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September 20, 2006
"White and Nerdy"
"Weird Al" Yankovic is back with a vengance. His latest video is better than It's All About the Pentiums (if that is possible). Leave it to Al to make me like rap songs!
PS. Watching the video, I was alarmed at how white and nerdy I really, truly, sadly am. Right down to the Kirk vs. Picard and mowing the yard. Really.
Posted by Steven at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2006
What Happened To All the Blogging?
Where are all the blog entries, you ask? I wonder that myself.
Turns out that between my day job, Bill Baumbach's campaign, and Boyd, McKinney North and Dowell Band, I'm out of time to blog. I'll try to post the Big Stuff, but things are happening so fast right now it's difficult to stay contemporary. This will settle down in a few weeks ... I hope.
Posted by Steven at 01:27 AM | Comments (0)
"This Is Your Brain On Music"
I ran across a review of a new book called This Is Your Brain On Music on Salon.
The review of the book hits on some of the big revelations, but the bottom line is that a lot of experience I've had with music since my early teens has been studied by the author, and he finds strong correlations between my personal experience and what they've deduced from scanning brains.
Humans are incredibly good at parsing music. It's an extremely complicated task, and only part of that is speech recognition. There are other issues involving acoustic analysis and other esoteric tasks that most people never "think of" when they are enjoying a song. I found his discovery about music and teens to be extremely reassuring:
Humans prefer music of their own culture when they're toddlers, but it's in our teens that we choose the specific sort of music that we'll love forever. These years, Levitin explains, are emotional times, "and we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to 'tag' the memories as something important." In addition, our brains are undergoing massive changes up until the teen years -- after that, the brain structure becomes more fixed, and it begins to prune, rather than grow, neural connections. Consequently it's in our teens that we're most receptive to new kinds of music (in much the same way it's easier to learn a new language when you're young than when you're old).
The author also explains one of those things that drives me (personally) nuts, that of the "song stuck in your head":
One more thing on the connection between memory and music bears mentioning, if only for the name: the "earworm." This word, from the German "ohrwurm," describes the annoying feeling of having a song stuck in your head. Alas, Levitin says relatively little research has been done on the phenomenon -- all we really know is that musicians and people with obsessive compulsive disorder are more prone to getting earworms, and that for most people it's small bits of songs, rather than entire songs, that we keep repeating.
I get this all the time ... in fact, I'm rarely not 'hearing' some song in my head at any time of the day.
The reviewer brings it all home with this pithy (and personally "too close to home") comment:
If you want your potential mate to remember you, you serenade her, or at least get Peter Gabriel to do it.
I don't think I could put it better (and Anne probably would prefer the Gabriel serenade).
Posted by Steven at 01:14 AM | Comments (0)
September 03, 2006
Simpsons meet Star Trek
Alanna found this. It's cute.
Pay close attention and see if you spot the Theremin.
Posted by Steven at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)