new short article at Seedmagazine.com, on automated scientific discovery and the sociology of knowledge. Sounds fascinating, I know, but it really is a better read than I make it sound.

In a recent article in Science, Cornell professor Hod Lipson and graduate student Michael Schmidt described a new computer system that can discover scientific laws. At first glance, it looks like a fulfillment of the dreams of “computational scientific discovery,” a small field at the intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence (AI) that seeks to reverse-engineer scientific imagination and create a computer as skilled as we are at constructing theories. But if you look closer, it turns out that the system’s success at analyzing large, complicated data sets, formulating initial theories, and discarding trivial patterns in favor of interesting ones comes not from imitating people, but from allowing a very different kind of intelligence to grow in silico — one that doesn’t compete with humans, but works with us....

lder AI projects in scientific discovery tried to model the way scientists think. This approach doesn’t try to imitate an individual scientist’s cognitive processes — you don’t need intuition when you have processor cycles to burn — but it bears an interesting similarity to the way scientific communities work.

Though I have to give credit where it's due: if it turned out well, it's because it's a great project, and several people were very generous with their time, talking me through its details, and speculating on what the project and this approach to automated scientific discovery could mean for the future of science. I should never be amazed that people are almost always willing to talk about their work and what makes it interesting, but I never fail to be. Remember that when I call you!

It's not just for dinner any more

From the New Scientist:

A cloned beagle named Ruppy – short for Ruby Puppy – is the world's first transgenic dog. She and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light.

A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.

This new proof-of-principle experiment should open the door for transgenic dog models of human disease, says team member CheMyong Ko of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "The next step for us is to generate a true disease model," he says.

And I know the title's completely tasteless. Without a good garlic sauce, anyway.

Pet Schrodinger's Kitty

This mashup of Pat the Bunny and a physics textbook is really brilliant. I've finally found the perfect children's gift for all my friends! (Though it doesn't look like it comes with an Enrico Fermi stuffie, alas.)

Very funny

If you're, well, into math humor.

And, now that I think about it, you have to be skeptical about the possibility of even very sophisticated computers developing the capacity to do higher mathematics (unlike, say, research on orphan enzymes in yeast).

[from microservios, via Ho John Lee]

On the expert mind

I've been reading some pretty cynical stuff about expertise recently, so to cleanse the palate I checked out this Scientific American article on "The Expert Mind:"

[Florida State professor K. Anders] Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study....

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields....

Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.

You can tell if you have this gene by how you react the news that you might not have it

New research suggests that something scientists have dubbed the "brightside gene" is partly responsible for whether we take an optimistic or pessimistic view of life.

It seems that for some of us, seeing the glass as half full is hardwired into our genetic make-up, helping us shrug off the miseries of life and enjoy the positives.

Research by British psychologists suggests that people who carry the gene pay less attention to negative things going on around them and focus instead on the happier aspects of life. By doing so, they end up being more sociable and are generally in better shape psychologically.

Elaine Fox, head of psychology at Essex University, said the gene seems to underlie some people's ability to deal with daily stresses. Those without it are likely to have a gloomier outlook on life, and suffer more from mental health problems such as depression....

In a study involving more than 100 volunteers, Fox's team checked how long it took people to react to good and bad images that flashed up on a computer screen. Among the positive pictures were a couple hugging and someone sailing along in a boat. The negative images included a photo of someone being mugged....

Genetic tests on the participants showed that a tendency to ignore negative images and dwell on the positive ones was strongly linked to a variation in a gene that controls serotonin, the brain's main feelgood chemical.

Instinct says that if you read about this study and think you probably have the happy version of the gene, you probably do.

Timing is everything

More from the Scientific American article, "The Expert Mind:"

A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.

The Drosophila of cognitive science

From Scientific American's 2006 article on "The Expert Mind:"

Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists--as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.

Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking--the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.

Quote of the day

Aaron Hirsh, on "A New Kind of Big Science:"

Citizen Science won’t be very helpful in genome sequencing or particle physics. But it will be helpful — indeed, perhaps essential — for gathering a kind of data that will be increasingly important over the next few decades. Widespread networks of observers are especially well-suited to detecting global change — shifts in weather patterns; movements in the ranges of species; large-scale transformations of eco-systems — and that, unfortunately, is something we will need to know far more about if we are to mitigate and adapt to the fateful effects we are having on the planet.

In the end, though, what may be most important about Citizen Science is what it could mean for the relationship between citizens and science. When everyone is gathering data, that rather austere and forbidding tower becomes a shared human pursuit. In 1963, Alvin Weinberg, who was then the director of Oak Ridge, likened Big Science to the greatest monuments civilizations have ever built: the cathedrals of medieval Europe; the pyramids of Egypt.

But just as we build higher our temples of scientific investigation, so too should we strengthen their foundations, and broaden their congregations.

