The Floral Clock
In “Philosophia Botanica” (1751), the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus proposed that it should be possible to plant a floral clock. He noted that two species of daisy, the hawk’s-beard and the hawkbit, opened and closed at their respective times within about a half-hour each day. He suggested planting these daisies along with St. John’s Wort, marigolds, water-lilies and other species in a circle. The rhythmic opening and closing of the plants would be the effective hands of this clock.
awesome.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/guest-column-lets-hear-it-for-the-bees/
I am compelled…
… to post this. Yes, it’s old. Yes, I’m sure you’ve seen it. No, I don’t care.
20 years from now, when your kids (or grandkids) are taking their “History of the Internet” class in high school, you owe it to them to explain why videos like this one were so awesom– erm, I mean viral.
oh and I may as well explain why I felt compelled to post:
Morse Code
So I noticed today that Google had Morse Code on its front page. “How interesting,” I thought to myself. It’s Samuel Morse’s birthday — he was the inventor of Morse Code and one of the inventors/developers of the electric telegraph.
I actually learned Morse Code many years ago, when I was a Boy Scout. That itself isn’t really that interesting. What is interesting (to me!) is the the system we used for learning Morse Code. Every Morse Code character was transformed into an ideogram; that is, we used pictures to help us remember the Morse Code characters. For example, the letter “A” which is represented in Morse Code as dot-dash, was an apple with a worm next to it. “B” was a bee with three drops of honey. Note that when “speaking” Morse Code, you don’t say “dot” and “dash,” you say “dit” and “dah.” I’ll still use dash/dot to represent the characters, but dit/dah to represent the sound.
An apple with a worm next to it.
A bee with three drops of honey.
A Camel. neck (dash) – hump (dot) – body(dash) – hump (dot).
A dog with 2 doggie “presents” next to it. 
An egg
Imagine a fish. 2 eyes ( .. ) a fin ( _ ) and a tail ( . )
Two gold bars with a gold nugget next to it.
The four dots mark the corners of a square, representing the square shape of the letter “H”
Two eyes.
The lowercase letter “j” — the dotted top and the stem (picture it sideways)
Wright Brothers at “Kitty Hawk” — imagine an airplane from the front, the two dashes are the wings and the dot is the propellor.
The ( ._ ) is a sideways lighthouse (the dot is the top where the light is, the dash is the building) and ( .. ) are two rocks at the base of the lighthouse.
”Mickey Mouse” — somehow that was enough.
A in reverse.
This one is easy to remember, “SOS” is a distress signal (. . . _ _ _ . . .) with S being three dots and O being three dashes. SOS is a backronym for “Save our Ship” (I’ve seen other variations but that’s the one I learned!).
Two pea-shooters side-by-side. Imagine the dot being a pea, and the dash being the pea-shooter handle.
Similar to “H” and “J” – the dashes form an “O” and the dot is the Q’s squiggle.
It’s a racecar – looking at it sideways, the dots are the wheels and the dash is the body of the car.
You remember this from “SOS” (refer to “O”)
This one was interesting. “You want some tea?” “duh!”
A unicorn! Two eyes and the horn.
From Veethoven’s (Beethoven’s) 5th symphony – dit dit dit dah! (watch the video and it’ll make perfect sense. except the v/b part).
Like the Warner symbol, but in reverse (wow this one is bad)
Two xylophone sticks pointed at each other.
Similar to “J” and “Q” – this was a representation of the letter “Y” – the three dashes represent the three “prongs” of the letter, and the dot is the center where they meet.
Similar to fish and unicorn, this is a Zebra (looking to the right). Two stripes and two eyes.
Such a method, of course, isn’t unique to learning Morse Code. As Dave wrote in 漢字が怖いですか。On “The Horror of Ideograms” and jfboy.shieh wrote in Cultural heritage status for complex Chinese characters, we often associate images with characters. It’s part of how we learn a new language — or how we learn anything, really. We adapt new conceptual schema to old ones. Whether it’s Piaget’s Constructivism, Selinker’s Interlanguage, or Lakoff’s theories on Conceptual Metaphors, the idea that learning occurs through the interactions between multiple knowledge systems is well-developed in many fields.
