Neanderthals had different bodies than we do. In general, they were stockier and shorter, for instance. And there were other physical differences, as well. It's hard to say what these differences meant in practice but it's fun to speculate. You could build up a pretty good about how those short, study bodies might have helped Neanderthals be better adapted to cold. Or, you could look at the shape of a male Neanderthal's voice box, and think about how that shape might affect the sounds that came out.

So that's what this video is about. I have no idea how widely accepted "high pitched voice theory" is. I couldn't find a lot of references to it outside of the BBC special this clip comes from. Here's what the BBC says:

Professor Bob Franciscus, from Iowa University, is part of a multi-national group attempting to do just that. By making scans of modern humans, he saw how the soft tissue of the vocal tracts depends on the position of the hyoid bone and the anchoring sites on the skull. Computer predictions were then be made to determine the shape of the modern human vocal tract from bone data alone. The same equations were then used with data from a Neanderthal skull to predict the shape of a Neanderthal vocal tract.

The Neanderthal vocal tract seems to have been shorter and wider than a modern male human's, closer to that found today in modern human females. It's possible, then, that Neanderthal males had higher pitched voices than we might have expected. Together with a big chest, mouth, and huge nasal cavity, a big, harsh, high, sound might have resulted. But, crucially, the anatomy of the vocal tract is close enough to that of modern humans to indicate that anatomically there was no reason why Neanderthal could not have produced the complex range of sounds needed for speech.

As long as you understand that context, that this isn't necessarily a given that Neanderthals spoke in high-pitched voices, I think you should see this video. Because the results of this theory are damned hilarious.

Via misspepper on Submitterator!

Video Link

Still think that something other than a mere plane crash brought down the World Trade Center towers? According to a Norwegian materials expert, you may be right. Just ... you know ... not in the way most Truthers probably expect.

Christian Simensen thinks the Twin Towers were ultimately felled by a thermite reaction.

"If my theory is correct, tonnes of aluminium ran down through the towers, where the smelt came into contact with a few hundred litres of water," Christian Simensen, a scientist at SINTEF, an independent technology research institute based in Norway, said in a statement released Wednesday.

"From other disasters and experiments carried out by the aluminium industry, we know that reactions of this sort lead to violent explosions."

Given the quantities of the molten metal involved, the blasts would have been powerful enough to blow out an entire section of each building, he said. This, in turn, would lead to the top section of each tower to fall down on the sections below.

The sheer weight of the top floors would be enough to crush the lower part of the building like a house of card, he said.

I honestly don't know how plausible an idea this is. It sounds reasonable to a layperson, but I'm curious what those of you with more engineering expertise think.

The AFP has a write-up about the theory. There's also a more-detailed explanation on the website of SINTEF, the Norwegian research lab where Simensen works. Finally, this appeared in the trade journal Aluminum International Today, and they've got an email address where you can request a copy of the story.

Here's my perspective: the purpose of any cultural policy or regulation should be to encourage a diversity of both participation and works (that is: more people making art, and more kinds of art being made).

ISTM that your assertion amounts to: "Whatever forms of participation that come into existence as a result of the capitalization opportunities that accrue in an exclusive rights regime, they are dwarfed by the works that lurk in potentia should such a regime perish."

IOW: we unequivocally get *some* participation in culture as a result of exclusive rights regimes, some of which would not exist except for exclusive rights. You believe that if this regime and the works that depend on it was to vanish, the new works that would come into existence as a result would offset the losses.

I don't know how either assertion could be tested. We both have firsthand experience of both modes of creativity -- I know of works that wouldn't have been capitalized absent the higher returns expected in the presence of exclusive rights; I also know of works that could only have been made in their absence.

Kerov writes:

The nature of propaganda is to use emotion to bypass rationality. That, to me, qualifies it as a "bad thing" generally.

The aptly titled "great generation" was born and raised in the Great Depression, and as soon as that lifted, they were thrust into a World War that threatened freedom and peace between nations in a way that the world had never faced before. Today, we've endured hardships and faced challenges, but nothing like the ones our grandparents faced. How did they motivate themselves to make those sacrifices and answer the challenges? Here's a hint... They didn't do it with reason alone.

This is a cartoon made by the Disney Studios in 1943 to explain why both reason and emotion are so important. (Leonard Maltin only gets it half right in his introduction.)

