LCC

The tradition (and mythos) of Challenge Coins goes back farther than reliable records can determine. Wikipedia tells an evocative (but unsubstantiated) story from World War I about an American who escaped German captivity only to nearly be executed by French soldiers, his allies, because he had no papers to identify him as a US solider. Finally he showed them a bronze medallion that only members of his squadron carried. It proved his identity and saved his life. So the Challenge Coin was born.

In the spirit of this tale, modern military members challenge each other to produce their unit’s coin. Commonly, the challenge is initiated by slamming a coin onto the bar. Those who take too long to produce their own coin or haven’t got one are on the hook for a round of drinks.

We have designed a custom Long Now Challenge Coin to mark the founding of our latest endeavor the Long Now Salon and celebrate the camaraderie of all the long-term thinkers who will gather there.

On one side the coin challenges you to “Seize the Millennium” and the other features a bristlecone pine. Bristlecones are the Earth’s oldest living organisms with a lifespan up to 5000 years. They are a symbol of Long Now’s mission to foster long-term thinking and responsibility.

A first edition Long Now Challenge Coin is available to everyone who donates $100 or more to the Long Now Salon project.

Our coins are made of hefty stainless steel and can be exchanged, once the Salon is open for business, for a special Long Now beverage of your choice. We don’t, however, recommend getting caught without one…

“I don’t go for scale, I go for length. I just want things that can go on forever.”

In collaboration with the Red Bull Music Academy, m ss ing p eces recently produced a short film about Long Now Board Member Brian Eno’s visual art. Accompanying an exhibit of 77 Million Paintings and a lecture by Eno in New York, the film explores Eno’s experiments with light-focused images as a way of addressing our being in time. In a blend of pictures and words, Eno muses about his interest in conceiving visual processes, rather than products: his aim is to generate organic, ever-growing and ever-changing creations that ask us to surrender to their pace.

“If we look at what gardeners do, they think, well, I’ll put nasturtiums here, and I’ll have narcissus here, and I’ll have peonies over here. But they know that that’s just the start of a garden. A garden grows, and it grows unpredictably. You can specify the starting point, and you can hope that it’s going to turn out in some way that you like. But essentially, you surrender to the project. You surrender to the thing growing in its own way. And there’s a gracefulness in being able to surrender.”

Granted, it's a prank you can play on only 1 in 10,000 people. But if you find one of those rare individuals who can name any note they hear, with just a brief manipulation you can set that power awry. You can later console your subject with a reminder that, after all, nobody's perfect. A children's choir that I used to sing in always performed the carol "Once in Royal David's City" at a certain concert, and the boy soprano who sang the opening solo would be sent up to a high chapel balcony along with a man who had perfect pitch. The adult would hum the correct note in the boy's ear, apparently, so that he could begin the solo out of a dramatic silence. (Looking back, I'm not sure sending someone up to blow very softly on a pitch pipe wouldn't have accomplished the same thing—but the addition of the superpowered helper made the whole thing more thrilling.) People with perfect, or absolute, pitch can identify any notes they hear, and can tell you if those notes are a little sharp or flat. Stephen Hedger, a graduate student at the University of Chicago who's studying both cognitive psychology and musicology, has perfect pitch. After discovering that his perception could be skewed distressingly by someone fiddling with a tuning knob while he played the keyboard, he decided to test just how absolute "absolute pitch" really is. Hedger gathered 13 subjects who'd scored as high as possible on a test of absolute pitch. At the beginning of the experiment, they listened to a series of notes; for each one, subjects had to identify the name of the note and whether it was in tune. The notes included everything from middle C to the B above it, and each note had three versions: one in tune, one slightly flat, and one slightly sharp. (The out-of-tune notes were off by 33 "cents." The distance between any two notes, say C to C#, is 100 cents. Most people can detect a difference of just 25 cents, so a 33-cent difference—a third of the way to the next note—would be comfortably noticeable to all but the tone-deaf.) Next, subjects listened to the entirety of Brahms's Symphony No.1 in C minor. During the first movement, which is 15 minutes long, the recording ever so slowly went flat. The pitch crept downward at 2 cents a minute, ending a full 33 cents flat from the original. The remaining half-hour of the symphony was played in the new, flattened key. When asked, none of the subjects noticed said they noticed a difference in pitch. Then subjects completed the pitch quiz a second time. Now, pitches that were flat sounded in-tune, and pitches that were in tune sounded a little out of tune. (The subjects still correctly identified sharp pitches.) In a second experiment, instead of Brahms subjects heard a series of modern musical compositions that only include 5 pitches. Just as before, the music slowly drifted flat and then stayed that way. In the pitch quiz afterward, subjects misjudged all the flat and in-tune notes they heard—not only the five notes they'd listened to. A brief time listening to out-of-tune notes was able to skew a person's whole internal scale. Yet when subjects heard test pitches played by an instrument they hadn't listened to during the experiment—for example, a set of piano notes after the Brahms symphony, which didn't include a piano—their judgements were correct again. It is "as if each instrument voice retains its own tuning," Hedger and his coauthors write in Psychological Science. People with absolute pitch, those superpowered few, are thought to learn their pitches in childhood. The pitches aren't absolutely stable, though: the detuning study shows they can be bent and changed by music a person has recently heard. In a video, senior study author Howard Nusbaum says that the group is now looking for ways to improve people's sense of pitch, rather than detuning it, by taking advantage of this flexibility. "We are constantly changing to meet the circumstances around us," he says. That means someday the rest of us may be a little more perfect. Image: by Timothy Valentine (via Flickr) Hedger, S., Heald, S., & Nusbaum, H. (2013). Absolute Pitch May Not Be So Absolute Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612473310...

thesochillnetwork:

Stay classy, Microsoft

Conhecido como tornado de dejetos.

