The Metropole Orkest (or Metropole Orchestra), a jazz and pop orchestra based in the Netherlands, is the largest full-time ensemble of its kind in the world.
Music: Pat Metheny & The Metropole Orkest — ‘First Circle’
Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen
Humanity at the crossroads: Sheldon Solomon on the work of Ernest Becker
Music: Pat Metheny — ‘Always And Forever’
Why bystanders are reluctant are reluctant to help those in need
Dwyer Gunn writes: Bethesda in the state of Maryland is the kind of safe, upscale Washington DC suburb that well-educated, high-earning professionals retreat to when it’s time to raise a family. Some 80 per cent of the city’s adult residents have college degrees. Bethesda’s posh Bradley Manor-Longwood neighbourhood was recently ranked the second richest in the country. And yet, on 11 March 2011, a young woman was brutally murdered by a fellow employee at a local Lululemon store (where yoga pants retail for about $100 each). Two employees of the Apple store next door heard the murder as it occurred, debated, and ultimately decided not to call the police.
If the attack had occurred in poor, crowded, crime-ridden Rio de Janeiro, the outcome might have been different: in one series of experiments, researchers found bystanders in the Brazilian city to be extraordinarily helpful, stepping in to offer a hand to a blind person and aiding a stranger who dropped a pen nearly 100 per cent of the time. This apparent paradox reflects a nuanced understanding of ‘bystander apathy’, the term coined by the US psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané in the 1960s to describe the puzzling, and often horrifying, inaction of witnesses to intervene in violent crimes or other tragedies.
The phenomenon first received widespread attention in 1964, when the New York bar manager Kitty Genovese was sexually assaulted and murdered outside her apartment building in the borough of Queens. Media coverage focused on the alleged inaction of her neighbours – The New York Times’s defining story opened with the chilling assertion that: ‘For more than half an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks.’ Over the years, that media account has been largely debunked, but the incident served to establish a narrative that persists today: society has changed irrevocably for the worse, and the days of neighbour helping neighbour are a nicety of the past. True or not, the Genovese story became a cultural meme for callousness and man’s inhumanity to man, a trend said to signify our modern age.
It also launched a whole new field of study. [Continue reading…]
Is the world making you sick?
Jill Neimark writes: In 1962, physicist and historian Thomas Kuhn proposed that science makes progress not just through the gradual accumulation and analysis of knowledge, but also through periodic revolutions in perspective. Anomalies and incongruities that may have been initially ignored drive a field into crisis, he argued, and eventually force a new scientific framework. Copernicus, Darwin, Newton, Galileo, Pasteur—all have spearheaded what Kuhn has called a “paradigm shift.”
Thomas Kuhn is Claudia Miller’s hero. An immunologist and environmental health expert at the University of Texas School of Medicine in San Antonio, and a visiting senior scientist at Harvard University, Miller lives by Kuhn’s maxim that “the scientist who embraces a new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses…[he] has undergone a revolutionary transformation of vision.”
Miller has spent 30 years hammering out a theory to explain the contemporary surge in perplexing, multi-symptom illnesses — from autism to Gulf War Syndrome — which represent a Kuhnian shift in medicine. She calls her theory “TILT,” short for Toxicant Induced Loss of Tolerance.
TILT posits that a surprising range of today’s most common chronic conditions are linked to daily exposure to very low doses of synthetic chemicals that have been in mass production since World War II. These include organophosphate pesticides, flame-retardants, formaldehyde, benzene, and tens of thousands of other chemicals.
TILT, says Miller, is a two-step process. Genetically susceptible individuals get sick after a toxic exposure or series of exposures. Instead of recovering, their neurological and immune systems become “tilted.” Then, they lose tolerance to a wide range of chemicals commonly found at low doses in everyday life and develop ongoing illnesses. [Continue reading…]
The super-abundant virus controlling your gut bacteria
The New Scientist reports: The common cold, hepatitis C… crAssphage? A new virus has been discovered that could lurk in the guts of almost three-quarters of people around the world, making it one of the most ubiquitous viruses you never knew you had.
The virus, which replicates by infecting a species of common gut bacteria, is six times more abundant than all other known gut viruses combined. Its discovery supports the idea that viruses may be the puppet masters of our intestines, regulating the teeming bacterial communities that call our gut home.
“The idea is that viruses can control the levels of bacteria in the gut, to make sure that no one type gets the upper hand,” says Bas Dutilh of Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. “Viruses could maintain the biodiversity within us.”
