Natural quiet is a rapidly disappearing resource. According to acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, there are only seven or eight naturally quiet places — defined as where the sounds of nature are unbroken for intervals of at least 15 minutes during daylight hours — left in the United States. None exist in Europe anymore. But if you travel far enough to remote corners of the Earth, and listen carefully enough, you can still find them.

Acoustic ecology studies were established in the 1960s by naturalist/composer R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia as an attempt to define the relationship between humans and their environment, as mediated through sound. With a focus that spans both science and art, the continuum of acoustic ecology often attracts individuals who are part researcher, part composer, and part adventurer.

Listen ...

"I got a gift that I wasn’t expecting, and that gift is to be alive and well at 76. I see all these friends of mine who say, I’m going to be 40, I don’t know what to do, and I say, Wait until another 30 or 40 years and you’re going to feel much better."

to what extent does what we get paid confer ‘worth’? Beyond a narrow notion of productivity, what impact does our work have on the rest of society, and do the financial rewards we receive correspond to this? Do those that get more contribute more to society?

Our report tells the story of six different jobs. We have chosen jobs from across the private and public sectors and deliberately chosen ones that illustrate the problem. Three are low paid – a hospital cleaner, a recycling plant worker and a childcare worker. The others are highly paid – a City banker, an advertising executive and a tax accountant. We examined the contributions they make to society, and found that, in this case, it was the lower paid jobs which involved more valuable work.

The report goes on to challenge ten of the most enduring myths surrounding pay and work. People who earn more don't necessarily work harder than those who earn less. The private sector is not necessarily more efficient than the public sector. And high salaries don't necessarily reflect talent.

in my experience, the NEF report tells us nothing we didn't intuitively suss out before, only the probability of realizing their result appears to be directly proportional to one's real talent and engagement, and inversely proportional to one's occupational remuneration.

Put another way, could it be people are in fact proportionally paid specifically to overlook this reality?

“What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.”

While Persinger’s experiments could prove groundbreaking, he remains doubtful about his controversial findings reaching his colleagues, “I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types.  They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.”

And from the Abstract:

One indication of entanglement between two particles is a change in parity or spin in one when the other is changed in order to maintain constancy of the system. Our experiment was designed to discern if this phenomenon occurred at the macroscopic level between the electroencephalographic activities of brains of pairs of people, separated by about 75 m, with various degrees of “entanglement”. About 50% of the variance of the "simultaneous" electroencephalographic power was shared between pairs of brains. Pairs of strangers were positively correlated within alpha and gamma bands within the temporal and frontal lobes. However the power levels within the alpha and theta bands were negatively correlated for pairs of people who had a protracted history of interaction. The latter result might be considered support for the hypothesis of macroscopic entanglement.

I knew you were going to say that.

This was not an easy book to write. For many of you, it won’t be an easy book to read. I know. I was a vegan for almost twenty years. I know the reasons that compelled me to embrace an extreme diet and they are honorable, ennobling even. Reasons like justice, compassion, a desperate and all-encompassing longing to set the world right. To save the planet—the last trees bearing witness to ages, the scraps of wilderness still nurturing fading species, silent in their fur and feathers. To protect the vulnerable, the voiceless. To feed the hungry. At the very least to refr ain from participating in the horror of factory farming.

     This book is written to further those passions, that hunger.

The mark of a good journalist is an endless stream of connected details that compels you to go that one more paragraph on before putting it down; the mark of a good writer is not being able to find one small part better than the others to cite in a blog post to give you the gist of what they are saying -- even if you steadfastly won't read the book, even if you don't trust the sources over your own, read just this one teaser page, the opening of Chapter One, the overview of the background, the motives, the situation, the vision of change and proposition of a solution, and if that alone doesn't leave you wanting to know more about the food you eat, all of the food you eat, vegan and otherwise, then move along folks, there's nothing more to see here.

But if it does, then by all means tune in to Lierre Keith, radical feminist on a planet-saving mission ...

“The Vegetarian Myth is one of the most important books people, masses of them, can read, as we try with all our might, intelligence, skill, hope, dream and memory, to turn the disastrous course the planet is on. Or rather that we are on because of our abuse of the planet. It’s a wonderful book, full of thoughtful, soulful teachings, and appropriate rage. My admiration for Lierre’s sharing of life experience and knowledge is complete. Thank you.” (Alice Walker)

This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.