Octopus watch TV, have no personalities

Marine biologists have discovered that "octopuses can watch television and understand at least some of what they see," but that "despite their intelligence, lack individual personalities." Macquarie University scientist Renata Pronk

collected 32 common Sydney, or gloomy, octopuses from Chowder Bay, near Mosman, and showed them a series of three-minute videos screened on a monitor in front of their tank.

One video featured a crab, an octopus delicacy.

A second starred another octopus, while a third had a "novel object" they would not have seen: a plastic bottle swinging on a string.

Miss Pronk then watched each octopus for any consistent response pattern, such as boldness or aggression.

When the crab movie was screened "they jetted straight over to the monitor and tried to attack it", she said, adding that was strong evidence they knew they were watching food.

When the octopus movie was screened some became aggressive while others changed their skin camouflage or "would go and hide in a corner, moving as far away as possible".

On viewing the swinging bottle, some puffed themselves up, just in case the object was a threat, while others paid no attention.

But significantly, when the experiment was repeated over several days, she found no consistent response from any octopus. Such random responses implied octopuses have no individual personalities.

She suspected previous efforts to show movies to octopuses failed because their sophisticated eyes were too fast for the 24-frame per second format of standard-definition video.

I guess I'll go for something else on the sushi menu from now on. What's the stupidest tasty fish? Eel? They don't seem too bright. And apparently the personality thing is actually a serious scientific issue:

Their reactions to these videos demonstrate whether they are bold or shy or where they fit between. This is the most common way of determining personality. Octopus diverged from the vertebrate lineage millions of years ago so their expression of personality would suggest that this trait is nearly universal. The question that arises from this is: 'What is the selective advantage of having a personality?' Renata will infer from her study the ecological and evolutionary implications of octopus having a personality.

The Atlantic on financial bubbles

The latest Atlantic is devoted to The Crash. The most outstanding piece, in my view, is a Virginia Postrel essay on experimental economics and the nature of financial bubbles.

[L]ab results should give pause not only to people who believe in efficient markets, but also to those who think we can banish bubbles simply by curbing corruption and imposing more regulation. Asset markets, it seems, suffer from irrepressible effervescence. Bubbles happen, even in the most controlled conditions.

Experimental bubbles are particularly surprising because in laboratory markets that mimic the production of goods and services, prices rise and fall as economic theory predicts, reaching a neat equilibrium where supply meets demand. But like real-world purchasers of haircuts or refrigerators, buyers in those markets need to know only how much they themselves value the good. If the price is less than the value to you, you buy. If not, you don’t, and vice versa for sellers....

For those of us who invest our money outside the lab, this research carries two implications.

First, beware of markets with too much cash chasing too few good deals. When the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, it effectively frees up more cash to buy financial instruments. When lenders lower down-payment requirements, they do the same for the housing market. All that cash encourages investment mistakes.

Second, big changes can turn even experienced traders into ignorant novices. Those changes could be the rise of new industries like the dot-coms of the 1990s or new derivative securities created by slicing up and repackaging mortgages.

This last bit helps explain this line Henry Blodgett's article in the same issue: "In the words of the great investor Jeremy Grantham, who saw this collapse coming and has seen just about everything else in his four-decade career: 'We will learn an enormous amount in a very short time, quite a bit in the medium term, and absolutely nothing in the long term.' "

On self and happiness

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has a really interesting article in The Atlantic about recent research on happiness.

We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the definition of I. Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles of everyday life, such as why addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off, and why we insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds­—like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist. And it provides a useful framework for thinking about the increasingly popular position that people would be better off if governments and businesses helped them inhibit certain gut feelings and emotional reactions.

For a futurist, one interesting aside is the degree to which we think of our future selves as... not quite ourselves, but as other people.

The multiplicity of selves becomes more intuitive as the time span increases. Social psychologists have found certain differences in how we think of ourselves versus how we think of other people—for instance, we tend to attribute our own bad behavior to unfortunate circumstances, and the bad behavior of others to their nature. But these biases diminish when we think of distant past selves or distant future selves; we see such selves the way we see other people. Although it might be hard to think about the person who will occupy your body tomorrow morning as someone other than you, it is not hard at all to think that way about the person who will occupy your body 20 years from now. This may be one reason why many young people are indifferent about saving for retirement; they feel as if they would be giving up their money to an elderly stranger.

Of course, this can be a good thing-- we couldn't evolve or reinvent ourselves if we thought otherwise-- but it does get in the way of thinking systematically about the future.

neuroscience, philosophy, psychology

Reflections on tinkering

I spent a really stimulating day yesterday at the Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge conference, listening and talking to people like Dale Dougherty (founder of Make Magazine, the Maker Faire, etc.), Mitch Resnik (MIT Media Lab), Rick Prelinger (the Prelinger Library and online film collection), Anne Balsamo, and others. We're meeting for part of today, but I wanted to start reflecting on yesterday's discussion; and in particular, I want to get at the question of what tinkering is. Is it a unified body of practices? Is it a distinct set of skills? is it an historical moment? Is it just a trendy name? This is something we spent a fair amount of time discussing, either formally or informally, and the answer is: It's all of those. I also thinking there are a couple other important things that define tinkering.

