29 April 2012

Week 18: 'To make the music as a part of yourself ... your way of doing'

Wonder spawned in: 2008
Wondered into being by: Edgar Meyer (bass) and Bela Fleck (banjo)
Wonderspan: 6 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full-screen icon and turn the sound r i i i i i g h t UP!

Today's way of loving is virtuosity - an individual's outstanding skill or facility, usually for playing a musical instrument.  And you get there, it seems, by loving music to a degree beyond anything anyone would recognise as reasonable.  Thanks to Jonathan B for sending this clip our way - Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer make the air glad:
Extra...

There's an abundant harvest of extra musical wonder for you to enjoy this Monday morning...

Here's one of Keith Jarrett's many scintillating, soulful improvisations (and if he looks like he's making love, maybe he is - let's not interrupt him):
Next, a beautifully-made 15-minute documentary by Wandering Eye showing how an engineer works with a musician to make the sound really shine.  The guitarist Ricardo Gallen plays the Prelude from Bach's Partita No. 3 in E Major for solo violin; the engineer is fellow guitarist Norbert Kraft.
If you're not yet emotionally exhausted, or if you are, here's Anoushka Shankar's sitar following her father's vocal improvisations with the ease of a smile - amazing:
And if you liked that there's more from Anoushka here, with even more joy and smiling - it really gets cooking, this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CnhcGpmH9Y

And here's Bela Fleck back with his own playful reworking of the same Bach E Major prelude we heard earlier.  Bach was a pretty unhappy individual for a lot of his life, his music often aches with sadness, but there's a deeper, half-hidden gladness there, too.  This is, I wonder, a kind of half-secret joy that many introverted people know.  It is as if they see and feel wonder all around them but struggle to make it known in the social world, where all the rules are different.  Every now and again Bach produced a piece that feels just like a blast of sun in winter, the sort of rare phenonenon the weather forecasters had no idea was coming.  He couldn't have known that someone would invent the banjo but I think he would have loved it:
And finally, here's something more oddball.  Ethel Smith was a virtuoso organist who made her name in films.  Here she is playing 'Tico Tico' in 1944's Bathing Beauty.
What virtuoso musicians would you include here?  Leave a comment or send an email to justplaindavid@waysofloving.com 

Next week - more joy, and we get political with it... see you then, wonderlovers.

22 April 2012

Week 17: 'It was pulsing, an unaccountable bit of brilliance.'

Wonder spawned in: a few million years ago
Wondered into being by: God, evolution, whatever makes the weather (circle at least one)
Wonderspan: 5 min

While hunting for fish on the coast of Mexico, the traveller Craig Childs spotted an unusual spot of colour on the seabed.  'It was pulsing,' he wrote, 'an unaccountable bit of brilliance, and it had no apparent form other than light itself. … It looked like a floating prism no more than a few inches long.’ [from  Animal Dialogues]

When he lifted the creature in his cupped hands for a more thorough wondering-at, he could see tiny organs contracting and relaxing beneath the translucent skin of its entirely boneless body.  And, most intriguing of all, its surface ‘pulsed gently’ with shimmering colour.  What Craig Childs had found was one of the smaller species of squid

Some of the extraordinary characteristics of squid and their cephalopod cousins are made possible by its quirky anatomy, particularly its brain.  The nervous system of a cephalopod is highly distributed, with two thirds of its neurons outside its central brain organ.  Its brain is, in effect, stretched right out to its skin, where it can electrochemically and instantaneously transform millions of iridescently pigmented openings to create complex patterns of colour.  A squid or octopus can look at its surroundings and camouflage itself in just a few seconds.  It can also use the colours to send signals. In some species of squid, males can sidle up to females and use one half of their bodies to put on a come-hither light show while displaying 'clear off' to a rival suitor on its other side.

In her Orion article, 'Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of the Octopus', Sy Montgomery meets an octopus in an aquarium.  She explains that the larger species of octopus, if they’re feeling friendly (and they do have moods), will want to meet you. They do this by wrapping their tentacles gently around your arms, so as to taste and feel you at the same time.  They will turn their head towards you -- they know exactly where your eyes are -- and look right at you.  Come back the following week and the octopus will remember whether or not it liked you.

This is more than a spooky likeness of intelligence -- it is the real thing.  Here's an octopus learning how to open a jar, for example.  In another experiment, researchers hid a crab in the middle of three nested, perspex boxes, each with a liftable lid fitted with a different kind of complex latch. They then popped the lot into an aquarium and watched an octopus feel each latch with its tentacles and learn how to open it.  Octopuses will play, too.  Sy Montgomery cites a research paper which found that some individuals would use their propulsion jet to squirt a plastic bottle around their tank, apparently just for something to do.  This makes octopus intelligence comparable to that of the few other playful animals, such as crows, dogs and chimpanzees.  Another weirdness is the creature's adaptability --  if an octopus escapes from a tank it will run away to find somewhere to hide. Yes, run on eight legs across the floor, even if that's its first experience on dry land.

