evanmorris.com
From the daily archives: Monday, October 27, 2008
They’re harvesting the corn in the huge field across the road, which reminded me of this article:
Anyone with normal hearing can distinguish between the musical tones in a scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. We take this ability for granted, but among most mammals the feat is unparalleled.
This finding is one of many insights into the remarkable acuity of human hearing garnered by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, reported in January in the journal Nature.
Izhak Fried of U.C.L.A. and his colleagues worked with epileptic patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain to pinpoint the source of their seizures. Some of the probes linked to the auditory cortex, providing the researchers with a detailed window into sound processing.
The study revealed that groups of exquisitely sensitive neurons exist along the auditory nerve on its way from the ear to the auditory cortex. In these neurons natural sounds, such as the human voice, elicit a completely different and far more complex set of responses than do artificial noises such as pure tones. In this mixed environment humans can easily detect frequencies as fine as one twelfth of an octave—a half step in musical terminology.
I spend a fair amount of time sitting on the front porch on a wooden porch swing suspended from two chains, staring at that cornfield and swinging gently forward and back. Hey, it beats watching Oprah.
So I was sitting there this afternoon as they harvested with these humongous harvesters that make a sort of mid-range hissing roar as they travel back and forth across the field. The nearest harvester is perhaps a mile away. And I’m drinking a cup of coffee and swinging back and forth. And I notice, as I’m swinging, that the pitch of the harvesters is rising as I swing forward and falling as I swing back. After a moment, I realized that I was picking up the Doppler shift of the sound caused by the movement of my ears toward and away from the machine (8 to 12 inches, max), even though that distance is minuscule in relation to my distance from the harvester.
Maybe you have to live in the middle of nowhere to find that neat, but I do.
Next up: How to tell chipmunks apart.
But which Obama looks forward to pursuing “the right way.” There is no right way. There are only slow learners.
The Duke of Wellington was a cantankerous reactionary but he knew a thing or two about Afghanistan: “a small army would be annihilated and a large one starved”. On 13 January 1842, a sharp-eyed sentry in Jalalabad saw the more-dead-than-alive figure of the British army surgeon Dr William Brydon crossing the plain, struggling to stay on his pony. He had a bad head wound and was bleeding from the hand. When eventually the pony was taken into a stable, it lay down and died.
Roughly 16,000 British troops and camp followers hadn’t made it from Kabul – one of the most terrible defeats of British military might in the 19th century, commemorated in Lady Elizabeth Butler’s painting Remnants of an Army. Brydon was the sole survivor. The massacre of Lord Elphinstone’s army prompted a series of revenge attacks by the British, which developed into wars. In 1849, 1850 and 1851, huge numbers of British troops swarmed into Afghanistan, butchered and then bolted. And still the Afghans fought back.
In 1860 the British took Peking but a few years later they were back in Afghanistan’s borderlands with 12,500 troops – more than the army needed in order to subdue the Chinese capital – and still the Afghans fought back.
In 1878 came the Battle of Sangin. The British had immense advantages in material – better guns, better communications, better everything – but still the Afghans fought back.
On 17 January 1880 a small and extremely emaciated Talib, or religious student, approached a group of British Royal Engineers in Kandahar and tried to stab Sergeant Miller to death. This incident was the first recorded suicide attack in Kandahar. The Afghans were fighting back, asymmetrically.
The British looked at the map and drew a line – a smudge, more like – along the highest ridges of the Suleiman Mountains, dooming generations of local people yet unborn to almost constant war. Right now, US drones are buzzing along that very line between Pakistan and Afghanistan and getting shot down.
today’s moodcat