What is Tinkering?

You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about how traditional technology-related planning is top-down, linear, structured, abstract, and rules-based, while tinkering is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented. (Resnick is very big on creating toys that invite tinkering.)

Anne Balsamo and Perry Hoberman have looked at a wide variety of tinkering activities, ranging from circuit bending to paper prototyping to open source to blogging. They argue that these varied activities are unified by a common set of principles or practices. (The following are just highlights.)

• Tinkerers improvise, iterate, and improve constantly.
• Tinkerers use materials at hand, combining heterogeneous parts and components (e.g., raw and finished materials, handmade and industrial objects, customized and personalized consumer products) in ways that push beyond the boundaries of their original contexts. As a result, tinkered objects tend to be collages, appropriations, and montages. Tinkering is bricolage.
• Tinkerers are also social animals. Their success depends in part on being able to tap into porous and ad-hoc communities. For most of what they do the manual is useless; other tinkerers are the only ones who are likely to have the information you need.

Tinkering isn't so much a specific set of technical skills: there tends to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. You pick up just enough knowledge about electronics, textiles, metals, programming, or paper-folding to figure out how to do what you want. It certainly respects skill, but skills are a means, not an end: mastery isn't the point, as it is for professionals. Competence and completion are.

Is Tinkering Shallow or Deep?

One of the things I talked with several people (Mike Kuniavsky in particular) about was how historically specific tinkering is. The deeper question is, is this just a flash in the pan, a trendy name without any substance underneath? The answer we came up with is that this is like a musical style, both the product of specific historical forces, and an expression of something deeper and more fundamental. (Think of jazz: you can talk about how it emerges in the early 20th century out of blues, ragtime, and other previous musical forms, reflects particular sociological and historical trends, and is guided by certain assumptions about beauty and what music is; but at the same time, it definitely expresses a deeper impulse to create music.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

• The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology-- explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here's my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
• Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
• The EULA rebellion. The fact that you're forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you're just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
• Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are "consumers"-- passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don't just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn't a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
• Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
• The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you're making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined-- and redefined-- by users.)
• From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn't discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity-- as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning-- just didn't exist: it's what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that "working with your hands" defined you as lower class: "My son won't work with his hands" was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

No doubt there are other sources you could point to-- microentrepreneurship or the growth of "jobbies," the presence of an infrastructure that supports the sharing and tracking of unique handmade things (from eBay to ThingLink).

Does Tinkering Matter?

That's a pretty varied list. And it suggests that tinkering is more than a local, Valley, geek leisure thing.

First, tinkering is a powerful form of learning. Even if it doesn't stress mastery of skills, tinkering does emphasize learning how to use your hands, learning how to use materials, and to engage with the physical world rather than the world of software or Second Life-- though tinkering does share a sensibility toward the world that lots of kids demonstrate to programs and virtual worlds: you just get in there, hit buttons, and see what happens.

This really matters because you can be creative with stuff in ways you can't with bits, and that the more you understand the possibilities and limitations or materials-- or more abstractly, if you learn how to develop that knowledge-- the smarter you become. In this respect, it dovetails with "a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering" that Gregg Zachary wrote about a few weeks ago: "a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands." (I write about this at greater length on End of Cyberspace.)

Second, tinkering is forward-looking. It's partly about how we'll use and interact with technologies in the future. As much as any loose movement can be described this way, tinkering is a set of anticipatory practices, aimed at developing a sensibility about the future. It's a way to develop skills that are going to matter in the Conceptual Age, in the ubiquitous computing world. As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop-- not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others-- will be huge. (I talk about this some in an article in Samsung's DigitAll Magazine.)

Finally, tinkering is an expression of the nature of our engagement with technology. If you buy the argument of Andy Clark that we are natural-born cyborgs, you can see tinkering as a form of co-evolution with technology, or a kind of symbiotic activity.

[Update 5/29/2009: I just published a new piece on tinkering and the future in Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. Check it out!]

Robert Burton on "The feeling of knowing"

Today at lunch I heard a really fascinating talk on certainty and knowledge by Robert Burton, author of a recent book called On Being Certain. It's a terrific project, because it makes a radical but to my mind entirely plausible case about the nature of certainty-- that it's not the product of logical operations, but an emotional state whose inner workings are (for now at least) forever mysterious.

But first, let's back up a bit. For a long time psychologists have mapped (and argued over) the differences between knowing things, and knowing that you know them-- between cognition and metacognition. The work of Ben Libet in the 1980s showed that there's a "ready potential"-- a gap of several hundred milliseconds between when we make a decision, and when we become aware of the decision. More recently, John-Dylan Haynes' work shows that this potential can, under some circumstances, be a lot longer.