To Sy Montgomery, an octopus is too clever to be an ‘it’, but must be a ‘he’ or a ‘she’:
‘No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange.  Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink.’
The larger squid show similar intelligence to octopuses, but the largest octopus comes nowhere near the size of the larger species of squid.  The Humboldt squid can be as long as a human and given the chance would happily chew on one.  They hunt in packs, first corralling fish into dense shoals then flashing a rapid red-and-white pattern just as they pounce.  Their tentacles prickle with hundreds of cats-claw barbs for harpooning the flesh of their prey before dragging it to a hard ‘beak’ for crushing and ingesting.

But a Humboldt is far from the largest kind of squid.  The famous giant squid of sea stories like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is real.  It lives about 3km down, where it loves the extreme cold, the huge aquatic pressure and the pitch darkness.  Amazingly, the first film of a live giant squid was only accomplished eight years ago; before then the only evidence they existed was occasional washed-up remains, giant squid beaks inside the stomachs of dead sperm whales and the tall tales of sailors.  But in 2004, Japanese scientists lowered a lump of bait, a camera and a light into the depths on a 3000-metre cable and waited until, eventually, a giant squid wrapped its body around the meal.

Even this monster is not the largest of the squid.  The most massive of all – as far as anyone knows – is the colossal squid, which is the world’s biggest invertebrate.  A female could weigh up to a ton and measure 18 metres (59ft) in length, which is two thirds as high as a fully grown oak tree; its tentacles (so we might imagine) must be as thick as the branches.  For me, the most exciting feature of the colossal squid is its eye -- the biggest and beadiest of any animal in the world at just over a foot in diameter.  It’s all the better to see you with, my dear.  Deep water squid also have the longest penises relative to body size of any mobile animal; all the better to... well, you know the rest.

You might think that, given the hostile conditions for life 3,000m beneath the sea’s surface, the deep-sea squid would cast lonely figures in the darkness.  But the fauna at that depth is actually the richest of any ecosystem on Earth (including the rainforest).  Yet, so marine biologists say, we know more about the moon than the deep sea, because even with the latest submersible technology it’s so hard to get down there and it’s completely dark.  The giant and colossal squid are among possibly millions of deep-sea species.

The massive squids’ only significant predator (apart from each other) is the sperm whale.  But rather than behave like sensible prey and try to swim away, a giant squid will pick a fight with an attacking whale by wrapping tentacles around its head.  The whale responds by rising closer to the surface.  Eventually, as the water gets a little warmer the squid can’t maintain its oxygen levels in its blood.  When it gets sleepy and falls off the whale tucks in.  Even so, the whale is likely to be a little worse for the encounter, too: older sperm whale heads are scarred all over by tentacle suckers and barbs, testifying graphically to the do-or-die tenacity of its prey. Presumably the squid's attacking technique sometimes works in its favour otherwise it would not have evolved.

But the most remarkable thing about the cephalopods is, perhaps, what so intrigued Craig Child's -- their incredible facility for changing colour and form.  Let's finish with the octopus - here's a short film of the creature's camouflage and other defences.  Pause the video at between 10 and 15 seconds in and see if you can spot him.

Extra...

Here's the rest of the two Ted.com talks by David Gallo, a very enthusiastic marine biologist talking about the spooky world of the deep sea.
Thanks to Joanna W for suggesting squid for a Monday wonder, and to James P for pointing me in a useful direction for the research.

15 April 2012

Week 16: 'Voilá la vérité'

Wonder spawned in: 1926
Wondered into being by: Nadia Sibirskaia (Actor) and Dimitri Kirsanoff (Director)
Wonderspan: 2 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full-screen icon - the film has good music but also works without the sound.

This week, two minutes of the silent 1926 film Ménilmontant.

From the YouTube notes:
'Starring Nadia Sibirskaia as a French girl whose parents are murdered before her eyes; looking for love in the wrong place she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, is homeless and starving, and suddenly finds kindness in the most unlikely of places.’
I haven't been able to find any more of the film online but P. Adams Sitney's provides a bit more info at filmreference.com.  Thanks to GoldenSilents for uploading the video to their YouTube channel
 

'Voilá la vérité' ('And here's the truth') - a headline in the old man's newspaper.

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8 April 2012

Week 15: 'I would like to apologise to many of my friends for being so occupied...'

Wonder spawned in: 2011
Wondered into being by: The Sun, the Earth, and Ole Salomonsen
Wonderspan: 5 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full-screen icon.

Let's talk about the weather in space, where it's sunny with clear skies but always windy.