Mais bonito que a aurora boreal.

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A hugely talented and original science fiction author, Iain M. Banks, has died at the age of 59 of cancer of the gall bladder.

Can space opera be darkly humorous? Definitely; that describes Banks' "Culture" series. And he liked games; one of his novels describes a culture built entirely around a complex game, while another recounts an multi-species ethical issue which, in theory, is to be resolved by a virtual-reality wargame. It is probably not much of a spoiler to say that cheating occurs.

I cannot make the customary lament of "now I will never read another new novel by (author)," because in fact I discovered Banks only a few years ago, and have not yet caught up with everything he did . . . let alone the non-SF works that were published as "Iain Banks" with no M. And, when I finally run out of "new" Banks, I won't really have run out; these are the kind of books that can be read over and over. And, truth be told, most of them can also be used as doorstops. It wasn't that the man could not write short fiction – he did – but he seemed to prefer long, complex stories of huge scope. And oh, my, he was good at it. You just kept turning pages, and turning pages, and it was perfectly all right that there were a lot of pages.

Banks also created a sort of geek haiku with the names he gave to the Culture's ships. No "Enterprise" here. They chose their own names. But what, exactly, is a huge and heavily-armed super-intelligence saying when it chooses a name like Prosthetic Conscience? Or I Thought He Was With You? Or God Told Me To Do It, or Zero Gravitas, or Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill . . . Read the list.

I don't know if I would like to live in the Culture, but I'm grateful to Banks for letting me visit.

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The Card Game Of Junk E-Mail

Earn a Gazillion Dollars Every Second!
Turn Pocket Lint Into Bitchin' Hot Rods!
Find God In Your Bathroom!

If you're on the Internet (and we're sure you are), you've seen messages like these.

*Disclaimer: SPAMMERS will only make you filthy rich beyond your wildest dreams if you have very low expectations, will only make you invincible to the exceptionally weak, will only ward off eggs if used to construct a protective barrier, and will probably not make women flock to you in this life. Certain SPAMMERS sets may not contain Moxes.

One of the giants of 20th and 21st century Scottish literature has left the building.

I can't really claim to be a friend; my relationship with Iain was somewhere between one of the faceless hordes seen at SF conventions, and "guy I run into at the pub occasionally". However, I've known Iain and chatted with him at times since, I think, 1989 or 1990 or thereabouts. And, after getting over my initial awe of the giant of letters, subsequently discovered that he was a giant in other ways: big-hearted, kind, affable, humorous, angry at injustice.

There is probably no point in my writing an obituary. The newspapers are all over the generalities (for example, here), and if I had anything more intimate to add I wouldn't care to do so in public, out of respect for his family and friends.

However, I'd like to pause for a moment and reflect on my personal sense of loss. Iain's more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. But in his science fiction he achieved something more: something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do. He was intensely political, and he infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that sane human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed).

Last night I was talking to a friend who, with Ken MacLeod, had been invited to visit Iain last week at home. Iain was apparently gravely ill even then, and had to retire after half an hour. Purely selfishly, I hoped he'd hang on longer — long enough for me to tell him I intend to dedicate my next (first) trilogy to him. (I can't hold a candle to his versatility as a writer, but it seems to me that we badly need an SF literature that offers hope for the future, and he has provided a compass for me to set my sails by.)

I've spent about 3 months away from home (Edinburgh) this year, so the last time I saw him was back in December or January, before his diagnosis. Purely by accident, I ran into him in the St James shopping centre (up the road from where I live). He was his usual affable, cheery self: and that is how I intend to remember him.

As Paul McAuley tweeted, a big bright bold boisterous light has gone out.

Newly discovered dance repertoires in the superb lyrebird bird may be the most sophisticated in the avian world.

Almost time to launch the new gamebook. WOOP!

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Happy for them?" - originally published 5/22/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Yahoo buying Tumblr in one gif

Have you ever really looked at your fingers? I mean, really looked?

You have?

Oh. Never mind, then.

• So the moral is: When your senator votes against disaster relief for another state, brace yourself. Because yours will soon need it. 19:35:13

In the decade since it first aired, Arrested Development has inspired scads of memes, mash-up Tumblrs, and fan art. Here are some of the best.

Did you see the new Star Trek movie? I did, this weekend. It had its share of flaws but I was too busy enjoying it to really care. A lot of folks seem to have very strong feelings about it. I’m a hardcore Trek fan, have been for thirty years or so. I feel like I should care more. But mostly I just want to watch it again and then see another sequel.

Last chance for Centaurs and Malice shirts! Get ‘em while they exist.

 

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The Waterfall and the World at NightAbove this boreal landscape, the arc of the Milky Way and shimmering aurorae flow through the night. Like an echo, below them lies Iceland's spectacular Godafoss, the Waterfall of the Gods. Shining just below the Milky Way, bright Jupiter is included in the panoramic nightscape recorded on March 9. Faint and diffuse, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) appears immersed in the auroral glow. The digital stitch of four frames is a first place winner in the 2013 International Earth and Sky Photo Contest on Dark Skies Importance organized by The World at Night. An evocative record of the beauty of planet Earth's night sky, all the contest's winning entries are featured in this video.