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On a woman's effort to speak Hindi in NYC
Learning Hindi Was Hard, but It Was Just the Start
By SUSAN DOMINUS
It is not unusual for Katherine Russell Rich, an author and a former magazine editor, to break out into song in the back of a taxi, and not just any song, but a song in Hindi from one of her favorite Bollywood movies. “Yaara, sili sili,” she’ll croon when she has an Indian cabdriver. “Biraha ki raat ka jalana.” “Beloved, little by little — the separation of the night is beginning to burn.”
The drivers are apparently too shocked to contemplate whether this is a seduction attempt. “The cabdrivers do things like laugh in surprise,” said Ms. Rich, who is not Indian. “They say, ‘Oh my God. That is really good. You are really speaking Hindi. Where did you learn that?’ ”
In other words, they loosen up upon hearing the familiar tune and start talking to her like a person, instead of a fare, which is what she hoped to accomplish in the first place. Then and only then, Ms. Rich has found, will drivers relax and start speaking Hindi to her, which allows her to keep up the language that she has been studying since 1999, including for almost a year in Rajasthan, starting in the fall of 2001.
The experiences of that year make up the substance of Ms. Rich’s new book, “Dreaming in Hindi” (Houghton Mifflin), a work that will inevitably be compared to Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” (Viking Adult, 2006), given that it traces the far-flung adventures of a thoughtful, soul-searching single woman from New York (it is also a pick for Oprah’s summer reading list, so Ms. Rich may have in common with Ms. Gilbert killer sales.)
Long before she left for India, however, while still a beginner studying the language, Ms. Rich was delicately trying to find personally escorted entry points into Hindi around New York.
“I used to try to ask a man who worked at a newsstand near my home to help me with my homework,” she said. Delighted by her effort, he’d keep a line of people waiting while he patiently went over vocabulary with her on the back of lottery tickets.
But usually, finding a way to speak Hindi in New York posed challenges she did not anticipate. It’s not for lack of potential tutors: The city, according to the 2000 census, has about 35,000 Hindi or Urdu speakers (the languages are very similar). In a promotional video for the book, Ms. Rich recreates some of the encounters she’s had with Indians around New York. One store owner insists in English that she is not actually speaking Hindi; when Ms. Rich explains, in Hindi, that she studied the language for some time in Rajasthan, he retorts, in English, “They don’t speak Hindi in Rajasthan.” (This happens not to be true.)
When Ms. Rich returned to New York from abroad, she spontaneously spoke Hindi to a friend of a friend. “He told me that when I spoke Hindi to him, it was like a body blow,” Ms. Rich said. “I think to Indians, sometimes it feels like I’m eavesdropping on a private conversation, like I’m breaking the fourth wall.”
To some people from India, Ms. Rich learned, it is insulting to be addressed in anything other than English, a language of the privileged. And for some immigrants, domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim.
Ms. Rich says she is becoming less of an anomaly. In the past 10 years, the number of universities offering the language has significantly increased, according to S. N. Sribhar, the director of the Center for Indian Studies at the State University at Stony Brook. Part of that rise can be explained by general educational trend toward improving foreign language fluency. But the demand for Hindi has also increased because of what Mr. Sribhar calls the “heritage phenomenon,” a natural outgrowth of the large influx of Indian immigrants in the past several decades.
“A lot of Indians who were born here or moved here when they were very small want to rediscover the language,” he said. (Ms. Rich said that she had overlapped with such students at New York University, and that many were already proficient in the language, less interested in their heritage and more interested in an easy A.)
She did feel that she got great instruction at N.Y.U., even if, in a local quirk of globalism, her teacher was Bulgarian rather than Indian. “It was like learning Hindi from Nadia Comaneci’s coach,” she said.
The shock of a Westerner speaking Hindi is still bracing enough that Ms. Rich rarely jumps right into the language she has mastered. She usually politely asks first if she might, a courtesy she understands now as intuitively as she does the language itself.
Daughter Against Use of Father’s Name to Subvert Neo-Nazis
Daughter Against Use of Father’s Name to Subvert Neo-Nazis
By MICHAEL COOPER
The daughter of a distinguished Jewish theologian said Monday that she opposed a plan to rename for him a stretch of Missouri highway that has been adopted by a group of neo-Nazis. She said that lending her father’s name to a road that Nazis cleaned would “dishonor” him.
Missouri officials, thwarted in the past on free-speech grounds when they tried to keep the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway, took another tack after the National Socialist Movement adopted the half-mile stretch of road, on the outskirts of Springfield. The legislature voted to name it for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled the Nazis’ advance in Europe and became a prominent theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States before his death in 1972.