There are also interesting examples of people being certain about things under circumstances where certainty is not really possible. William James, in his study of religious experience, talked about "felt knowledge" and mystical states: "Although so similar to states of feeling," he wrote, "mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge." Deja vu and cortical stimulation all generate a feeling of certainty, even in the absence of evidence. Baseball players talk about being able to see the ball and adjust their swings accordingly, when neurological studies show that they can't possibly have enough time to both track the ball, figure out how they should change their stance or the angle of the bat or the speed of the swing, and execute. Ditto for tennis players and other athletes who require lightning-fast reflexes; really, many of those sports shouldn't really exist at all.

All of this leads to Burton's argument that there's a really big disconnect between knowledge and certainty. Here's the book blurb:

In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.

What does this mean? Looking at 2+2 = 4 gives us both a correct answer, and a feeling that it's right (metacognition); looking at Einstein's theory of special relativity does not. Likewise, optical illusions are things that we can logically know work one way, but emotionally feel wrong.

We normally thing of thoughts and logical and reasonable, but they consist of lots of things: sensory inputs, biological predisposition, prior experience, and mental sensations. All of these are flexible, contingent, fragile, constructed, and otherwise... uncertain. Certainty isn't a logical conclusion, it's an emotional state. "Certainty and other feelings of conviction," Burton says, "are neither conscious choices nor even thought processes. They are mental sensations that arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason." Later in the talk, he added, "The feeling of knowing operates as an intermediary between the world, and your conscious thoughts... We think of the feeling of knowing as the logical result of a line of reason, it's actually the other way around."

However, while that "a-ha" feeling of certainty is not something you can arrive at through logical means, it can be trained. After all, physicists do look at the theory of relativity, and have that a-ha feeling.

I suspect you could take this idea and blend it into things like the sociology of science-- how does it mesh with concepts like tacit knowledge?-- and Kuhn's arguments about the psychological dimension of paradigm shifts (something that hasn't gotten a lot of attention among later readers).

IFTF, psychology, decision-making, certainty

On Krugman

Balloon Juice has a very nice piece on Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize, and the long-term payoff of taking controversial stands that you really believe in. Indeed, that seems to be a theme this year: As Science reported (quoted in Balloon Juice):

"Fluorescent proteins have revolutionized medical research,” says oncologist and imaging expert John Frangioni of Harvard Medical School in Boston... [but if 2008 Nobel Laureate Osamu] Shimomura’s pursuit of jellyfish fluorescence were funded today, says [chemist Marc] Zimmer, it would be more likely to earn scorn than anything else.

Quote of the day

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection… There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers… and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved. (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species)

evolution

Science and national culture

Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin using a hockey stick as a pointer in his talk on current problems in science.

via flickr

Somehow I think you're not likely to see such a thing in, say, China. Or Palo Alto.

conference, science, Perimeter Institute

Sleeping on it

From The Guardian:

After a particularly creative night's sleep, Paul McCartney rushed to the piano at his girlfriend Jane Asher's house to scribble down a tune he had heard in a dream. That song, Yesterday, would become a Beatles classic.

Few can claim their slumbering hours are as productive or as lucrative, but scientists have found evidence that "sleeping on the problem" does work. By scanning the brains of volunteers, they found that a good night's shut-eye seems to stimulate new brain connections that promote learning by turning a weak memory into a stronger one.

Dr Sophie Schwartz, from the University of Geneva, gave volunteers the task of remembering unknown faces or using a joystick to follow a moving dot on a computer screen. Some were then allowed to sleep while others were not. They repeated the same tasks the next day while having their brains scanned. The results showed that "a period of sleep following a new experience can consolidate and improve subsequent effects of learning from the experience", says Schwartz.

brain, memory

Attention, attention

Driving home this evening I heard an interview with Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid. Many of the interview dealt with questions of attention: are we focusing less? Are we less able to focus?

This subject seems to be picking up steam. There's a new book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, by columnist Maggie Jackson, The New York Times blog Shifting Careers has a guest post by Jackson:

Should we blame the BlackBerry and other devices? No. The P.D.A., the cellphone and the computer did not usher in our hypermobile, split-focus, cybercentric culture. Instead, the first high-tech revolutions more than a century ago created new experiences of time and space that have intensified. Inventions like the telegraph, cinema, railroad and airplane shattered distance and upended ancient temporal rhythms. Our age of speed and overload has been building for generations.

But just as we are working toward a green earth, so we can find ways to create what I like to call “planet focus.” What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.

Jackson's blog talks more about distraction. RSS it, then forget to read it for several months.

memory, psychology, attention

There goes the neighborhood

As if the subprime mortgage meltdown wasn't enough: it turns out we don't live in one of those really cool spiral galaxies, but a bar galaxy.

science

From My Life as a Quant

Whenever I have a new problem to work on-- in physics or options theory-- the first major struggle is to gain some intuition about how to proceed; the second struggle is to transform this intuition into something more formulaic, a set of rules anyone can follow, rules that no longer require the original insight itself. In this way, one person's breakthrough becomes everybody's possession. (Emanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, p. 48)

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "The Mighty Quinn," from the album "1991-04-05 - The Omni".]

