JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

You know Last Song Syndrome, where the last song you hear keeps playing in your head and you can’t make it stop? Well I often have First Song Syndrome—I wake up and there’s a song already playing in my head and it just keeps on going. It is usually a song I have not heard in a long time. Days later, I hear that same song being played somewhere—in a restaurant, over the end credits of a movie, that sort of thing. Could be just coincidence, yes, but I’m inclined to think otherwise. I’m from the school of “Everything means something, the refusal to say anything means something, nothing is something.” (See the Coen Brothers, below.)

Sometimes I remember conversations I haven’t had yet. For instance, I distinctly remember Chus telling me that Myrza (of Marie-Claire) had won a Palanca for short story. He ran into her, and she told him the good news. (This would be in August 2006.) I remember which restaurant we had this conversation in (Segafredo Greenbelt, now closed), where we were seated (by the window), and what time it was (around 6.30pm). Weeks later, I told Chus I was gatecrashing the awards dinner the next day (September 1), and I’d probably see Myrza.

Why, Chus asked, Did she win? Of course she did, I said, You told me. No I didn’t, he said, I didn’t know she’d won. We spent the next 15 minutes arguing over who said what. Finally Chus called Myrza and asked her if she’d won a Palanca.

Myrza said, No, I haven’t heard from them. Chus said, Maybe you should call their office to make sure. Meanwhile I’m sitting there thinking, Did I imagine this? Am I going bonkers? But I’m certain that Chus told me that Myrza had told him. There was no one else I could’ve gotten the news from—I wasn’t privy to the judging process and I’m not in with the awards people.

The following morning Chus called me. Myrza had called the Palanca office, he said, and it turns out she did win a prize! (The guard in her building put the letter in a drawer and forgot it.) So the information I “remembered” was correct, except that it was delivered backwards. Weird, but according to Special Relativity, everything that will happen has already happened anyway.

Back to FSS. I woke up this morning and “Jacksons, Monk and Rowe” by Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartet was playing in my head, loud and clear. It’s a very pretty song about divorce, not likely to have been blaring out of a passing jeep, not on the typical radio playlist. It’s on my iPod but I haven’t listened to it in a long time. But there are worse things to have in your head.

From ScienceNOW Daily News: “Talk about “gaydar.” In just a fraction of a second, people can accurately judge the sexual orientation of other individuals by glancing at their faces, according to new research. The finding builds on the growing theory that the subconscious mind detects and probably guides much more of human behavior than is realized.”

Romantic attraction works just as fast. You CAN tell in milliseconds whether you are likely to have a thing with someone. Seems irrational not to mention unfair, but it’s true. From empirical evidence collected over the years, I’ve concluded that if there is no instantaneous attraction/spontaneous combustion between two individuals, it’s not going to work. But that’s just me.

Here’s a Straight Dope classic: “How does one suck in a piece of spaghetti? Think about it. How one sucks milk through a straw is easy. The lowered pressure in the mouth due to sucking causes the air pressure over the milk to force the liquid up. But if one pushes on the end of a piece of spaghetti it just buckles. The mouth is closed and sealed over the sides of the spaghetti, so passing air doesn’t drag it along. Somehow the air very close to the mouth must obliquely communicate a force along the length. . .” It’s more complicated than you think.

“Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that the invention of agriculture was a fall from grace. They have found the serpent in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the noble savage. Maybe it was not an 80,000-year camping holiday after all. . .”

Is constant violence a modern pathology, or is it the natural state?

Hunter-gatherers: Noble or savage? in The Economist 

Is this surfer dude the next Einstein?

From New Scientist: “GARRETT LISI is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently, physics was not much more than a hobby.

“That hasn’t stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe’s particles and forces, including gravity - or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.”

Gnarly. I keep thinking of Sean Penn as Jeff Spiccoli.

For centuries sleep was viewed as an annihilation of consciousness. Now scientists regard the sleeping brain as “an active, purposeful machine, a secretive intelligence that comes out at night to play—and to work—during periods of dreaming and during the netherworld chasms known as deep sleep.”

I’ve long suspected that writing actually gets done in your sleep, and what you do when you’re awake is basically transcription.

“Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage. The theory is controversial, and some scientists insist that it’s still far from clear whether the sleeping brain can do anything with memories that the waking brain doesn’t also do, in moments of quiet contemplation.”