Lawmakers said they hoped the new name would send a message that the area valued inclusiveness, not anti-Semitism and racism. But Rabbi Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, said Monday that while she appreciated their intentions, attaching her father’s name to a road cleaned by neo-Nazis would be “vulgar” and would “dishonor” him.
Dr. Heschel noted that her father’s mother, three of his sisters and much of his extended family were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
“While I appreciate their wanting to — embarrass Nazis, let’s say, it goes too far,” Dr. Heschel, who studies Jewish-Christian relations in Germany and the history of anti-Semitism, said in an interview. “It’s inappropriate. I don’t think that my father would have felt honored by this.”
Dr. Heschel expressed similar sentiments to lawmakers after the provision had been adopted as part of a major transportation bill, which has not yet been signed into law by Gov. Jay Nixon. State Representative Sara Lampe, a Springfield Democrat who introduced the provision, said she had spoken with Dr. Heschel then and had hoped that her concerns had been allayed.
Ms. Lampe said she still believed that Rabbi Heschel, who marched for civil rights with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was the perfect person to honor.
“I continue to believe that his teachings are what this is all about,” she said. “It’s about making sure that we don’t forget. It’s about making sure that we stand against bigotry and hatred.”
Michael Abrams, chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee in Overland Park, Kan., the group that came up with the idea of renaming the road for Rabbi Heschel, said, “The intent was to honor an extraordinary human being.”
When an Ear Witness Decides the Case
When an Ear Witness Decides the Case
By NATALIE ANGIER
Spoken clearly, the sounds “dah” and “bah” are easy to distinguish. Yet if you play a film clip in which the soundtrack says “dah” while the image on the screen shows a mouth saying “bah,” people will swear they heard “bah.”
If you ask people to count the number of times that a light flashes, and you flash the light seven times together with a sequence of eight beeping tones, people will say the light flashed eight times.
When confronted with conflicting pieces of information, the brain decides which sense to trust. In the first scenario, those clearly percussing lips could never be articulating a “d,” and so vision claimed the upper hand. But on matters that demand a temporal analysis, and making sense of similar sounds in a sequence, the brain reflexively counts on hearing.
Click click click. You can listen to a series of clicks at 20 beats per second and know they are separate clicks rather than a single continuous tone. Run a series of images together at 20 frames per second and — welcome to the movies.
“The temporal resolution of our vision,” said Barbara Shinn-Cunningham of Boston University, “is an order of magnitude slower than what our auditory system can cope with.”
It’s easy to take hearing for granted, that sprawling stereophonic Babylonia where the gates never close and there are soapboxes for all. You can shut your eyes against a bright sun or avert your gaze from a grim scene. But when one neighbor’s leaf blower sets off another neighbor’s car alarm, hey, where are my earlids? We’ve been called the visual primate, and the size of our visual cortex dwarfs the neural platform assigned to audition. Most people, when asked, claim they would rather lose their hearing than their sight.
Yet in ways that researchers are just beginning to appreciate, we humans are beholden to our ears. Mechanically, electrically, behaviorally and cosmetically, our paired sounding boards are a genuine earmark of our species. And if the words aural and oral are often confused, they should be, for our ears and our mouths jointly gave us our voice.
Scientists now suspect that the origin of human language owes as much to improvements in the early hominid ear as to more familiar spurs like a changing vocal tract or even a generally expanding brain. In one recent molecular analysis, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin reported that eight genes involved in shaping the human ear appear to have undergone significant changes over the past 40,000 years, some as recently as the dawn of the Roman Empire. Only with highly refined auditory infrastructure, researchers said, could our ancestors have tuned in to the sort of tiny fluctuations in pressure waves that characterize all human speech, let alone properly conjugated Latin.
Moreover, the avidity with which our auditory sense seeks to organize ambient noise into a meaningful acoustical pattern — a likely consequence of our dependence on language — could help explain our distinctly human musicality.
Every human culture studied makes music, and human babies are born loving music, yet the old saw notwithstanding, music will do nothing to soothe the average nonhuman beast. Emerging evidence suggests that many of our fellow mammals, including dogs, cats, rodents and monkeys, are indifferent to music and may even dislike it. In a study of cotton top tamarins and common marmosets, Josh McDermott, now at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, found that while the monkeys showed some signs of preferring slow-tempo music to livelier tunes, their favorite song of all was the sound of one hand clapping. “They’re in a room with nothing else to do, and they could be listening to a nice, soothing lullaby,” Dr. McDermott said. “But if you give the monkeys a choice between music and silence, they choose silence pretty strongly.”
Whatever the preferred playlist, our auditory system is a superb piece of engineering, and indeed many auditory researchers have an engineering as well as a neuroscience background. The pressure waves that are sound enter the ears through the curved and lobed pinna, a structure as specific to each individual as a fingerprint that is essential for gauging the vertical contours of an incoming sound wave and hence how near or far the sound source may be.