Technorati Tags: physics

The majesty of science

Not safe for work, but very amusing. The back story is here.

Technorati Tags: humor, science

Paper Enigma machine

Sure, the Enigma was cracked in World War II, but it's still a pretty cool device. Did you know you can make a (very simple) paper version?

[via Bruce Schneier]

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "Get Down Tonight," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: mathematics, security

Closing doors

This (via Lifehacker) is an interesting game, and an interesting experiment.

ah, the future

From 41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments:

It's like a cross between I Can Has Cheezeburger and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Frontiers of science!

I've recently been reading some brain science stuff, but haven't found anything as interesting as this:

Half Of 26-Year-Old's Memories Nintendo-Related

Nearly 50 percent of 26-year-old paralegal Philip Jenkins' encoded long-term memories involve button combinations, game-playing experiences, and spatial-cognitive maps of various levels and worlds from Nintendo's line of video-game consoles, a team of neuroscientists reported Tuesday.

[To the tune of Jethro Tull, "Cross Eyed Mary," from the album "Bursting Out: Jethro Tull Live".]

Technorati Tags: humor

I'll bet historians are the last ones to get into this, too

For years there's been anecdotal evidence, and a couple surveys, suggesting growing use of drugs like Ritalin and Provigil by undergraduates looking to get an edge over the competition. Now, some faculty are starting to claim that professors who study the brain have started doing it, too:

While caffeine reigns as the supreme drug of the professoriate, some university faculty members have started popping "smart" pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours, according to two University of Cambridge scientists.

In a commentary published in the journal Nature last month, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir revealed the results of their informal survey of a handful of colleagues who study drugs that help people perform better mentally....

But brain boosting raises hackles in some parts of academe. "It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess," said Barbara Prudhomme White, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied the abuse of Ritalin by college students. After recent revelations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball, she sees parallels between athletes and assistant professors. "You're expected to publish and teach, and the stakes are high. So young professors have to work their tails off to get that golden nugget of tenure."

The poll was not meant to be a comprehensive study, said Ms. Morein-Zamir, a research associate at Cambridge. Rather, the essay, "Professor's Little Helper," was intended to provoke a public discussion of whether society in general, and universities in particular, should regulate the use of available compounds and medications that might be developed in the future. "If a drug helps you be more alert but also make better decisions, how does society feel about that?" she asked.

The essay, published in Nature, is a rewardingly geeky piece that includes a long discussion of how these drugs work, and what dangers exist in their use.

Technorati Tags: brain, drugs, university

The march of science

Man's relentless desire to-- oh, never mind.

US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday....

Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer... cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere.

Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says. "Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even Nasa was only given a censored version."

Only four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance". The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.

One of my 20-something colleagues pointed this out to me. I hate my colleagues

From the Reuters wire:

Alzheimer's memory loss faster among well-educated

Having more years of formal education delays the memory loss linked to Alzheimer's disease, but once the condition begins to take hold, better-educated people decline more rapidly, researchers said on Monday....

Every year of education delayed the accelerated memory decline that precedes dementia by about 2-1/2 months, according to the researchers at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

But once this memory loss began, the rate of decline unfolded 4 percent more quickly for each additional year of education, the researchers said.

Someone with 16 years of schooling might experience memory decline 50 percent more quickly than another person with just four years education, based on the findings.

[To the tune of Neil Young, "Powderfinger," from the album "Weld".]

Technorati Tags: aging, biology, memory

Renyi Institute this morning

I'm going to go to the Renyi Institute, one of Budapest's most important centers for pure mathematics, this morning. (I know how to have a good time.) We're starting-- have started, really-- a new project on the future of science and technology, a kind of turbocharged, Web 2.0-ified version of the Delta Scan, and so I'm going to log a little time on the project by going over and talking to people there.

One of the things I'm really interested in is the big trend from Cold War brain drain-- where world-class minds tended to gravitate from the Third World (or global periphery, or global South, or whatever you like to call it), to Europe and the U.S.-- to brain circulation, where people tend to move back and forth between various countries.

Hungary has a pretty incredible tradition in pure mathematics, and the Renyi Institute is interesting to me for a couple reasons. First, I don't know that much about Hungarian science, and I figure mathematics is as good a place as any to start learning.

Second, Renyi runs a school for foreign students in mathematics, and I'm curious to understand why undergraduates come to it. I think I know the answer, but you'd think that mathematics, of all fields of inquiry, would be place-independent. After all, math is the same everywhere. It's all people standing in front of blackboards, or writing equations on pieces of paper. So why travel anywhere to do it? What's that about? Essentially, the school is a case study in brain circulation-- and conveniently for me, it's one in which Americans go abroad, rather than the other way around.

