Sunday, 20 June 2010

Road Tripping With Sufi Mystics

Nearly a year ago British author William Dalrymple set off on a world tour with Sufi mystics and stoned Bengali musicians to promote his new book, Nine Lives. He tells the story of his hilarious adventures from getting them through customs to calling forth a deity in Australia.

@'Daily Beast'

Soul Of A Man

"A simmering gumbo of hypnotic beats, wailing voices and shivering guitars" Uncut

Skip ‘Little Axe’ McDonald, the legendary blues guitarist, might not have sold his soul at the crossroads, but he’s looked both ways down the road of the old blues, up the highway of the future before proceeding. After a series of studio-based albums, Little Axe have returned to their roots on Bought For a Dollar, Sold For a Dime. For the first time in seventeen years the original crew came together in the Big Room at Real World for this rare and privileged session, with McDonald and his co-producer, British dub maestro Adrian Sherwood.
Featuring soul singer Bernard Fowler, drummer Keith LeBlanc, bassist Doug Wimbish, all of whom made up the seminal British outfit, Tackhead, a band whose pioneering devices are now integral aspects of rap and pop. LeBlanc, Wimbish and McDonald had previously blazed a trail as The Sugarhill Gang, house band of the famed early ‘80s rap label Sugar Hill Records; they were, quite probably, the most important rhythm section on the planet.
Real World’s state-of-the-art facilities opened its arms to other collective regulars, and the result is a live album, Little Axe-style.

“Soul of a Man” (mp3)
from “Bought for a Dollar / Sold for a Dime”
@'Mundovibe'

Your brain sees your hands as short and fat

Knowing something like the back of your hand supposedly means that you’re very familiar with it. But it could just as well mean that you think it’s wider and shorter than it actually is. As it turns out, our hands aren’t as well known to us as we might imagine. According to Matthew Longo and Patrick Haggard from University College London, we store a mental model of our hands that helps us to know exactly where our limbs are in space. The trouble is that this model is massively distorted.

To keep track of where your various body parts are, your brain maps your posture by processing information from your muscles, joints and skin. Close your eyes and move around a bit, and you’ll still have a good idea of what position you’re in even if you can’t see or touch yourself. But there’s no such direct signal that tells your brain about the size and shape of your body parts. Instead, your brain stores a mental model with those dimensions mapped out.

To visualise this model, Longo and Haggard asked volunteers to hide their hand under a board and use a baton to indicate the position of ten landmarks – the tip and base knuckle of each finger. Their answers were surprisingly inaccurate.

They underestimated the lengths of their fingers by anywhere from around 5% for their thumb and over 35% for their ring and little fingers. In contrast, they overestimated the width of their hand by around 67%, and particularly the distance between their middle and ring knuckles. Our mental hand is a shorter, wider version of our real one. Longo and Haggard found the same thing if they asked the recruits to angle their hands at 90 degrees under the board, and if they tested the right hand as well as the left.

These distortions actually reflect how sensitive each part of the hand is. The skewed mental map is remarkably similar to another map called Penfield’s homunculus, which charts the areas of the brain’s somatosensory cortex (the bit that processes touch information) that is devoted to each body part. Regions that have a more acute sense of touch correspond to larger parts of the homunculus, but they also loom bigger in our mental map. Regions that are less sensitive are smaller on both charts.

As we move from the thumb to the little finger, our digits become less sensitive and the mental map increasingly underestimates their true size. The back of the hand is more sensitive to movement across it than movement along it; accordingly, our mental map depicts a wider, shorter hand.

And we have no idea about this. Consciously, the volunteers had a pretty good appreciation of the size and shape of their hands. When Longo and Haggard showed them a selection of hand images and asked them to select the one that best matched their own, they did so very accurately. But even though they passed this test, they still failed to place the baton in the right place when their hands were hidden.

If we hold such a distorted depiction of our own hands, how is it that we ever grasp things successfully? It’s possible that our motor system uses a different model but Longo and Haggard put forward two more plausible ideas: that cues from vision are strong enough to override the warped map; and that we learn to correct for the misshapen model. Only by removing both of these factors did they finally reveal how skewed our perceptions actually are.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1003483107

Image: Hands by Toni Blay

@'Discover'

Dagestan: My daughter the terrorist

Window display

@'Awkward Family Photos'

(Thanx Anne!)

Paul Wright

Paul Wright uses just the brushstroke in Photoshop to create these amazing portraits.

@'France-Soir'

HA!

ندا آقا سلطان

In Memorium

HERE

Café wall illusion at Melbourne Docklands

HERE

U.S. Testing Pain Ray in Afghanistan

The U.S. mission in Afghanistan centers around swaying locals to its side. And there’s no better persuasion tool than an invisible pain ray that makes people feel like they’re on fire.
OK, OK. Maybe that isn’t precisely the logic being employed by those segments of the American military who would like to deploy the Active Denial System to Afghanistan. I’m sure they’re telling themselves that the generally non-lethal microwave weapon is a better, safer crowd control alternative than an M-16. But those ray-gun advocates better think long and hard about the Taliban’s propaganda bonanza when news leaks of the Americans zapping Afghans until they feel roasted alive.
Because, apparently, the Active Denial System is “in Afghanistan for testing.”
An Air Force military officer and a civilian employee at the Air Force Research Laboratory are just two of the people telling Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger that the vehicle-mounted “block 2″ version of the pain ray is in the warzone, but hasn’t been used in combat.
[Update: "We are currently not testing the Active Denial System in Afghanistan," Kelley Hughes, spokesperson for the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, tells Danger Room.
So I ask her: Has it been tested previously? She hems and haws. "I'm not gonna get into operational," Hughes answers.
Hughes also disputes the assertion that Active Denial creates a burning feeling. "It's an intolerable heating sensation," she says. "Like opening up an oven door."]
For years, the military insisted that the Active Denial System — known as the “Holy Grail” of crowd control — was oh-so-close to battlefield deployment. But a host of technical issues hampered the ray gun: everything from overheating to poor performance in the rain. Safety concerns lingered; a test subject had to be airlifted to a burn center after being zapped by the weapon. (He eventually made a full recovery.) And then there were concerns about “the atmospherics” — how the locals might react — when they learned that the United States had turned a people-roaster on ‘em. “Not politically tenable,” the Defense Science Board concluded.
I pinged Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s staff about the use of Active Denial in Afghanistan. I’ll let you know if I hear anything back. But a few months ago, a source told me that a representative from the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was in Afghanistan. Did that mean Active Denial was about to be put into action? Nope, the source said. “She’s just out getting some atmospherics on the use of non-lethals.”

Update 2: “The active denial system is in the country,” e-mails Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for Gen. McChrystal. “However, it has not been used operationally and no decision has been made at this time to deploy it.”

Noah Schactman @'Danger Room'