MANILA, Philippines - U.S. and Philippine scientists may have discovered new marine species in the world’s most biologically diverse region, their expedition leader said Tuesday.

Larry Madin, who led the Inner Space Speciation Project in the Celebes Sea south of the Philippines, said scientists had been to one of the world’s deep-ocean basins in search of organisms that may have been isolated there for millions of years. . .

Exotic creatures found in ‘coral triangle’ 

Justin Erik Halldor Smith asks, Is depression a medical condition?

I was 10 or 11 when I first learned the word “depressed” from a Woody Allen movie, and I quickly grasped its usefulness. “I don’t want to go out, I’m depressed” just sounded more dramatic than “I don’t feel like it” or “Tinatamad ako”.  Am I a true depressive? To say so would be disrespectful to the people with the real problem. I have these black moods, but I know that they will pass eventually, I just have to ride them out. But I see how it can get very bad, and pass beyond your control, and then you’re in the abyss. My friends tell me depression is chemical, and often you have no choice but to medicate. But what if depression is an inextricable part of your character, one of the things that make you you? Medication makes it easier for other people to deal with you, but is it still you?

Hobbits did exist.

Velociraptors were more like big turkeys.  

At a bookstore I noticed a display of pretty bookmarks at the counter. One of them said, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Bonga, the nearest star is 93 million miles away.

Heard of the new controversy involving the game show Wowowee. Which thrives on this stuff—name another game show with a body count. Wowowee has one of those contests where people have to choose from among seven covered digits, and if the number 2 turns up in the correct decimal place, they win two million pesos. Turns out all the covered digits were zeroes—you can watch the incident on YouTube. This leads to a new round of sniping between Joey de Leon, host of Eat Bulaga, and Willie Revillame of Wowowee. De Leon’s recent pronouncement: “Ang yabang mo, Willie. Hindi lang ikaw ang mandaraya dito sa Pilipinas!” (Subtitle: You blowhard. You’re not the only cheat in the Philippines.)

It works on many levels, no?

One of my favorite cosmic coincidence sites is Goro Adachi’s Etemenanki. (Etemenanki is one of the towers of Babel.) This post connects the showing of a Battlestar Galactica episode about radiation poisoning, solar flares, a Discovery launch, the opening of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, the end of the Mayan calendar, the Transit of Venus, the “passing of the torch” from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Deep Impact, the octagonal floor plan of the Dome of the Rock, the Russian spy Litvinenko who died of radiation poisoning, Comet McNaught, Nostradamus, Pink Floyd, the death of Gerald Ford, the execution of Saddam Hussein, 2001: A Space Odyssey and two must-haves of any good conspiracy theory: the Knights Templar and the Book of Revelations.

Mind-boggling entertainment, the start of a migraine, or your signal to drop everything and head for the hills to await the apocalypse?

So if you’re planning on writing the next Da Vinci Code-type bestseller, you know where to rip off your plot.

Has it occurred to you that Transformers has a premise similar to that of 2001: A Space Odyssey, only it’s much less static?

It’s never too late to finish your dissertation! From the BBC: Queen star hands in Ph.D.
Queen guitarist Brian May has handed in his astronomy PhD thesis - 36 years after abandoning it to join the band. May recently carried out observational work in Tenerife, where he studied the formation of “zodiacal dust clouds”. The subject forms the basis of a 48,000-word thesis for Imperial College, London, where 60-year-old May studied before becoming a rock star. “It’s been the longest gap year ever,” May said. “It was a tough decision back then to leave my studies for music.”

But the star said that at the time, his “passion for music was stronger”.

“I’m so proud to be here today,” he told BBC London. “Astronomy has always interested me. I used to love sitting at home and watching Sir Patrick Moore on the Sky at Night.” May handed in the thesis, called Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, to Imperial’s head of astrophysics Professor Paul Nandra.

The guitarist is scheduled to discuss his thesis with the examining board on 23 August, his spokesman said. The results should be known some time shortly after that date. “If I fail I will fail big time,” May said. “It will be a very public failure with all this press.”

The rock star is also preparing a concert to mark the inauguration of a telescope at the Observatory of the Roque de Los Muchachos in La Palma in the Canary Islands, where he completed his studies last month.

“I have no doubt that Brian May would have had a brilliant career in science had he completed his PhD in 1971,” said astrophysicist Dr Garik Israelian, who worked with May in La Palma. “Nevertheless, as a fan of Queen, I am glad that he left science temporarily,” he added.