As the displacement of air molecules proceeds through the ear canal and across the membranous ear drum, the vibrations wiggle the three tiny bones of the middle ear, which, as Jeremy Wolfe’s “Sensation and Perception” vividly puts it, act like a set of levers and a stiletto heel striking a wooden floor, to amplify the wave’s energy and so make even faint sounds audible. Venturing next into the dense snail shell of the inner ear, the mechanical vibrations are further amplified and translated into neurally appropriate electrical signals by pulsing arrays of fringed hair cells.
Shihab Shamma of the University of Maryland argues that the brain interprets visual and audio signals using many similar tricks. For example, it looks for the edges and the overall geometry of the signal. “What distinguishes one vowel from another is the shape of the waveform entering the ear,” Dr. Shamma said. “This would be analogous to what distinguishes a square from a circle.” The brain also has a penchant for symmetry. Many objects in the natural world are bilaterally symmetrical — they have a left and a right side — and the brain uses that symmetry as a cue to group together similar objects and distinguish one from the next. The equivalent of symmetry in aural cues is pitch, the frequency profile of a sound wave that makes a C note sound different from a G-flat. Most sounds consist not of pure notes of a single gorgeous oscillating sine wave, but of harmonics, overlaid multiples of those sine waves, and the brain seizes on them as one, just as it treats the left and right half of a painting or a tree as elements of a single object.
Unlike the eyes, of course, the ears are not limited to sensory stimulants in front of the face. “Because auditory signals go around objects,” said Dr. Shamma, “they’re extremely important for communicating in a cluttered environment.”
A penguin locates its chick or a human mother her lost daughter by listening for the telltale cry. If ears are the eyes in the back of our head, maybe it’s best that these eyes never blink.
An article on beekeeping in the city
Beekeepers Keep the Lid On
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
THERE were hives to inspect and honeycombs to drain, but before all that Patrick Gannon sat on a cinder block in his backyard on City Island with his 9-year-old son, Julian, and just watched the bees.
“I can’t think of anything more relaxing than sitting in front of my beehive, drinking a beer, smoking a cigar, letting the bees fly,” Mr. Gannon said on a recent Saturday afternoon. “And the smell. It’s the most beautiful smell.”
Mr. Gannon moved to City Island from Manhattan in 2003, lured by the opportunity of sailing. But after trading a sixth-story walk-up apartment for a house, Mr. Gannon decided to return to beekeeping, a hobby he had discovered as a young man in rural England.
His pastime, however, means breaking the law. His hives, like all those in New York City, are illegal, and Mr. Gannon could face thousands of dollars in fines if someone complained and the authorities took action.
Though it’s almost impossible to keep a bee colony a secret, the number of New Yorkers taking the risk is growing: beehives are popping up in various neighborhoods, and seem particularly popular in Brooklyn, say those who track beekeeping.
A group called the New York City Beekeepers Association is encouraging novices: it offers classes, matches people who want to keep bees with people who have room for hives, and sells beekeeping starter kits.
The growing popularity of beekeeping may be due, in part, to reports of colony collapse — the mysterious disappearance, reported by scientists, of bees across the country. It is also considered a worthy avocation among the environmentally conscious, because bees pollinate flowers and crops as well as produce honey.
City Councilman David Yassky of Brooklyn introduced a bill this year that would legalize beekeeping. Beekeeping enthusiasts are waiting for the Council’s Health Committee to schedule a hearing on it.
Mr. Yassky and Just Food, a New York group focused on hunger issues, argue that beekeeping is a legitimate form of agriculture.
Just Food is coordinating Pollinator Week — it begins Monday — in New York City to make the case for legalizing beekeeping.
The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is charged with enforcing the ban against beekeeping, but officials there said beekeepers are pursued only when a complaint is lodged. This year, the city had received 49 complaints by Friday; officials made nine inspections and issued four summonses.
Mr. Gannon said that a fear of thousands of bees roaming across City Island was initially unsettling to some residents. But the sight of his children playing near his hives helped ease fears, and the family’s first honey harvest in 2004 attracted 30 curious neighbors.
Then there is a built-in incentive for neighborly tolerance: Each summer Mr. Gannon harvests 150 to 200 pounds of honey; almost all of it is jarred and handed out as gifts.
In a demonstration of beekeeping practice, Mr. Gannon and his son filled a hive with smoke, using a bee smoker, a small device equipped with a hand pump. Smoke calms the bees, but also makes them anticipate having to abandon the hive because of fire. They gorge on honey, in preparation for a quick exit, and, like humans, they mellow out after their big meal. It makes them less likely to object when someone pokes around their home and allows Mr. Gannon to inspect the hive.