So this morning I checked the directions on the Web site, got out my map of Budapest (99% of the time the free maps you can pick up at tourist information desks or in hotel lobbies are good enough for my purposes), and spent a sleepy minute looking around for it. Turns out it's about 3 minutes' walk from here.

So I've got a little more time to shower and get some breakfast than I expected, which is cool. I'm pretty smoky, and didn't shower last night, as I got back from Tandem around midnight and was working on my end of cyberspace talk.

I'm now really excited about the talk, by the way. It's not all the time you get to come up with a new way of explaining a subject you've been working on for a couple years, but I think I've done it, and that's very satisfying. I'm going to get at least a chapter section out of it, plus an article in the conference proceedings. Mmmmm, c.v. lines...

[To the tune of Sarah Shannon, "I'll Run Away," from the album "Sarah Shannon".]

Technorati Tags: brain circulation, Budapest, end of cyberspace, future, mathematics, Renyi Institute, science, travel

The color changing card trick

Since reading Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, I've been interested in-- though probably no better at correcting-- attentional blindness. This video nicely demonstrates how, in the course of focusing on one thing, we fail to notice others:

Via Jill's Living Room, home of excellent wind-up pulsating brains.

Technorati Tags: cognition, psychology

Science cities photoset

I realized I've been taking plenty of pictures of science cities, science parks, cool labs, and what have you. So I've made a photoset of them.

[To the tune of Van Morrison with Roger Waters, "Comfortably Numb (Live) (Edit)," from the album "Van Morrison At The Movies".]

Technorati Tags: architecture, science, science cities

Happy birthday Charles Darwin

When I was in college, a student group printed t-shirts that read, "Celebrate Darwin: Eat a Weakling." One of my history of biology professors protested, countering that this was really Social Darwinism, not something that Darwin himself would have advocated.

Whether weaklings are on the menu or not, happy birthday, Charles.

[To the tune of Roger Daltrey, "Say It Ain't So Joe," from the album "Gold".]

A handy definition of technological determinism

You can put away your tin foil hats, the Guardian reports: a British company claims to have developed a cream that blocks radio signals.

Waves from televisions, mobile phones and radios are all around us. They pass through metres of concrete, so imagine what they're doing to your skin.

Clarins reckon they have something to help. It's Expertise 3P, "an ultra-sheer screen mist containing a pioneering combination of plant extracts capable of protecting the skin from the accelerated-ageing effects of all indoor and outdoor air pollution but, most significantly, the effects of Artificial Electromagnetic Waves."...

One of the [active] ingredients, thermos thermophilus, comes from 2,000m deep in the ocean. The other, rhodiola rosea, lives in the extreme cold of Siberia....

Michael Bluck, an engineer at Imperial College, sounds distinctly unconvinced.... If you were intent on stopping the waves, Bluck explains that you could scatter them with a fine mesh of metal or absorb them - although the energy would be converted to heat, which would cook your skin.

But what about the ocean ingredients that prevented ageing in lab tests? "Presumably there's not a lot in the way of electromagnetic waves, particularly artificial ones, down in the bottom of the ocean, so why the organisms should have evolved this capability is beyond me," says Bluck.

His advice for anyone worried about EM radiation? "Live as far away from the producers of EM waves as possible and live with the consequences of having no friends and no life," he says.

The kind of thing you don't ever expect to read

A sentence like this:

The three Germans behind Ballonmoleküle give lots of information on how to make molecule models out of long balloons.

Hat tip to my colleague Mike Love!

Missing moon tapes

13,000 tapes of NASA's Apollo missions-- including the moon landings-- are missing:

What's missing are the never-before-broadcast clear original videos - not the grainy converted pictures the world watched on television more than three decades ago.

The tapes aren't lost, insists the NASA official put in charge of the search. But he doesn't know where they are....

Until Tuesday, the search for the tapes was a spare-time deal and retirement hobby for [senior NASA engineer] Nafzger and the 81-year-old [Apollo television camera manager Stan] Lebar - not anything organized. Now with news reports of the lost tapes and NASA wanting data for its new lunar missions, the agency ordered a search of its cosmic attics....

Nafzger hopes the hunt can be wrapped up in under six months with five workers and a bit of travel. Stored in more than 2,000 boxes, each tape lasts only 15 minutes. Everything from all 11 missions - from launch to splashdown - is on the videos, Lebar said.

There are 15 reels (three boxes) for just Apollo 11's stay on the moon, Lebar said.

"It's the whole history of the entire mission, of everything that went on," Lebar said.

And they're somewhere, but no one knows where.

Starting in 1970, the tapes were shipped to the National Archives' massive record center in Suitland, Md. And Lebar had hoped he hit pay dirt when he went to the record center, which he compared to the massive warehouse of long-forgotten boxes seen in the final scene of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

But when Lebar got to the area the boxes were supposed to be, he found empty shelves. Later, he and Nafzger determined all the boxes were returned permanently to Goddard.

