The shakiness of the reductive position might be more immediately apparent to anyone with even a spotty exposure (like mine) to Jewish religious music and its folk cousin, klezmer. Despite its characteristic minor tonality, this music encompasses a vast range of human emotion. How could it not? It has to cover everything from prayers for the dead to adoration of the deity. The clinching example of minor-key mirth-compatibility just might be that jolt of delirious energy familiar to anyone who's attended a Jewish wedding ... or a baseball game: "Hava Nagila"—a Prozac sundae, ethnic folk music's answer to the umbrella drink.

Other good examples, anyone? We can compile and post here the definitive, crowd-sourced list. Better yet, if there are any musicians out there with too much time on their hands, I invite you to perform your own "Eleanor Rigby" tests: Keep the melody—alter anything else (lyrics, tempo, orchestration) at will to produce a non-sad result. Polka and zydeco settings seem especially promising to me. Email us your musical rebuttals, and we'll upload them here.

The complementary principle in tonal determinism—major key songs are "upbeat"—seems even flimsier than its minor key counterpart. Two extremely sad major key songs immediately occur to me—Charlie Rich's abject confession of failure and despair, "Feel Like Going Home," and "Boulder to Birmingham," in which a depleted Emmylou Harris seeks relief from her apathy and emotional isolation following the death of Gram Parsons by trying to commune directly with him.

The myriad exceptions to the "sad minor third" rule illustrate a perhaps banal but basic truth about music: It's irreducibly emergent. All its elements act reciprocally, and their infinitely variable interplay produces a correspondingly variable range of emotions. Obviously, if every chord came out of its original factory packaging charged with its own specific, predictable emotional valence, we wouldn't have much need for composers or musicians. Musical composition would be reduced to translation, instead of creation, and pretty much anybody could do it. Literal-minded cognitive psych professors could write music.

In a less reductive intellectual climate it might not need saying, but the emotions evoked by music can't be simply reduced to correlative harmonic or melodic intervals, and sad songs can't be reduced to intrinsically sad building blocks. "Eleanor Rigby" isn't sad because it's constructed of sad chords built from sad intervals—any more than Albert Einstein was a genius because his brain was wired with uniquely smart neurons.

If a cognitive psychologist tries to tell you the minor third interval is intrinsically, universally "sad," it's not true. If, on the other hand, she says that, well, in the right musical setting and cultural context it can help evoke an ultimately elusive range of sad or mysteriously unresolved emotions—then it's not exactly new.

via The Atlantic.

A few years ago, when I was still teaching at the University of Chicago, I had my first Chinese graduate students, a couple of earnest Beijingers who had come to the Committee on Social Thought hoping to bump into the ghost of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher who established his career at the university. Given the mute deference they were accustomed to giving their professors, it was hard to make out just what these young men were looking for, in Chicago or Strauss. They attended courses and worked diligently, but otherwise kept to themselves. They were in but not of Hyde Park. At the end of their first year, I called one of them into my office to offer a little advice. He was obviously thoughtful and serious, and was already well known in Beijing intellectual circles for his writings and his translations of Western books in sociology and philosophy into Chinese. But his inability to express himself in written or spoken English had frustrated us both in a course of mine he had just taken. I began asking about his summer plans, eventually steering the conversation to the subject of English immersion programs, which I suggested he look into. “Why?” he asked. A little flummoxed, I said the obvious thing: that mastering English would allow him to engage with foreign scholars and advance his career at home. He smiled in a slightly patronizing way and said, “I am not so sure.” Now fully flummoxed, I asked what he would be doing instead. “Oh, I will do language, but Latin, not English.” It was my turn to ask why. “I think it very important we study Romans, not just Greeks. Romans built an empire over many centuries. We must learn from them.” When he left, it was clear that I was being dismissed, not him.

via The New Republic.

