Month: July 2012

Brain Preservation

The Brain Preservation Foundation announces a prize for the first team to demonstrate a technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable.

2012-12-07: Eternal Brain. This is fascinating. It doesn’t really matter that much whether we’ll be able to reconstruct a brain from a 3D scan, brain plastination seems a much more appealing memento mori than the alternatives. Would I want my dear friends in the ground vs a urn vs a pretty paper weight? Definitely the paper weight.

2013-08-02: The real postmortem.

In the near future, a neurologist and 2 homicide detectives use experimental brain taping technology to question a murder victim about his final moments.

2014-10-09: Brain death after heart death

The largest scientific study of “life after death” and near death experiences in cardiac arrest patients (who were resuscitated) suggests that some people may sustain several minutes of awareness after the heart stops. Conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to 3 minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.”

2020-01-07: 2.5 ka brain scans

It was just amazing to think that a brain of someone who had died so many 1000s of years ago could persist just in wet ground. the first organ to really deteriorate and to basically go to liquid is the brain because of its high fat content. Axel Petzold had spent years researching 2 types of filaments in the brain – neurofilaments and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) – which act like scaffolds to hold brain matter together. He found both of these were still present in the Heslington brain, suggesting they played a key role in keeping the brain matter together

Louder Music

Music is getting louder and less interesting. scientific proof that music has largely become boring.

Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners’ attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than 50 years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness.

OWS is self-parodying

OWS focused more energy on the mundane logistics of camp life than on organizing for social change. Petty decisions such as how to manage laundry (a multi-day debate), what kind of storage bins to buy (they had to be fair trade and procured through Craigslist), and how to put limits on the drumming circles without alienating them (some considered this a civil rights issue) often sucked up hours of valuable time when put to consensus-based discussion in General Assemblies.

this all reads like a camp organized by the park slope coop.