Why do we contribute money to Haiti when an earthquake devastates their country? There isn't much of a logical reason... Haiti isn't really all that important to us strategically or economically. They'll probably never be in a position to return the favor. Why not just let them sort it and go about our own business?

Because we feel an emotional link to people who are suffering. Soulless corporations flourish with lots of "bottom line common sense" but no sense of altruism, and they make billions of dollars in profits. Why is that a bad thing? Isn't that what they're supposed to do? You and I both know the answer to that question. The problem with this world isn't that there isn't enough logic. The problem is that there isn't enough compassion. Logic won't cut it alone in each of our own lives either. There are a million things that make sense to do. I have a whole laundry list full of logical things to do in my own life- more than I'll ever get around to doing. Guess which ones I actually go out and do? Reason may be the reason to do things, but passion is what makes things actually happen.

Why do we admire Carl Sagan? Is it because he was factually accurate? No, it's because he was able to convey a passion for science to us. Walt Disney, Gandhi, M. L. King... people with passion move mountains. In my own small life, I've tried to follow my own passion and share it with others. Sure, it makes total sense to have an archive and museum dedicated to animation, but until I had the passion to quit my job and start building it, it didn't happen. If it wasn't for the passion of hundreds of dedicated volunteers, our collection wouldn't include 50,000 high resolution images and over 5,000 digitized animated films. Passion makes things happen that would never have happened otherwise.

If I get any idea across to you, gentle readers of Boing Boing, in my two week stint as guestblogger here, let it be this... BELIEVE in what you do- really feel it in your heart- and then go out and do it.

P.S. I just appealed to your emotions as a call to action. Feel free to call me a propagandist!

]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/01/20/in-praise-of-passion.html/feed 42 http://boingboing.net/2009/12/14/the-biology-of-music.html http://boingboing.net/2009/12/14/the-biology-of-music.html#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:32:56 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker

As a rule, humans are very picky about their music. I don't mean stylistic choices. Whether you like country, western, or both is up to you. I'm talking about something more basic than that.

A tone is a sound, like a note before it gets a specific name, and a scale is a collection of tones grouped in ascending or descending order. We are able to hear a huge number of tones and, theoretically, there's billions of ways to group them, but humans tend to focus on a very small number of scales, usually made up of either five or seven tones. The same scales are used over and over, throughout most of Western music and much of human music as a whole, said Dale Purves, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology at Duke University and director of the Duke-NUS Neuroscience Program in Singapore. In fact, even styles of music that sound completely different--say classical Chinese music vs. Western folk music--use the same scale, he said. They just use it differently.

So why are we so drawn to certain tones and certain groups of tones? Purves' team thinks they have an answer--an explanation that links what humans like with who they are, biologically.

The key, Purves said, lies in our evolutionary history.

"Any perceptual quality you have is there for some biological reason. They evolved because they provide useful information to us," he said. "So if you take a microphone out in nature and ask what the tonal sounds are in our environmental niche that we would have evolved to appreciate, the tonal sounds you record are nearly all animal vocalizations. And the ones that count the most are the vocalizations of other humans."

The sounds humans make matter most, he said, because that's where we get information about our competitors and our potential mates--the things we need to know to be successful creatures. We developed an ear for the tones common in human vocalizations, the same way a sommelier might develop a taste for fine wines. Those are the tones we find most appealing and thus, the ones we made into our musical art.

The basics of this idea are nothing new. It is, after all, pretty obvious that there's a connection between human voices and human music. But, when people have looked for links between musical scales and the natural changes in the pitch and rhythm of speech, they haven't been able to turn up any solid evidence of a causal relationship. Purves, along with Kamraan Gill, Ph.D., approached this in a different way, looking instead at similarities between scales and the spectrum of--or frequencies in--speech. Here, they hit paydirt. In fact, Purves and Gill found that you can correctly predict which scales are the most popular by how similar they are to the spectrum of human vocalizations. A great example of how this plays out: Rock 'n Roll

"Rock is especially popular because it emphasizes the musical intervals whose frequency relationships are those we hear in the human speech ," Purves said. "That's one of the reasons people like it so much."

Read Dr. Purves and Dr. Gill's paper at the journal PLoS ONE.