“Everyone’s vain,” he continues. “It just depends on how vain you are on the day. Everyone’s vain when they have their photo taken.” He is right: everyone is vain. Everyone wants to look good in a picture. Few, though, can muster Jagger’s steely commitment to achieving that end. More, perhaps, than any other rock star of his generation, Jagger has made it his business to understand and control the mechanics of his own stardom. He manifests no tempery neurosis; he pulls no celebrity sulks. He just insists, calmly, on getting things done as he wants them. “I think of him as coming from the English tradition of the actor-manager,” says Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live.” “If you watch him get ready to put on a show, you’ll see that there is nothing that he is not aware of, that he is not intimately involved with, from lighting and design to how the curtain is going to hit the floor. There are very few people whose production skills impress me, but he’s one of them. He’s as good a showman and a producer as there is.”

“I got a powerful sense of his mastery of every detail of every aspect of the production,” says Martin Scorsese, who collaborated with Jagger on the Stones concert documentary “Shine a Light.” “And by that, I don’t just mean the music; he also has a sharp sense of cinema.” (As the documentary attests, Jagger even gave Scorsese his thoughts on where to place the cameras.) “You can delegate things to other people,” Jagger observes, “and you have to, to a certain extent, but if you’re not behind it and getting your knowledge and input into it, it’s not going to turn out as interestingly and probably it won’t be what you would like. It’ll be disappointing.”

via The New York Times.

Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection. The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its ‘docking station’, attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.

The case was first reported at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and Berlin doctors subsequently published a detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009.

They have now published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, arguing that based on the results of extensive tests, “It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient.”

via HIV & AIDS Information.

A very good overview.

Users expect websites to work on their mobile phones. In two to three years, mobile support will become standard for any site. Web developers must add mobile web development to their skill set or risk losing clients.

How do you make websites mobile compatible? The answer is obvious: By testing them on all mobile phones, and by solving the problems you encounter. But, that’s a useless answer. It’s impossible to test your designs on every mobile phone out there. Within the mobile phone landscape, there are at least ten operating systems (OSs) and fifteen browsers that require consideration. Mobile devices are expensive, and not every web developer can afford to buy five to ten of them. Testing “on all mobile phones” is impossible for most web developers.

In this article, I’ll give you an overview of the mobile web market, as well as phone platforms and their browsers, so that you can decide which mobile devices to test on. Then, we’ll look at how to set up a mobile test bed.

via A List Apart.

A Marshall amplifier. A hybrid electric car battery. A Braun ET66 calculator. A mortar board. A Moleskine notebook. An Apple iPhone chip. An American Express Centurion charge card. A Sony PlayStation2 console. A floppy disk. The letter “l” in the font Helvetica. An audio cassette tape. What do they have in common? Not much, you’d think, since they are so different in terms of function, price, complexity and how they were made. But they are all (various shades of) black and (roughly) rectangular.

When the German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic (that’s pronounced GEAR-tichich) started thinking about the color and shape of objects he most admired, he realized that many took the form of black rectangles. He has assembled a collection of them for “Black2 (Black and Square),” an exhibition running through Feb. 12 at the Swiss Institute in Rome. Among the items he included are a gravestone, a wallet, soap, a table, a perfume bottle, a cooking pot, a television set, a cart, an accordion, a Sudoko cube, a fireplace, a laptop, a Chanel handbag, a gas tank, a bible and Prince’s “Black Album,” from 1987.

“How is it that so many different things made in so many different ways end being black rectangles?” Mr. Grcic asked. “They can be extremely elegant and sophisticated, or very basic, but they are such strong and powerful parts of our lives that it is impossible to imagine a world without them.”

via NYTimes.com.

Security expert Bruce Schneier writes about passwords often, and he distills Thompsons findings into a few rules: Choose a password that doesnt contain a readable word. Mix upper and lower case. Use a number or symbol in the middle of the word, not on the end. Dont just use 1 or !, and dont use symbols as replacements for letters, such as @ for a lowercase A—password-guessing software can see through that trick. And of course, create unique passwords for your different sites.

via Slate Magazine.