The fact that the virus is found in so many different people, regardless of where they live or what they eat, overturns the previously held belief that each person’s viral signature is unique, says Dutilh. [Continue reading…]
Earth’s magnetic field polarity could flip sooner than expected
Scientific American reports: Earth’s magnetic field, which protects the planet from huge blasts of deadly solar radiation, has been weakening over the past six months, according to data collected by a European Space Agency (ESA) satellite array called Swarm.
The biggest weak spots in the magnetic field — which extends 370,000 miles (600,000 kilometers) above the planet’s surface — have sprung up over the Western Hemisphere, while the field has strengthened over areas like the southern Indian Ocean, according to the magnetometers onboard the Swarm satellites — three separate satellites floating in tandem.
The scientists who conducted the study are still unsure why the magnetic field is weakening, but one likely reason is that Earth’s magnetic poles are getting ready to flip, said Rune Floberghagen, the ESA’s Swarm mission manager. In fact, the data suggest magnetic north is moving toward Siberia.
“Such a flip is not instantaneous, but would take many hundred if not a few thousand years,” Floberghagen told Live Science. “They have happened many times in the past.”
Scientists already know that magnetic north shifts. Once every few hundred thousand years the magnetic poles flip so that a compass would point south instead of north. While changes in magnetic field strength are part of this normal flipping cycle, data from Swarm have shown the field is starting to weaken faster than in the past. Previously, researchers estimated the field was weakening about 5 percent per century, but the new data revealed the field is actually weakening at 5 percent per decade, or 10 times faster than thought. As such, rather than the full flip occurring in about 2,000 years, as was predicted, the new data suggest it could happen sooner. [Continue reading…]
Music: Imogen Heap — ‘Cycle Song’
Music: Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny — ‘Our Spanish Love Song’
Music: Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny — ‘Message to a Friend’
Music: Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny — ‘First Song (for Ruth)’
When chance surpasses reason
Michael Schulson writes: In the 1970s, a young American anthropologist named Michael Dove set out for Indonesia, intending to solve an ethnographic mystery. Then a graduate student at Stanford, Dove had been reading about the Kantu’, a group of subsistence farmers who live in the tropical forests of Borneo. The Kantu’ practise the kind of shifting agriculture known to anthropologists as swidden farming, and to everyone else as slash-and-burn. Swidden farmers usually grow crops in nutrient-poor soil. They use fire to clear their fields, which they abandon at the end of each growing season.
Like other swidden farmers, the Kantu’ would establish new farming sites ever year in which to grow rice and other crops. Unlike most other swidden farmers, the Kantu’ choose where to place these fields through a ritualised form of birdwatching. They believe that certain species of bird – the Scarlet-rumped Trogon, the Rufous Piculet, and five others – are the sons-in-law of God. The appearances of these birds guide the affairs of human beings. So, in order to select a site for cultivation, a Kantu’ farmer would walk through the forest until he spotted the right combination of omen birds. And there he would clear a field and plant his crops.
Dove figured that the birds must be serving as some kind of ecological indicator. Perhaps they gravitated toward good soil, or smaller trees, or some other useful characteristic of a swidden site. After all, the Kantu’ had been using bird augury for generations, and they hadn’t starved yet. The birds, Dove assumed, had to be telling the Kantu’ something about the land. But neither he, nor any other anthropologist, had any notion of what that something was.
He followed Kantu’ augurers. He watched omen birds. He measured the size of each household’s harvest. And he became more and more confused. Kantu’ augury is so intricate, so dependent on slight alterations and is-the-bird-to-my-left-or-my-right contingencies that Dove soon found there was no discernible correlation at all between Piculets and Trogons and the success of a Kantu’ crop. The augurers he was shadowing, Dove told me, ‘looked more and more like people who were rolling dice’. [Continue reading…]
Music: Charlie Haden — 1937-2014
Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny — The Moon Song. Charlie Haden died on Friday.
I saw on the itinerary before we left that we were playing in Portugal, and I didn’t agree with the government there. It was a kind of a fascist government. They had colonies in Guinea-Bissau, in Angola and Mozambique, and they were systematically wiping out the Black race, you know? And so I called Ornette [Coleman], and I said, “You know, I don’t want to play in Portugal.” And he said, “Charlie, we’ve already signed the contract. We’ve gotta play. It’s the last country on the concert tour. Figure out — maybe you can do something to protest it, you know?”
AMY GOODMAN: The Caetano regime.
