Political theorist Marshall Berman, who was my colleague at the CUNY Graduate Center, died yesterday morning.
When I heard the news last night, my first thought was the date: 9/11. There’s no good day to die, but to die on a day so associated with death—whether the murder of nearly 3000 people on 9/11/2001, most of them in his beloved New York, or the 9/11/1973 coup in Chile that brought down Allende and installed Pinochet—seems, in Marshall’s case, like an especially cruel offense against the universe.
For as anyone who knew or read him knows, Marshall was a man of irrepressible and teeming life. The life of the street, which he immortalized in his classic All That’s Solid Melts Into Air; the life of sex and liberation, which he talked about in The Politics of Authenticity (read the section on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters; you’ll never read that book the same way again); the life of high art and popular culture, whether it was the Sex Pistols or hip-hop.
Marshall took in everything; his portion was the world. The only thing he couldn’t abide, couldn’t take in, was ugliness and cruelty.
“For the first time, we were able to link the auditory signal in the brain to what a person said they heard when what they actually heard was something different. We found vision is influencing the hearing part of the brain to change your perception of reality — and you can’t turn off the illusion,” says the new study’s first author, Elliot Smith, a bioengineering and neuroscience graduate student at the University of Utah. “People think there is this tight coupling between physical phenomena in the world around us and what we experience subjectively, and that is not the case.”
The McGurk effect
The brain considers both sight and sound when processing speech. However, if the two are slightly different, visual cues dominate sound. This phenomenon is named the McGurk effect for Scottish cognitive psychologist Harry McGurk, who pioneered studies on the link between hearing and vision in speech perception in the 1970s. The McGurk effect has been observed for decades. However, its origin has been elusive. In the new study in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the University of Utah team pinpointed the source of the McGurk effect by recording and analyzing brain signals in the temporal cortex, the region of the brain that typically processes sound. The researchers recorded electrical signals from the brain surfaces of four epileptic adult volunteers who were undergoing surgery to treat their epilepsy. These four test subjects were then asked to watch and listen to videos focused on a person’s mouth as they said the syllables “ba,” “va,” “ga” and “tha.” Depending on which of three different videos were being watched, the patients had one of three possible experiences as they watched the syllables being mouthed:
— The motion of the mouth matched the sound. For example, the video showed “ba” and the audio sound also was “ba,” so the patients saw and heard “ba.”
— The motion of the mouth obviously did not match the corresponding sound, like a badly dubbed movie. For example, the video showed “ga” but the audio was “tha,” so the patients perceived this disconnect and correctly heard “tha.”
— The motion of the mouth only was mismatched slightly with the corresponding sound. For example, the video showed “ba” but the audio was “va,” and patients heard “ba” even though the sound really was “va.” This demonstrates the McGurk effect — vision overriding hearing.
Video on the making of the Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools:
When I was sixteen or so I could throw a 12 pound spherical object, maybe, and on a very a good day, 47 feet. This was not something I ever really wanted to do, but I did it, perhaps to compensate for some vague and incipient form of masculine insecurity, perhaps to draw the interest of chicks (not that anyone ever sits and watches a shotput meet), or perhaps just to see how far I could throw something kinda heavy. This wasn't bad for high school; neither was it great. It was spang in the middle of mediocre.
There are people who have thrown a sixteen pound sphere nearly eighty feet. There isn't much to see when you witness this, other than a subtle unleashing of human energy, but it's hard to actually see: it all happens too fast. To watch someone throw a shotput upwards of eighty feet is not like watching the pas de deux of tennis, where two people seek, chess-like, to anticipate how to checkmate the other by thinking several moves ahead. It's not like that at all. But still there is something quite watchable there: there is an incredible confluence of torque and spin and speed and will that wind up and are released in a way that can be jaw dropping, at least if you know what to look for. Like watching the discus or the high jump or the long jump (none of which will ever really draw spectators in the way that less brief and intense performances ever will), there is something very blue collar but also quietly superhero-like about it. How, for instance, can someone jump over a bar that is actually taller than they are? And what ontological, metaphysical, or even just physical sense does that make or mean? It's a bit like jumping out of your own skin.
Here are some remarkable chucks over the course of many years (and apologies for the music…):
this kid threw a 5 kg (a little over 11 pound shot put) 23 meters, or roughly 75 feet.
Then there’s this kid:
There's something Emersonian about this sort of thing. You and yourself and the universe and this singular object, each conspiring against or cooperating with the other. Here's a heavy thing. How far can you throw it away from yourself? And how does this act make you feel, even if your results are mediocre?
Sure, summer is almost over. And we've already had plenty of worthy pretenders to the “Song of the Summer” throne. But that just makes this unknown duo's accomplishment that much more impressive.
Perhaps calling Bård Ylvisåker and Vegard Ylvisåker “unknown” is somewhat unfair. They're plenty known in their home country of Norway where they go by “Ylvis” and have their very own talk show on TVNorge.
And as part of the promotion campaign for that show's upcoming season premiere, Ylvis released a music video for a song unassumingly called “The Fox” which went on to set the world of sound on fire.
Don't read another word. Just, uh, just listen to it. Seriously, stop reading. Go listen. Stop. Go.
Researchers have provided the first comprehensive compendium of mutational processes that drive tumour development. Together, these mutational processes explain most mutations found in 30 of the most common cancer types. This new understanding of cancer development could help to treat and prevent a wide-range of cancers. Each mutational process leaves a particular pattern of mutations, an imprint or signature, in the genomes of cancers it has caused. By studying 7,042 genomes of people with the most common forms of cancer, the team uncovered more than 20 signatures of processes that mutate DNA. For many of the signatures, they also identified the underlying biological process responsible. All cancers are caused by mutations in DNA occurring in cells of the body during a person's lifetime. Although we know that chemicals in tobacco smoke cause mutations in lung cells that lead to lung cancers and ultraviolet light causes mutations in skin cells that lead to skin cancers, we have remarkably little understanding of the biological processes that cause the mutations which are responsible for the development of most cancers.
