|
Badge of Honor for the New Fighter: Mangled Ear
Once an outlaw sport derided for its brutality, the prizefighting style known as mixed martial arts or ultimate fighting has toned down its act to gain government approval, a loyal television audience and hundreds of gyms training youngsters across the country. Now, to herald its full arrival, mixed martial arts has claimed a signature injury — cauliflower ear.
Both musicians and non-musicians can perceive bitonality
If you're a non-musician like me, you might not have noticed anything. It sounds basically like the familiar song, even though the synthesized sax isn't nearly as pleasing as the familiar Nat King Cole version of the song. But most trained musicians can't listen to a song like this without cringing. Why? Because the music has been made "bitonal" by moving the accompanying piano part up two semitones (a semitone is the difference between a "natural" note and a sharp or flat). Here's the original, unaltered piece:
Indefinite Guantanamo detention plans condemned
The American Civil Liberties Union has criticised a recommendation that 47 Guantanamo Bay inmates should be held indefinitely without trial.
Review And Highlights Of Bertrand Russell's The Scientific Outlook
I found Part One to be rather dry and uninteresting with no real revelations, however Parts Two and Three were such that my highlighter pen was in danger of running out of ink. To attempt a review of Parts Two and Three just wouldn’t be good enough and so I’ve chosen to provide several quote and passages from the book so that I do not dilute or exaggerate what Russell has written. So here are just a few interesting snippets: “We are accustomed, in our own day, to protest against the empire of machinery and eloquent yearning for a return to a simpler day……Return to nature, if it were taken seriously, would involve the death by starvation of some 90 per cent. of the population of civilized countries.”
An illustrated history of trepanation
Trepanation, or trephination (both derived from the Greek word trypanon, meaning "to bore") is perhaps the oldest form of neurosurgery. The procedure, which is called a craniotomy in medical terminology, involves the removal of a piece of bone from the skull, and it has been performed since prehistoric times. The oldest trepanned skull, found at a neolithic burial site of Ensisheim in France, is more than 7,000 years old, and trepanation was practised by the Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Romans, Greeks and the early Mesoamerican civilizations. The procedure is still performed today, for both medical and non-medical reasons.
The Neuroscience Of Jazz
Improvisation is the main feature of Jazz that distinguishes it from other forms of music making. Improvisation is the spontaneous musical performance within a relevant musical context. It consists of novel melodic, harmonic and rhythmic musical elements. This unique feature of jazz offers the opportunity for neurobiological research or even creativity. What they did was do a functional MRI brain scan on 6 highly skilled professional jazz musicians.
 |