Then he rolled out his centrifuge — a large metal cylinder. It was time to extract 2009’s first batch of honey from a different hive.
Mr. Gannon loaded the racks inside the centrifuge with two beeless honeycombs, then stepped back and let Julian begin spinning them with a hand crank. The honey oozed out of the combs, down the walls in the cylinder and into a reservoir at the bottom. Two young girls from the neighborhood appeared, each wanting a turn at the handle and a taste of the honey. Mr. Gannon obliged for a few minutes, then shooed them away so he could finish.
In the first few decades of the 20th century, beekeepers were far more prevalent in the city — there were even beehives inside Radio City Music Hall and atop the American Museum of Natural History. But the number of hives dwindled: An article in The New York Times in 1956 included laments from a beekeeping supplier that he did not know of a single active hive remaining in Manhattan.
The practice was officially outlawed in 1999, when honeybees were included on a health code list of more than 100 wild animals that New Yorkers could not keep, including vultures, iguanas, ferrets and even whales: they were all potential menaces. The change to the health code sparked one of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s more memorable outbursts: when a ferret owner called his weekly radio program to complain about the rule, the mayor admonished the man for “devoting your life to weasels.”
The illicit status of their bees affects beekeepers in different ways. Mr. Gannon fears a crackdown the same way that the average pedestrian worries about jaywalking. But a new beekeeper named Barry, with hives on the roof of his brownstone in Clinton Hill, asked that his last name not be used.
He mentioned his new hobby to a neighbor, who seemed put off by the idea. He has not told other neighbors.
But can he keep it a secret?
“It’s kind of hard,” he said, “to be inconspicuous in a beekeeper’s veil.”
He blames his friend Amy Azzarito’s “latent desire to be a farmer” for making him a beekeeper.
Ms. Azzarito, on a quest to learn more about the food she was eating, read a book called “The Urban Homestead,” which included advice on growing vegetables, harnessing energy and raising animals. She ruled out various possibilities she deemed unsuitable for city living, like raising chickens. “The only thing that seemed plausible was beekeeping,” she said.
The idea was spurred last summer, when Ms. Azzarito, who works for the New York Public Library, went to a honey harvest that doubled as a crowded convention of bees on the Lower East Side. Ms. Azzarito was wearing shoes that left a lot of skin exposed, so she slipped a pair of rubber gloves on her feet for protection from stings. But she was thrilled by the experience and persuaded Barry, who was one of her college professors, to put a hive on his roof.
Now, several times a month, she and Barry don mesh masks and climb a ladder to the roof to check on their roughly 40,000 bees. There have been a few stings, some tar from the roof tracked into the house, and a stir-crazy month spent assembling the hive.
But they are enthralled by their project.
“It’s so different from my subway ride,” Ms. Azzarito said. “It’s so different from sitting in a cubicle every day.”
An article on how feeding cows a different diet not only reduces their methane output but - surprise! - makes them healthier
One on the proposal in the UK to stop teaching the specific mnemonic "I before E except after C". I personally have seen people claim this is due to "political correctness gone amok" (there's a term that no longer means anything if I ever saw one!), that it's due to "Obama's election" (these people seem to think that the UK is synonymous with the US), that it's due to not wanting to teach children how to spell, that there's NO way to learn how to spell without reciting inane jingles at every turn, and that all the rules are flying out the window. Not to mention the people who don't understand the rule in the first place. Why is language always ostensibly defended by people who lack the reading comprehension skills to understand that it was never under attack in the first place? WHY?
An article on why ethnic jokes aren't that funny
An article on octopi that "walk" to get past predators. COOL.
Learning Hindi Was Hard, but It Was Just the Start
By SUSAN DOMINUS
It is not unusual for Katherine Russell Rich, an author and a former magazine editor, to break out into song in the back of a taxi, and not just any song, but a song in Hindi from one of her favorite Bollywood movies. “Yaara, sili sili,” she’ll croon when she has an Indian cabdriver. “Biraha ki raat ka jalana.” “Beloved, little by little — the separation of the night is beginning to burn.”
The drivers are apparently too shocked to contemplate whether this is a seduction attempt. “The cabdrivers do things like laugh in surprise,” said Ms. Rich, who is not Indian. “They say, ‘Oh my God. That is really good. You are really speaking Hindi. Where did you learn that?’ ”
In other words, they loosen up upon hearing the familiar tune and start talking to her like a person, instead of a fare, which is what she hoped to accomplish in the first place. Then and only then, Ms. Rich has found, will drivers relax and start speaking Hindi to her, which allows her to keep up the language that she has been studying since 1999, including for almost a year in Rajasthan, starting in the fall of 2001.