The Sun is spinning off a stream of electrically charged particles that spiral outwards in waves like a flamenco-dancer's skirt.  The particles form fronts of space weather travelling at a million kilometers per hour.  This is the solar wind.

The solar wind would be harmful to life were it not for the Earth's magnetic field, which emanates from the excitation of matter in the planet's spinning, molten core.  The field's force lines form their own shape, like a giant iris flowering around the Earth.  Its sun-side petals push most of the solar wind outwards, around the planet and off into space, but the field also pulls some of the wind back towards the Earth just below each pole.

Electrons from the solar wind striking particles in the Earth's upper atmosphere give them an electrical charge, which they can then dump by emitting light.  So, although it's not normally visible to the naked eye even at night, a constant glow, called a diffuse aurora, hangs above the poles.

But the solar wind is gusty, too.  Squalls of particles buffet and compress the Earth's magnetic field, affecting how it pulls them them towards the Earth.  On a windy day in space, the solar wind billows the upper atmosphere as if it were a linen sheet hanging out to dry.  If we happen to be in the right place, we get to watch the solar gusts create green, red, yellow, blue and purple waves of light in the sky.  The colour depends on whether oxygen or nitrogen particles are being struck, and how high in the atmosphere they are.  These light shows are the northern lights (aurora borealis) and southern lights (aurora australis).

A space breeze becomes a storm when the sun releases solar flares and/or throws out large dollops of highly energised matter from its corona.  When these storms reach Earth they cause radio 'scintillation' and electrically excite power lines, electronics and a whole host of other stuff we rely on.  In the largest solar storm on record in 1859, telegraph operators were able to carry on a conversation with all the power turned off, by using only the excitation of the cables by the electrons from the solar wind.  These storms also interfere with the magnetite (a magnetised mineral) which homing pigeons and several other animal species use to navigate.

These storms also squeeze and weaken the Earth's magnetic field, which then brings the solar wind down to the atmosphere at much lower latitudes.  In the geomagnetic superstorm of 1989, people were watching aurorae in Texas, for example.

The field is measured constantly based on data from a few geomagnetic monitoring stations dotted about the planet.  The readings from last month show a 100 nano-Tesla dip in the field strength on 9 March, which classifies that day's space weather as an 'intense' storm.  This was caused by the sun throwing off two large waves of plasma earlier in the month. It would have been a good night for aurora-watching if Europe had been facing away from the sun at the time.

From space the aurorae appear as huge halos around the poles - here's a short video of the International Space Station crossing the southern lights.  (There are more aurora videos from NASA here but do come back!)

It's harder to find good video of the aurorae from the ground but one man, Ole Salomonsen from Tromso in Norway, spent six months taking 50,000 stills of the northern lights and splicing them together into this film to reflect as closely as possible their real-time movement.  He writes:
'In the video I have put together a collection of slow moving auroras in the woods, over the mounatins, in the city, in the foreshore, reflected in the sea, with some of the most spectacular and strongest auroral outbreaks seen in many years. Included here is a coronal outbreak, in which I am particularly happy to present, since it is very difficult to get on stills, even worse on "film".
'I could never have done this without the fantastic understanding and help from my girlfriend. This has been an insanely time-consuming project. Both hours after hours out in the cold, but also all the hours in post-processing during late nights has led to a severe lack of sleep.  Also, I would like to apologize to many of my friends for being so occupied the last months. Looking forward to spend more time with you all now.'
Today Ole (and vicariously, also his girlfriend Veronica) bring a little northern wonder into our offices (it's probably better without the sound, by the way):
Receive aurora alerts for the UK or out-nerd your friends by making your own auroral detector! Sign up at http://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk

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And can you help, please?

Later in the year I want to feature some street musicians/dancers/artists on waysofloving.com - I'm particularly interested in unusual forms - musicians playing unusual instruments, for example.  If you have any suggestions - good quality sound/image if poss - then please let me know.  Email justplaindavid@waysofloving.com.  Ta v much.

And please spread the love - tweet, like on Fbook etc.

1 April 2012

Week 14: 'The most amazing shapes!'

Wonderdate: 2011
Wondered into being by: Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith
Wonderspan: 2 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

Two tourists canoeing down Ireland’s longest river, the Shannon, are surprised by a huge murmuration of starlings at the point of their migration.  A murmuration, so named for the wave-sound of the flock's beating wings as it lurches and swoops, can be up to a million birds strong.  A study (says the BBC) has found that the murmuration's movements are due to each starling independently following just three rules.  The first two – fly at the same speed and stay close to your neighbours – collects the birds into a ball.  The third – steer clear of objects, predators and potential threats – creates the swirling motion we see.  The study claims that each starling only needs to keep an eye on its seven nearest neighbours while following these rules – simple!
Thanks to Becky H for suggesting this one!  More about migrations later on in the year...