Brahms and Radiohead

The most breathtaking musical event this spring will bring together one of the most successful concept albums of all time — Radiohead’s OK COMPUTER — with one of the most important symphonies ever — Brahm’s 1st — in an epic performance. Brahms V. Radiohead is the newest opus from Stereo Hideout Orchestra, whose composer Steve Hackman has married other modern and classical maestros before, like Björk and Bartók, Bon Iver and Aaron Copland. This will be Stereo Hideout’s first NYC performance, and they have hired some of Brooklyn’s most brilliant musicians for the 55-piece orchestra and 3 vocalists who will be seamlessly layering Radiohead’s motifs and lyrics into Brahms’ masterpiece.

Lucid dreaming playbook

1. Set an alarm for 5 hours after you go to bed.
2. When the alarm sounds, try to remember a dream from just before you woke up. If you can’t, just recall any dream you had recently.
3. Lie in a comfortable position with the lights off and repeat the phrase: ‘Next time I’m dreaming, I will remember I’m dreaming.’ Do this silently in your mind. You need to put real meaning into the words and focus on your intention to remember.
4. Every time you repeat the phrase at step 3, imagine yourself back in the dream you recalled at step 2, and visualize yourself remembering that you are dreaming.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you either fall asleep or are sure that your intention to remember is set. This should be the last thing in your mind before falling asleep. If you find yourself repeatedly coming back to your intention to remember that you’re dreaming, that’s a good sign it’s firm in your mind.

New Chemistry, And Its Limits

So I enjoyed this paper very much, but it starts off with a claim that’s worth arguing about: “organic synthesis is still a rate-limiting factor in drug-discovery projects“. Is that true?

It depends on where you’re standing. All the synthetic limitations described above are real, and they keep us from being able to make a lot of molecules that we’d otherwise be cranking out. But (and this is a big point) it’s rarely the case that we medicinal chemists identify a tricky new structure that absolutely has to be made. That sounds odd, but it comes down to our predictive powers, which aren’t so great. We don’t generally draw some wild compound up on the hood sash and say “That’s the one, folks: find a way to make it or die trying”. We never know which is the one, so in the absence of knowing, we make the things that we can make in the ways that we can make them, and honestly, much of the time, we can manage to come up with something.

End of Windows

It’s important to note that Windows persisted as the linchpin of Microsoft’s strategy for over 30 years for a very good reason: it made everything the company did possible. Windows had the ecosystem and the lock-in, and provided the foundation for Office and Windows Server, both of which were built with the assumption of Windows at the center. Office 365 and Azure are comparatively weaker strategically: Office 365 has document lock-in, but the exact same forces that weakened Windows in the first place weaken the idea of documents as well. It’s not clear why new companies in particular would even care. Azure, meanwhile, is chasing AWS, with a huge amount of business coming from Linux VMs that could run anywhere. Unsurprisingly, both are still benefiting from Windows: Office 365 really does, as Nadella noted in his retreat, work better on Windows, and vice versa; it is seamless for organizations that have been using Office for years to move to Office 365. Azure’s biggest advantage, meanwhile, is that it allows for hybrid deployments, where workloads are split between legacy on-premise Windows servers and Azure’s public cloud; that legacy was built on Windows. This, then, is Nadella’s next challenge: to understand that Windows is not and will not drive future growth is one thing; identifying future drivers of growth is another. Even in its division Windows remains the best thing Microsoft has going — it had such a powerful hold on Microsoft’s culture precisely because it was so successful.

Many more hominins

It seems as if, every few weeks now, a new hominin fossil, genetic study, archaeological site, or re-dating of old sites is reported from the vast Asian continent, a continent that still has large swathes of areas yet to be intensively explored. If nothing else, the picture as it appears thus far is much more complicated than the old Out-of-Africa models: there were multiple earlier dispersals from Africa, and much more interbreeding between species than we once thought. The story of ourselves, it turns out, becomes richer the more we know about it.

ASMR

W Magazine recently recruited Parks And Recreation and Legion star Aubrey Plaza for its ongoing, aurally uncomfortable video series, “Celebrity ASMR,” which is exactly what it sounds like. But where folks like Jake Gyllenhaal, Margot Robbie, and Gal Gadot only paid loudly-smacking lip service when they sat down way too close to W’s mics—posting videos a mere 2 or 3 minutes in length—Plaza approached the task with the same intensity with which she appears to tackle pretty much everything in her life, laying down a 36-minute sonic odyssey in search of “the tingles.” Also, a lot of it was about how much she still hates Jerry.

The shushing sound of voices whispering, or clothes rustling—and then a tingling feeling begins on the scalp, and spreads down into the neck, shoulders, and limbs, and along with it comes a state of calm, or even euphoria. This is how people who experience autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, describe the peculiar phenomenon. ASMR is “similar to the deep relaxation someone might feel if they’re getting a massage”. It’s a form of auditory-tactile synesthesia; “brain tingles.”

Who We Are and How We Got Here

The case of the Ancient North Eurasians showed that while a tree is a good analogy for the relationships among species — because species rarely interbreed and so like real tree limbs are not expected to grow back together after they branch — it is a dangerous analogy for human populations. The genome revolution has taught us that great mixtures of highly divergent populations have occurred repeatedly. Instead of a tree, a better metaphor may be a trellis, branching and remixing far back into the past.