The experiences of that year make up the substance of Ms. Rich’s new book, “Dreaming in Hindi” (Houghton Mifflin), a work that will inevitably be compared to Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” (Viking Adult, 2006), given that it traces the far-flung adventures of a thoughtful, soul-searching single woman from New York (it is also a pick for Oprah’s summer reading list, so Ms. Rich may have in common with Ms. Gilbert killer sales.)
Long before she left for India, however, while still a beginner studying the language, Ms. Rich was delicately trying to find personally escorted entry points into Hindi around New York.
“I used to try to ask a man who worked at a newsstand near my home to help me with my homework,” she said. Delighted by her effort, he’d keep a line of people waiting while he patiently went over vocabulary with her on the back of lottery tickets.
But usually, finding a way to speak Hindi in New York posed challenges she did not anticipate. It’s not for lack of potential tutors: The city, according to the 2000 census, has about 35,000 Hindi or Urdu speakers (the languages are very similar). In a promotional video for the book, Ms. Rich recreates some of the encounters she’s had with Indians around New York. One store owner insists in English that she is not actually speaking Hindi; when Ms. Rich explains, in Hindi, that she studied the language for some time in Rajasthan, he retorts, in English, “They don’t speak Hindi in Rajasthan.” (This happens not to be true.)
When Ms. Rich returned to New York from abroad, she spontaneously spoke Hindi to a friend of a friend. “He told me that when I spoke Hindi to him, it was like a body blow,” Ms. Rich said. “I think to Indians, sometimes it feels like I’m eavesdropping on a private conversation, like I’m breaking the fourth wall.”
To some people from India, Ms. Rich learned, it is insulting to be addressed in anything other than English, a language of the privileged. And for some immigrants, domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim.
Ms. Rich says she is becoming less of an anomaly. In the past 10 years, the number of universities offering the language has significantly increased, according to S. N. Sribhar, the director of the Center for Indian Studies at the State University at Stony Brook. Part of that rise can be explained by general educational trend toward improving foreign language fluency. But the demand for Hindi has also increased because of what Mr. Sribhar calls the “heritage phenomenon,” a natural outgrowth of the large influx of Indian immigrants in the past several decades.
“A lot of Indians who were born here or moved here when they were very small want to rediscover the language,” he said. (Ms. Rich said that she had overlapped with such students at New York University, and that many were already proficient in the language, less interested in their heritage and more interested in an easy A.)
She did feel that she got great instruction at N.Y.U., even if, in a local quirk of globalism, her teacher was Bulgarian rather than Indian. “It was like learning Hindi from Nadia Comaneci’s coach,” she said.
The shock of a Westerner speaking Hindi is still bracing enough that Ms. Rich rarely jumps right into the language she has mastered. She usually politely asks first if she might, a courtesy she understands now as intuitively as she does the language itself.
Daughter Against Use of Father’s Name to Subvert Neo-Nazis
Daughter Against Use of Father’s Name to Subvert Neo-Nazis
By MICHAEL COOPER
The daughter of a distinguished Jewish theologian said Monday that she opposed a plan to rename for him a stretch of Missouri highway that has been adopted by a group of neo-Nazis. She said that lending her father’s name to a road that Nazis cleaned would “dishonor” him.
Missouri officials, thwarted in the past on free-speech grounds when they tried to keep the Ku Klux Klan from adopting a highway, took another tack after the National Socialist Movement adopted the half-mile stretch of road, on the outskirts of Springfield. The legislature voted to name it for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who fled the Nazis’ advance in Europe and became a prominent theologian and civil rights advocate in the United States before his death in 1972.
Lawmakers said they hoped the new name would send a message that the area valued inclusiveness, not anti-Semitism and racism. But Rabbi Heschel’s daughter, Susannah Heschel, the Eli Black professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, said Monday that while she appreciated their intentions, attaching her father’s name to a road cleaned by neo-Nazis would be “vulgar” and would “dishonor” him.
Dr. Heschel noted that her father’s mother, three of his sisters and much of his extended family were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
“While I appreciate their wanting to — embarrass Nazis, let’s say, it goes too far,” Dr. Heschel, who studies Jewish-Christian relations in Germany and the history of anti-Semitism, said in an interview. “It’s inappropriate. I don’t think that my father would have felt honored by this.”
Dr. Heschel expressed similar sentiments to lawmakers after the provision had been adopted as part of a major transportation bill, which has not yet been signed into law by Gov. Jay Nixon. State Representative Sara Lampe, a Springfield Democrat who introduced the provision, said she had spoken with Dr. Heschel then and had hoped that her concerns had been allayed.
Ms. Lampe said she still believed that Rabbi Heschel, who marched for civil rights with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was the perfect person to honor.