The evidence for this view is mounting. Much of it has existed for years, in fact, but the focus on dysfunction in behavioral genetics has led most researchers to overlook it. This tunnel vision is easy to explain, according to Jay Belsky, a child-development psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London. “Most work in behavioral genetics has been done by mental-illness researchers who focus on vulnerability,” he told me recently. “They don’t see the upside, because they don’t look for it. It’s like dropping a dollar bill beneath a table. You look under the table, you see the dollar bill, and you grab it. But you completely miss the five that’s just beyond your feet.”

Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness.

Curiously, almost verbatim, a good astrologer would tell you precisely the same thing: "The planets IMPELL, they do not COMPELL" and then the whole picture taken to balance the disparities and salve the anomalies to achieve that whole-system balance which contains all the elements. Is psychology finally catching up?

About twenty some years ago I had a conversation with an officer of a BC psychiatric org; at that time the darling of psychiatry was a notion called Dynamic Personality, an 'innovative' idea that proposed an extension to Piaget's levels of human development through to the adult years, postulating a growth to the human psyche. It was very novel. I pointed out that Shakespeare's Ages of a man speech had already outlined this idea, and what's more, any competent astrologer would be able to not only map the progress for specific people, but also, unlike psychiatry, the astrologer could make a prognosis as to when the condition would change, often an important motivator for people in trouble. Notice that change doesn't imply better or worse, only that the scene changes; what one then does with this 'genetic' program is still largely personal free-will, and just as with the 'interventions' in this article, one can augment one's free-will with information from the greater whole-system view.

Udo Kasemets has written many pieces of music during his 90 years on the planet, including ambitious translations into sound of the works of eminent poets and scientists. But he says he is still looking for the answer to the most basic question about his art: What is music?

“I don't really want to be considered an accomplished composer, or something like that, because I'm still learning," he says, during an interview between rehearsals for his fraCtal fibONaCciERTO, which New Music Concerts is performing at the Betty Oliphant Theatre Sunday. “I still haven't got my answer, as to what music really is, and this is probably why I've had this long life."

“I thought it was important for a conductor to know what music is from the inside out, to know how it is made and put together," he said. “And that meant learning composition."

Kasemets walks with a cane, his speech is slow and his hair is snow white, but his capacity for wonder is that of a small child. “Fascinating" is one of his favourite words.

If anyone is able to take in the show today at the Betty Oliphant in Toronto, please do send on my regards and birthday wishes, and prepare yourself for a musical experience like no other. John Cage said that he only learned to play chess so he could hang out with Marcel Duchamp; truth be told, I only learned to create computer gear so I could hang out with Udo, which was every bit like hanging out with all three of them at once! :)

Enlarge

The researchers then compared four models of speciation to determine which best accounted for the rate of speciation actually found. The Red Queen hypothesis, of species arising as a result of an accumulation of small changes, fitted only eight percent of the evolutionary trees. A model in which species arise from single rare events fitted eighty percent of the trees.

Dr Pagel said that the research shows speciation is the result of rare events in the environment, such as genetic mutations, a shift in climate, or a mountain range rising up. Over the long term new species are formed at a constant rate, rather than the variable rate Pagel's team expected, but the constant rates are different for different groups of species.

The work suggests that natural selection may not be the cause of speciation, which Pagel said "really goes against the grain" for scientists who have a Darwinian view of evolution. The model that provided the best fit for the data is surprisingly incompatible with the idea that speciation is a result of many small small events, Pagel said.

The paper is published in the journal Nature.

More information: Venditti, C., Meade, A. & Pagel, M. Nature advance online publication (2009); doi:10.1038/nature08630

It still doesn't satisfactorily explain how bird wings could come to be out of land-dwellers when generations upon generations would have to endure useless not-arms/not-wings until the first flight-ready version emerged (or where they all penguin-like first?) but this does explain why we don't see a continuum of unfit species on the egress everywhere we look, at least not until some cataclysm (like man) befalls them.

The Edge Annual Question 2009

Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.

Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.

This year's EDGE question for WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? is out and while I haven't read them all, spot-checking a dozen or so I'm finding this to be the most despondent and depressing list of expert resignations they've yet put out. When asked "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" we find Susan Blackmore expecting to be pushed off the planet, Brian Eno witnessing the mass-disheartening of humanity, Richard Dawkins expects chimps cross-bred with humans and even Alan Alda chimes in a prediction that we always do the worst with what we get and we'll just blow ourselves up anyway.

I notice they did not ask Rob Brezny, but nonetheless I find this year's report to be extremely encouraging, because it means all these 'great' minds have boxed themselves into a corner, pressed themselves against the Limiting Edge and who knows, with a bit of luck, maybe one or two of them will fall off that edge entirely and discover something wonderful.