"They're not lost," Lebar said, "it's just we haven't gotten to the next step yet."

[via NKT, the most brilliant tech blog in the universe. It's like Dr. Dre meets Dr. Dobbs]

Technorati Tags: history of science, space

The march of science!

Not the kind of headline you really ever expect to read:

King Tut's Penis Rediscovered

Ummm. Good?

[To the tune of En Vogue, "Free Your Mind," from the album "Funky Divas".]

Technorati Tags: archaeology, internet

Applied philosophy of science!

Finally, an answer to the question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

The Guardian adds, "The debate [at King's College London] was organised to coincide with the launch of Chicken Little on DVD."

Priceless!

And people worry about the divide between high culture and low culture....

Technorati Tags: history of science, STS

Cool animation of the day

The CVS repository, from CAIDA's Walrus visualization tool.

And no, I have no idea what it is.

Technorati Tags: visualization

I love the California Academy of Sciences more than ever

Last weekend we took the kids to the California Academy of Sciences, in their temporary quarters in downtown San Francisco, near the Sony Metreon and Yerba Buena.

I've always like the California Academy: I have memories of going to the old Golden Gate Park building when I was 3 or 4, and being really overwhelmed in the hall of dinosaurs, and a giant model cell. Since the Academy is currently building a new Renzo Piano building in the spot where the old Beaux-Arts building stood, they've had to relocate to a much smaller space. Most of the Academy's stuff is in storage, but the aquarium is open, and it turns out it's really beautiful-- in a surprising way.

Most aquariums work hard to create the sense that you're in some hybrid natural habitat, not one that's highly artificial and mechanical. The Academy, being in temporary quarters, can't quite afford to put the money into such artifice; and as a result, you can see a lot more of the machinery behind the curtain.

It turns out that while the fish are still cool (well, they're still fish) you get a completely different sense of the aquarium now: it is, as Corbusier would have put it, a gigantic machine for (fish) to live in. Behind the fishtank glass and explantory plaques, there's a vast industrial apparatus of pumps, water filters, electric motors, lighting, and temperature controls-- all of which you're vaguely aware of in any aquarium, but which are far more visible here

The weird thing is, it's strangely beautiful. More compelling than the stuff you're supposed to pay attention to, sometimes.

More pictures on flickr.

Technorati Tags: aquarium, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

Squid parents

Having spent several hours today at my childrens' school, kicking off another phase of the strategic planning process, this bit (from Schneier) about good squid parenting caught my eye:

[A] team of ocean scientists exploring the inky depths of the Monterey Canyon off California has discovered that at least one squid species cares for its young with loving attention, the mother cradling the eggs in her arms for months, waving her tentacles to bathe the eggs in fresh seawater. The scientists suspect that other species are doting parents, too, and that misperceptions about squid behavior have arisen because the deep is so poorly explored.

[To the tune of Yes, "Starship Trooper," from the album "Keys To Ascension (Disc 2)".]

Makes sense to me...

From the frontiers of science, an alternative to intelligent design: incompetent design.

The Other I.D.

Don Wise, professor emeritus of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the nation's foremost proponent of ID. No, Wise isn't getting ready to testify on behalf of the school board in Dover, PA. Rather, he advocates for a different version of the acronym: "incompetent design."

Wise cites serious flaws in the systems of the human body as evidence that design in the universe exhibits not an obvious source of, but a sore lack of, intelligence....

And while Wise, um, wisely doesn't get into the question of just who such a creator is, his theory inspires two questions.

First, if you accept intelligent design, how do you know that there was a single creator, rather than many? Insects and whales are pretty different; and just as no one would confuse a Louis Kahn building for a Louis XIV chair, might we reasonably conclude that cats, cockroaches, and cetaceans had different designers?

Second, can we know whether the creator(s) was/were benign? What can we deduce about the intelligence, or psychology, of the creator of the dust mite, or of malaria, or the avian flu virus? Could God have created humans in his own image, and the Devil created epidemic diseases in his? If there was an intelligence and purpose behind, say, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, I'm hard-pressed to believe that it was benign.

[via Daily Kos]

Technorati Tags: biology, science

The kind of thing that you know is significant, but...

From a NASA press release:

New gullies that did not exist in mid-2002 have appeared on a Martian sand dune.

[To the tune of Röyksopp, "Eple," from the album "Melody A.M.".]

Technorati Tags: science, space

We knew it would come to this....

The renormalization of relativity and quantum physics has been a great problem since the 1920s. Does this fact, and the fact that there are many controversies in physics, suggest the need for an intelligent design theory for physics? It seems so.

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling....

Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University, [pointed out the flaws in gravitational theory]: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."...

"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."