“I continue to believe that his teachings are what this is all about,” she said. “It’s about making sure that we don’t forget. It’s about making sure that we stand against bigotry and hatred.”
Michael Abrams, chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Bureau/American Jewish Committee in Overland Park, Kan., the group that came up with the idea of renaming the road for Rabbi Heschel, said, “The intent was to honor an extraordinary human being.”
When an Ear Witness Decides the Case
When an Ear Witness Decides the Case
By NATALIE ANGIER
Spoken clearly, the sounds “dah” and “bah” are easy to distinguish. Yet if you play a film clip in which the soundtrack says “dah” while the image on the screen shows a mouth saying “bah,” people will swear they heard “bah.”
If you ask people to count the number of times that a light flashes, and you flash the light seven times together with a sequence of eight beeping tones, people will say the light flashed eight times.
When confronted with conflicting pieces of information, the brain decides which sense to trust. In the first scenario, those clearly percussing lips could never be articulating a “d,” and so vision claimed the upper hand. But on matters that demand a temporal analysis, and making sense of similar sounds in a sequence, the brain reflexively counts on hearing.
Click click click. You can listen to a series of clicks at 20 beats per second and know they are separate clicks rather than a single continuous tone. Run a series of images together at 20 frames per second and — welcome to the movies.
“The temporal resolution of our vision,” said Barbara Shinn-Cunningham of Boston University, “is an order of magnitude slower than what our auditory system can cope with.”
It’s easy to take hearing for granted, that sprawling stereophonic Babylonia where the gates never close and there are soapboxes for all. You can shut your eyes against a bright sun or avert your gaze from a grim scene. But when one neighbor’s leaf blower sets off another neighbor’s car alarm, hey, where are my earlids? We’ve been called the visual primate, and the size of our visual cortex dwarfs the neural platform assigned to audition. Most people, when asked, claim they would rather lose their hearing than their sight.
Yet in ways that researchers are just beginning to appreciate, we humans are beholden to our ears. Mechanically, electrically, behaviorally and cosmetically, our paired sounding boards are a genuine earmark of our species. And if the words aural and oral are often confused, they should be, for our ears and our mouths jointly gave us our voice.
Scientists now suspect that the origin of human language owes as much to improvements in the early hominid ear as to more familiar spurs like a changing vocal tract or even a generally expanding brain. In one recent molecular analysis, John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin reported that eight genes involved in shaping the human ear appear to have undergone significant changes over the past 40,000 years, some as recently as the dawn of the Roman Empire. Only with highly refined auditory infrastructure, researchers said, could our ancestors have tuned in to the sort of tiny fluctuations in pressure waves that characterize all human speech, let alone properly conjugated Latin.
Moreover, the avidity with which our auditory sense seeks to organize ambient noise into a meaningful acoustical pattern — a likely consequence of our dependence on language — could help explain our distinctly human musicality.
Every human culture studied makes music, and human babies are born loving music, yet the old saw notwithstanding, music will do nothing to soothe the average nonhuman beast. Emerging evidence suggests that many of our fellow mammals, including dogs, cats, rodents and monkeys, are indifferent to music and may even dislike it. In a study of cotton top tamarins and common marmosets, Josh McDermott, now at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, found that while the monkeys showed some signs of preferring slow-tempo music to livelier tunes, their favorite song of all was the sound of one hand clapping. “They’re in a room with nothing else to do, and they could be listening to a nice, soothing lullaby,” Dr. McDermott said. “But if you give the monkeys a choice between music and silence, they choose silence pretty strongly.”
Whatever the preferred playlist, our auditory system is a superb piece of engineering, and indeed many auditory researchers have an engineering as well as a neuroscience background. The pressure waves that are sound enter the ears through the curved and lobed pinna, a structure as specific to each individual as a fingerprint that is essential for gauging the vertical contours of an incoming sound wave and hence how near or far the sound source may be.
As the displacement of air molecules proceeds through the ear canal and across the membranous ear drum, the vibrations wiggle the three tiny bones of the middle ear, which, as Jeremy Wolfe’s “Sensation and Perception” vividly puts it, act like a set of levers and a stiletto heel striking a wooden floor, to amplify the wave’s energy and so make even faint sounds audible. Venturing next into the dense snail shell of the inner ear, the mechanical vibrations are further amplified and translated into neurally appropriate electrical signals by pulsing arrays of fringed hair cells.