And that is Morse Code in a nutshell.
cross-posted on Found in Translation
“Making” music
One of the characteristics of “Web 2.0″ is the separation of form and content. Back in the 90s, before Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, when social networks consisted of sites like Geocities and you spoke to your friends on IRC, putting a page online actually required some coding know-how. You basically started with a blank index.html and the rest was up to you. Nowadays, making a website is often automated. Even this blog that you’re looking at only requires a small amount of knowledge to make a post. You don’t have to know how to code in php or run a database to get your content online (well someone does, but not you) — you can add your content to pre-existing forms to create a website.
For the most part, playing music is the opposite. Form (the instrument) is still intimately tied to content (music). If you want to play music, one of the biggest obstacles is knowing how to play a musical instrument. You want to play the clarinet solo from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue? Spend a month or so learning how to play the clarinet. Spend at least a few years learning how to play it well. Want to play Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood”? Not even guitarists who have played for years can manage such a feat (and no, Guitar Hero doesn’t count!)
Every once in a while, someone tells me that they’re not a musician. And I think to myself, “Everyone’s a musician! they just need the right instrument!” Whistling is a form of music, isn’t it? And when we whistle, our mouths are the instrument, right? Think about it. The principles are the same as any other wind instrument: alter the path of the wind to produce different tones. The same way a flute player will cover fingering holes on the flute to essentially make the flute longer or shorter (as far as the wind path is concerned), you move your tongue and lips to “shape” the wind.
So why is it that practically anyone can whistle a favorite tune, or a melody they’ve just heard, but ask them to play it on a piano and most people are lost?
I think that deep down inside, everyone is capable of creating epic musical masterpieces. Why aren’t we there? The problem isn’t that we’re lacking musicians, the problem is that for the most part, form and content are still tied together in music. It’s like those early personal web pages from the 90s — you had to know html before you could put your words online. As far as most people are concerned, you have to know how to play an instrument in order to make music.
Web 2.0 is reshaping the internet, transforming it into a place where you don’t need a background in computer programming to participate. How will Music 2.0 look like?
Perhaps it will no longer be about the actual process of making music, but of arranging, synthesizing, even orchestrating music. Consider the following video which features musicians from around the world, playing separately, yet blended together into a beautiful arrangement:
or the “I can’t play guitar but I do know how to edit video!” genre of YouTube videos:
Should not being able to play an instrument preclude someone from being a musician?
In what ways is technology itself the instrument? perhaps the first of its kind, the computer as a meta-instrument?
eventually…
cross-posted on Found in Translation
Watching old music videos for the first time
I didn’t have cable television growing up, so there are a lot of songs that I grew up with whose music videos I’ve never seen.
- wow, that’s totally different from what I expected them to look like. I pictured them older and a bit more scruffier.
- saw this one for the first time a few months ago. Beautiful video.
- definitely not what I imagined, I had something more literal in mind.
- and since I’m on the subject of music videos, here’s one I think i never would have discovered if not for YouTube. I actually saw this long before I heard his more popular songs, and I remember thinking, “‘Ocean’ is a million times better than his radio songs.”
Yet another crazy awesome Japanese game show
I think I’m learning Japanese characters…
Freeterminism
How does freeterminism get no google hits? A nonce word combining free will + determinism. Someone somewhere must have thought “free will vs. determinism is a false dichotomy, we need a new word to represent a more hybrid system… like freeterminism!”
p.s. I wonder what kind of person gets a kick out of finding words that don’t exist on google.
p.p.s. I wonder how long it’ll take for this post to show up on google, thus invalidating my post.
Darn Canadian baby seal clubbers
so I’m reading the Trader Joe’s website to see if their pistachios are safe (erm, not known to be contaminated) and I see the following:
5. A Message to Customers Regarding Canadian Seafood and the Seal Hunt Issue
The Issue: It’s been reported that some fishermen off Canada’s East coast near Newfoundland kill baby seals in the off-season from fishing.We looked into this, and we think it’s important to tell you that we do not purchase any seafood items from the areas where the killing of seals is taking place. Our seafood products that are labeled “Product of Canada,” come from reputable suppliers on Canada’s West coast, or come from Alaska and are simply processed on Canada’s West coast. None of these suppliers are involved in the seal hunt. In addition, we have no plans to purchase any seafood products from the East coast of Canada.
:(
April is National Poetry Month!
Soul Receives From Soul
Soul receives from soul that knowledge,
therefore not by book nor from tongue.
If knowledge of mysteries come after
emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.
- Rumi