CHARLIE HADEN: Yeah. And so, during the tour we were playing one of my songs, “Song for Che,” and I decided that when we played my song, because it was connected to me, because I was the guy that was going to do it, you know, I would dedicate that song to the Black peoples’ liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola and Guinea-Bissau. And I asked — I think we were in Bulgaria, and we were doing a jazz festival there. Or Romania, we were in Bucharest, and I asked one of the journalists there, who was from Portugal, I said, “I’m planning on” — because he knew about the Liberation Music Orchestra. He says, “What are you going to do?” And I said, “I’m going to dedicate — what would happen if I did this?”
He said, “Well, three or four different things. You can either be shot on the spot, or they could pull you off the stage, or they could arrest you on the stage. They could arrest you in your dressing room. Or they can arrest you later. But you’re going to be arrested.” And I thought, you know, I don’t think they’ll arrest me, man. I’m an American jazz musician. This is a jazz festival. It has nothing to do with politics. I think I’m safe.
So I made the dedication, and I wasn’t arrested immediately, but, you know, when I did the dedication there were young people there, students, that were in the cheaper seats in front, and they all started cheering so loud that you couldn’t hear the music. And a lot of police were running around with automatic weapons, and they, right after we finished our set, they stopped down the festival, and they closed down in Cascais this big stadium that we were playing in. And we went back to the hotel, and so I was starting to get concerned about what was going to happen.
The next day, we went to the airport, and at the airport, I was trying to get my bass on the plane to make sure I could get the bass on the plane. And there were hundreds and hundreds of people in front of the airlines’ counters. And finally, one of the people from TWA came around the counter and said, “There was a man over there who wanted to interview you, and you have to stay here.” And I said, “I don’t want to be interviewed.” And Ornette came over and said, “What’s going on?” And they say, “They want to interview Mr. Haden, and you guys are going to get on the plane. And he’s staying here.” And Ornette said, “No, we’re not going on the plane. We’re going to stay here with him.” And they said, “No, you’re not. You’re getting on the plane.” They took them by the arms, and they led them on the aircraft. And I stayed there, and they took me down a winding staircase to an interrogation room and started pumping me with questions. They said, “We’re going to transfer you over to the PIDE headquarters.”
AMY GOODMAN: The police?
CHARLIE HADEN: It was the political police of Portugal. And so I said, you know, “I’m a United States citizen with a United States passport. I demand to be able to call the embassy.” And the guy who worked for TWA looked at me and smiled and said, “It’s Sunday, Mr. Haden. You can’t call the embassy. You shouldn’t mix politics with music.” [Continue reading…]
In Argentina blind soccer players learn how to see with their hearts
Music: Bugge Wesseltoft & Sidsel Endresen — ‘Try’
Music: Sidsel Endresen and Bugge Wesseltoft — ‘Out Here In There’
In a grain, a glimpse of the cosmos
Natalie Wolchover writes: One January afternoon five years ago, Princeton geologist Lincoln Hollister opened an email from a colleague he’d never met bearing the subject line, “Help! Help! Help!” Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist and the director of Princeton’s Center for Theoretical Science, wrote that he had an extraordinary rock on his hands, one that he thought was natural but whose origin and formation he could not identify. Hollister had examined tons of obscure rocks over his five-decade career and agreed to take a look.
Originally a dense grain two or three millimeters across that had been ground down into microscopic fragments, the rock was a mishmash of lustrous metal and matte mineral of a yellowish hue. It reminded Hollister of something from Oregon called josephinite. He told Steinhardt that such rocks typically form deep underground at the boundary between Earth’s core and mantle or near the surface due to a particular weathering phenomenon. “Of course, all of that ended up being a false path,” said Hollister, 75. The more the scientists studied the rock, the stranger it seemed.
After five years, approximately 5,000 Steinhardt-Hollister emails and a treacherous journey to the barren arctic tundra of northeastern Russia, the mystery has only deepened. Today, Steinhardt, Hollister and 15 collaborators reported the curious results of a long and improbable detective story. Their findings, detailed in the journal Nature Communications, reveal new aspects of the solar system as it was 4.5 billion years ago: chunks of incongruous metal inexplicably orbiting the newborn sun, a collision of extraordinary magnitude, and the creation of new minerals, including an entire class of matter never before seen in nature. It’s a drama etched in the geochemistry of a truly singular rock. [Continue reading…]
Music: Bugge Wesseltoft & Henrik Schwarz — ‘Leave My Head Alone Brain’