Shihab Shamma of the University of Maryland argues that the brain interprets visual and audio signals using many similar tricks. For example, it looks for the edges and the overall geometry of the signal. “What distinguishes one vowel from another is the shape of the waveform entering the ear,” Dr. Shamma said. “This would be analogous to what distinguishes a square from a circle.” The brain also has a penchant for symmetry. Many objects in the natural world are bilaterally symmetrical — they have a left and a right side — and the brain uses that symmetry as a cue to group together similar objects and distinguish one from the next. The equivalent of symmetry in aural cues is pitch, the frequency profile of a sound wave that makes a C note sound different from a G-flat. Most sounds consist not of pure notes of a single gorgeous oscillating sine wave, but of harmonics, overlaid multiples of those sine waves, and the brain seizes on them as one, just as it treats the left and right half of a painting or a tree as elements of a single object.
Unlike the eyes, of course, the ears are not limited to sensory stimulants in front of the face. “Because auditory signals go around objects,” said Dr. Shamma, “they’re extremely important for communicating in a cluttered environment.”
A penguin locates its chick or a human mother her lost daughter by listening for the telltale cry. If ears are the eyes in the back of our head, maybe it’s best that these eyes never blink.
An article on beekeeping in the city
Beekeepers Keep the Lid On
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
THERE were hives to inspect and honeycombs to drain, but before all that Patrick Gannon sat on a cinder block in his backyard on City Island with his 9-year-old son, Julian, and just watched the bees.
“I can’t think of anything more relaxing than sitting in front of my beehive, drinking a beer, smoking a cigar, letting the bees fly,” Mr. Gannon said on a recent Saturday afternoon. “And the smell. It’s the most beautiful smell.”
Mr. Gannon moved to City Island from Manhattan in 2003, lured by the opportunity of sailing. But after trading a sixth-story walk-up apartment for a house, Mr. Gannon decided to return to beekeeping, a hobby he had discovered as a young man in rural England.
His pastime, however, means breaking the law. His hives, like all those in New York City, are illegal, and Mr. Gannon could face thousands of dollars in fines if someone complained and the authorities took action.
Though it’s almost impossible to keep a bee colony a secret, the number of New Yorkers taking the risk is growing: beehives are popping up in various neighborhoods, and seem particularly popular in Brooklyn, say those who track beekeeping.
A group called the New York City Beekeepers Association is encouraging novices: it offers classes, matches people who want to keep bees with people who have room for hives, and sells beekeeping starter kits.
The growing popularity of beekeeping may be due, in part, to reports of colony collapse — the mysterious disappearance, reported by scientists, of bees across the country. It is also considered a worthy avocation among the environmentally conscious, because bees pollinate flowers and crops as well as produce honey.
City Councilman David Yassky of Brooklyn introduced a bill this year that would legalize beekeeping. Beekeeping enthusiasts are waiting for the Council’s Health Committee to schedule a hearing on it.
Mr. Yassky and Just Food, a New York group focused on hunger issues, argue that beekeeping is a legitimate form of agriculture.
Just Food is coordinating Pollinator Week — it begins Monday — in New York City to make the case for legalizing beekeeping.
The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is charged with enforcing the ban against beekeeping, but officials there said beekeepers are pursued only when a complaint is lodged. This year, the city had received 49 complaints by Friday; officials made nine inspections and issued four summonses.
Mr. Gannon said that a fear of thousands of bees roaming across City Island was initially unsettling to some residents. But the sight of his children playing near his hives helped ease fears, and the family’s first honey harvest in 2004 attracted 30 curious neighbors.
Then there is a built-in incentive for neighborly tolerance: Each summer Mr. Gannon harvests 150 to 200 pounds of honey; almost all of it is jarred and handed out as gifts.
In a demonstration of beekeeping practice, Mr. Gannon and his son filled a hive with smoke, using a bee smoker, a small device equipped with a hand pump. Smoke calms the bees, but also makes them anticipate having to abandon the hive because of fire. They gorge on honey, in preparation for a quick exit, and, like humans, they mellow out after their big meal. It makes them less likely to object when someone pokes around their home and allows Mr. Gannon to inspect the hive.
Then he rolled out his centrifuge — a large metal cylinder. It was time to extract 2009’s first batch of honey from a different hive.
Mr. Gannon loaded the racks inside the centrifuge with two beeless honeycombs, then stepped back and let Julian begin spinning them with a hand crank. The honey oozed out of the combs, down the walls in the cylinder and into a reservoir at the bottom. Two young girls from the neighborhood appeared, each wanting a turn at the handle and a taste of the honey. Mr. Gannon obliged for a few minutes, then shooed them away so he could finish.
In the first few decades of the 20th century, beekeepers were far more prevalent in the city — there were even beehives inside Radio City Music Hall and atop the American Museum of Natural History. But the number of hives dwindled: An article in The New York Times in 1956 included laments from a beekeeping supplier that he did not know of a single active hive remaining in Manhattan.