This raises the more general question: are theoretical mismatches of this sort a reliable sign of Intelligent Design? Should, for example, differences in microeconomics and macroeconomics be taken as evidence of the existence of a higher power (other than Alan Greenspan)? Perhaps long-standing arguments between advocates of traditional biography-- who often take for granted that great individuals are agents of history-- versus economic, social, and Annales School historians-- who argue that mass movements and long-term economic and demographic trends are the drivers of history-- really point to the existence of a grand design for history?

Technorati Tags: humor, science

Now that you've got that unified field theory...

...you need Michio Kaku to tell you what to do next. The important bits:

1) Try to summarize the main idea or theme in a single paragraph. As Einstein once said, unless a theory has a simple underlying picture that the layman can understand, the theory is probably worthless.

2) If you have a serious proposal for a new physical theory, submit it to a physics journal, just as Physical Review D or Nuclear Physics B. [ed: at this point I started wondering if this was an elaborate joke. Got some physics? How about a physics journal! Hmmmm....]

3) Remember that your theory will receive more credibility if your theory builds on top of previous theories, rather than making claims like "Einstein was wrong!"

4) Try not to use vague expressions that cannot be formulated precisely or mathematically, such as "time is quantized," "energy is space," or "space is twisted," or "energy is a new dimension," etc. Instead, try to use mathematics to express your ideas.

5) Once formulated mathematically, it's then relatively easy for a theoretical physicist to determine the precise nature of the theory. At the very least, your theory must contain the tensor equations of Einstein and the quantum theory of the Standard Model.

6) Most important, try to formulate an experiment that can test your idea.

[via catshive]

Technorati Tags: innovation, science

Interesting historical fact...

I've been working flat-out on stuff, so blogging has fallen off. Regular programming will resume shortly, I hope.

In the meantime, from History News Network:

Jews and Palestinians have common ancestry that is so recent that it is highly likely that at least some of the Palestinian blood actually descends from Jews. Another study by New York University confirmed a remarkable similarity between Jewish and Palestinian genes. "Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham," said Dr. Harry Ostrer, director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, who worked on the study. "And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years.

According to several other studies, Palestinians and Jews are genetically closer to each other than either is to the Arabs of Arabia or to Europeans. A study of congenital deafness identified an allele limited to Palestinian and Jews of Ashkenazi origin (those who lived in Europe in recent centuries), suggesting a common origin. Furthermore, Y-chromosome polymorphism is very similar among Palestinians and Sephardic Jews.

[To the tune of Dan Fogelberg, "Heart Hotels," from the album "Dan Fogelberg Live: Greetings from the West (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: culture

Advertising science, or vice versa

I wonder what would happen if you tried this with a history of science journal?

Journal prints rejected paper - as ad

If you don't like getting your paper rejected before it even reaches peer review, ask David Egilman how to get around the process: In what may be an unprecedented move, when the Brown University researcher's paper was recently rejected from an occupational medicine journal, he simply bought two pages of ad space and printed the entire article in the same journal....

"I don't know where he gets this idea that he gets to publish anything he wants in the journal of his choice," [Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine editor Paul] Brandt-Rauf said. "If that were true, I'd publish all of my pieces in Nature and Science."

Actually, it would be probably be cheaper to buy a few pages' ad space in a humanities journal. And I'll bet the reprints would be less expensive, too.

[via Marginal Revolution]

[To the tune of Thomas Dolby, "She Blinded Me With Science," from the album "The Best of Thomas Dolby: Retrospectacle".]

This is your brain on e-mail

Ah...

E-mails 'hurt IQ more than pot'

LONDON, England -- Workers distracted by phone calls, e-mails and text messages suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana, a British study shows....

In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.

He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana.

"This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," Wilson said. "We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness....

Wilson said the IQ drop was even more significant in the men who took part in the tests.

[via TR blog]

[To the tune of Pink Floyd, "Brain Damage," from the album "Dark Side of the Moon".]

Right on the crazy/brilliant line

Via Paul:

The Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

What is it?

Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention. Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted. We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in one week, and WE NEED YOUR HELP!...

Great idea, I'd love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention....

Can't the time travelers just hear about it from the attendees, and travel back in time to attend?

Yes, they can! In fact, we think this will happen, and the small number of adventurous time travelers who do attend will go back to their "home times" and tell all their friends to come, causing the convention to become a Woodstock-like event that defines humanity forever....

I'm from the future, and I'd like to attend!

We're not sure how you're emailing us from the future, but we'd love to have you! Come as you are! No dress code whatsoever. We do request that you bring some sort of proof that you do indeed come from the future, and haven't just dressed like you do. We welcome any sort of proof, but things like a cure for AIDS or cancer, a solution for global poverty, or a cold fusion reactor would be particularly convincing as well as greatly appreciated.

So if no one from the future shows up, does that prove that time travel never happens?

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "Saint Stephen," from the album "1977-05-08 - Barton Hall, Cornell University".]