The practice was officially outlawed in 1999, when honeybees were included on a health code list of more than 100 wild animals that New Yorkers could not keep, including vultures, iguanas, ferrets and even whales: they were all potential menaces. The change to the health code sparked one of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s more memorable outbursts: when a ferret owner called his weekly radio program to complain about the rule, the mayor admonished the man for “devoting your life to weasels.”
The illicit status of their bees affects beekeepers in different ways. Mr. Gannon fears a crackdown the same way that the average pedestrian worries about jaywalking. But a new beekeeper named Barry, with hives on the roof of his brownstone in Clinton Hill, asked that his last name not be used.
He mentioned his new hobby to a neighbor, who seemed put off by the idea. He has not told other neighbors.
But can he keep it a secret?
“It’s kind of hard,” he said, “to be inconspicuous in a beekeeper’s veil.”
He blames his friend Amy Azzarito’s “latent desire to be a farmer” for making him a beekeeper.
Ms. Azzarito, on a quest to learn more about the food she was eating, read a book called “The Urban Homestead,” which included advice on growing vegetables, harnessing energy and raising animals. She ruled out various possibilities she deemed unsuitable for city living, like raising chickens. “The only thing that seemed plausible was beekeeping,” she said.
The idea was spurred last summer, when Ms. Azzarito, who works for the New York Public Library, went to a honey harvest that doubled as a crowded convention of bees on the Lower East Side. Ms. Azzarito was wearing shoes that left a lot of skin exposed, so she slipped a pair of rubber gloves on her feet for protection from stings. But she was thrilled by the experience and persuaded Barry, who was one of her college professors, to put a hive on his roof.
Now, several times a month, she and Barry don mesh masks and climb a ladder to the roof to check on their roughly 40,000 bees. There have been a few stings, some tar from the roof tracked into the house, and a stir-crazy month spent assembling the hive.
But they are enthralled by their project.
“It’s so different from my subway ride,” Ms. Azzarito said. “It’s so different from sitting in a cubicle every day.”
An article on how feeding cows a different diet not only reduces their methane output but - surprise! - makes them healthier
One on the proposal in the UK to stop teaching the specific mnemonic "I before E except after C". I personally have seen people claim this is due to "political correctness gone amok" (there's a term that no longer means anything if I ever saw one!), that it's due to "Obama's election" (these people seem to think that the UK is synonymous with the US), that it's due to not wanting to teach children how to spell, that there's NO way to learn how to spell without reciting inane jingles at every turn, and that all the rules are flying out the window. Not to mention the people who don't understand the rule in the first place. Why is language always ostensibly defended by people who lack the reading comprehension skills to understand that it was never under attack in the first place? WHY?
An article on why ethnic jokes aren't that funny
An article on octopi that "walk" to get past predators. COOL.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-29 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-29 03:27 pm (UTC)Or, should I say, spelling is weird; it's not an ancient science, neither for theists or for atheists. (Yes, I'm trying to think of sentences that I can cram as many exceptions into as possible...)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-29 03:47 pm (UTC)However, the fact that so many people think those words are exceptions is just more proof that teaching the rule is pointless. People aren't taught it correctly, or they don't understand it to begin with!
*Either may or may not fit the rule, depending on whether or not you pronounce it with an ee sound and whether or not your version of the rule is limited ONLY to those words with an ee sound.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-29 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-29 03:52 pm (UTC)In the version usually taught in the US it's supposed to be made clear that the rule only applies when the two letters together form a digraph - that is, two letters make one sound. The mnemonic probably doesn't have a nifty rhyming part that clarifies this, but it's supposed to be part of how the mnemonic is taught, otherwise it makes no sense.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-29 11:25 pm (UTC)It always baffles me about animal feeds, why something so OBVIOUS only now comes up?
Of course, there are still LOTS of people who think that grains are the best feed for horses, even in large amounts. NOPE, only if you need to give the horse something that produces lots of energy - or fat. And you still need to be careful because that much rich bulk can cause problems from the digestive tract to the overly-rich nutrients causing foot problems. I was accused of "starving my horse" when I said that he gets maybe a pound or two of grain a day. The rest is grass (or in the winter, hay). I don't want to think how many health and behavior problems he would have. It's like giving kids high-sugar cereals instead of any time you'd give them fruits and vegetables.
Yeah, I was starting to wonder why cattle emit that alarming amount of methane, as I've mostly been around them in large pastures and hadn't noticed a whole lot of issue. The problems arise when you force them into small lots (not large grassy pastures) and offer them grains that are easy to store and feed in cramped conditions. Those are also the places that STINK. I've only ever driven past places like that...and read up on places that are even worse.
These grazing animals didn't adapt in the wild to thrive on such large amounts of grains, much less anything stripped to what's hard, dry, and high-energy. Their ancestors developed on a diet almost entirely made of grasses. Some was grain, but not in the form they're fed now.