Shave and A Haircut?

You probably think you don't know this 'tune' but you probably do. Years ago i was amazed when my girlfriend-at-the-time used the same knock (as in knock on the front door knock) as i did. Wow! How did you know the family knock? I just assumed it was a local phenomenon. I went around asking people at work- "If you went to a friend's house and knocked on the door- what knock would you use?". Most people's knock was the same. "How did you know that knock?" i demanded- but nobody knew.- and everybody thought i was strange. It'd been passed down from generation to generation- it's origin lost in the mist of time. Even the interweb didn't help- i tried googling:

"knock"
"knock rhythms"
"knock rhythm meme"
"dum-dum-de-dum-dum... dum dum"

Until, one day, Bo Diddley died. I read his obit- and then downloaded some of the dead man's music: "I know a cat named way out Willie- who had a cool little chick named rockin' Millie" etc. There's a link on his wikipedia entry: "Bo Diddley Beat" which then links to a page entitled "Shave and a Haircut". Finally!

Apparently the 1st known occurrence of the tune is from 1899 : "At a Darktown Cakewalk" by Charles Hay. Much later, Milton Berle added the lyrics "Shave and a haircut- shampoo!"- hence the current name of the tune!

Apparently in Mexico, the tune is associated with a profane insult. Whistling the tune is deemed highly offensive and means "Chinga tu madre, cabrón" where cabrón represents the final two notes, and can be used as a response. It can be translated as "Go fuck your mother, you bastard."

I guess there's nothing new about a sticky, memish 'earworm' tune- but why has this one's rhythm become divorced from it's melody and migrated from orchestra to 'front door' (if you consider this an instrument). I wonder if there are any recorded similar migrations?

Who knows if Charles Hay invented the rhythm or adapted it from a preceding door-knock? Or a Charleston rhythm, or Latin American clave rhythm? If he did, he must be an even better song-writer that the sisters who wrote the tune to te ever-popular 'happy birthday to you' in 1893. In 1990 that song was valued at $5 million. (Copyright won't expire until 2030 so remember kids- you can't sing 'happy birthday' or download music- it's illegal.)

What would have happened in , say, 1850 - if you went to your Mexican friend's house for his birthday?: "knock knock knock - let's eat cake". It's hard to conceive of a world without these things.

Theresa Andersson

Swedish spunk Theresa Andersson is amazing .. heard this song on npr's "song of the day" and loved it- but had no idea that she was a one woman show! Is that an Ikea shoe rack she's using to hold her guitar pedals? Oh well- i guess she is Swedish! And i think that stool is also from Ikea. Two other things- one is (although i have a 'foot aversion') i think she also has very sexy dextrous feet- like a MONKEY. The second is - you never see guys doing this shtick - always girls (KT Tunstall , Laura veirs etc) .. because we can't multitask. Many of us can barely unitask. I cannot talk and write at the same time. My brother-in-law apparently cannot drive and talk at the same time. I cannot drive and change the track on my ipod at the same time- yet i do try. I'd like to see a fMRI of Theresa's brain when she's singing and got all 4 limbs playing different instruments. If only she had a tail!

npr version here (better audio quality)

Financial Crisis Explained: Don't Lend Money to Men in String Vests!

Blinktwice4y is cool and needs a record deal ASAP.

Just some generic Chinese guy? Yep but - he's cool. Who is he? No idea- his "youtube" ID is "Blinktwice4y".. the 1st song is about a Mario Videogame- yet it sounds like a Sufjan Steven's ode to a girlfriend dying of metastatic cancer.

"The Dinner Party" from The New Yorker

Great short story : "The Dinner Party" from Joshua Ferris from the August 08 New Yorker... that poor sap- he had no idea what was coming!

My Computers 1981-2008 (The Story So Far)

The Poetry Of Science

This is the official explanation of the September malfunction of the "Large Hadron Collider" at CERN in Geneva. It is obviously a phenomenally complicated bit of equipment- but this 'explanation' reminds me of the typical Star-Trek babble used to explain away flimsy plot resolutions: "Captain i managed to reprogram the fusion generators by re-routing the di-lithium crystal manifold .. blah blah". If you read it as poetry i think you'll agree there is some elegance to it:

Within the first second,
an electrical arc developed
and punctured the helium enclosure,
leading to release of helium into the insulation vacuum of the cryostat.
The spring-loaded relief discs on the vacuum enclosure opened
when the pressure exceeded atmospheric,
thus relieving the helium to the tunnel.
They were however unable to contain the pressure rise
below the nominal 0.15 MPa absolute
in the vacuum enclosures of subsector 23-25,
thus resulting in large pressure forces acting on the vacuum barriers
separating neighboring subsectors,
which most probably damaged them.
These forces displaced dipoles
in the subsectors affected from their cold internal supports,
and knocked the Short Straight Section cryostats
housing the quadrupoles and vacuum barriers
from their external support jacks
at positions Q23, Q27 and Q31,
in some locations breaking their anchors
in the concrete floor of the tunnel.
The displacement of the Short Straight Section cryostats
also damaged the “jumper” connections
to the cryogenic distribution line,
but without rupture of the transverse vacuum barriers
equipping these jumper connections,
so that the insulation vacuum
in the cryogenic line
not degrade.

Professor Wikipedia

Did you know that Ryan Seacrest contains many of the elements necessary to facilitate a chemical reaction!?

Stevie Wonder Was Twins!

Listening to his music, it's almost as if- could it really be true- there were TWO Stevie Wonders? Has anyone seen the movie "The Prestige"? It's like that.

Don't let all the BAD BAD Stevie Wonder songs like these:

1. Jungle Fever: "I've got jungle fever. She's got jungle fever. We've got jungle fever" Ebola Epidemic?
2. Knocks Me Off My Feet: "I see us in the park, strolling...." for goodness sake.
3. Castle of Love: "..I've been building my castle for two.." Is that birds' chirping i can hear or some mp3 artifact?
4. Part Time Lover: "Knowing it's so wrong, but feeling it's so right!"
5. I'll be Loving You Always: something or other about "rosebuds blooming in early may"
6. My Cherie Amour: "lovely as a summer day, distant as the milky way".
7. These 3 Words: "When was the last time that i heard you say: mother or father i love you?"
8. Every other Stevie Wonder song not listed here


..turn you off all the GOOD GOOD GOOD Stevie Wonder songs like these. Crank up the button that says "vol" and you won't be able to stop smiling and wiggling your head. Try! Impossible!

1. Master Blaster (Jammin'): Peace has come to Zimbabwe- well... not quite but Cholera (yes), HIV (yes)...
2. Higher Ground: Bloggers KEEP ON BLOGGING!
3. Living for the City: Living just enough for the CI-TAYYY!!!
4. Sir Duke: I can feel it all over Stevie!!!
5. Superstitious: Even the 1st 2 bars are worth the price of admission!
6. Signed Sealed Delivered: Here i am Baby!

Borderline Stevie Wonder... but if you've been dumped/just fallen in love/celebrating Martin Luther King Jr Day then these soppy numbers might seem OK.

1. Isn't She Lovely: Yes she is - borderline soppy but still funky
2. Happy Birthday- now that you know its about the fight to get a national holiday to commemorate MLK's assassination it's hard to dance around in your pyjamas on your own birthday without thinking about social justice issues.

3. You Are the Sunshine of my Life: sing it at your wedding.

Is Zero Apples the same as Zero Oranges?

My 3 year old can count backwards from 10 - although he thinks that the correct mathematical term for -1 is "blast-off". I'm sure high-level math would benefit from renaming -1 in this fashion. What is the square root of "blast off"? That's irrational!

I have been trying to teach my 5 year old daughter basic addition and subtraction- best done using food. I gave her 6 chocolates, and she 'subtracted' (i.e. ate) each one in turn...

"6 chocolates minus 1 chocolate is?"
"5 ..4 ..3..2..1."

After eating the last one, i thought she'd immediately say "zero" but she said "No chocolates left". Maybe she's right... after all, 1 apple is clearly different to 1 orange but is/are zero apples really the same as zero oranges?* This seems incorrect to me- clearly there is an assumption with a mathematical sequence of apples that you're not 'allowed' to suddenly stick in a watermelon or an elephant. All those places seem to be reserved for apples.

In other words, are there many different 'zeros'?

Maybe we should we be calling the empty space left on the table after the last chocolate has been eaten as "The Empty (Chocolate) Set"... i.e. a virtual space reserved for a number of chocolates- but nothing else. Apparently, however , there is only one "empty set"... so that scotches that idea. This is the problem with D.I.Y mathematics- particularly when you're not that mathematical.

I got to thinking about all the stuff i learned in primary school about numbers.. how we learned how to do (short) division... but in fact only really learned how somebody ELSE did division. It's not as if any of us had any idea why we were "carrying the one" anywhere.

According to wikipedia- here is the REAL explanation: The procedure relies on the division algorithm, which states that given any two integers a and d, with d ≠ 0, there exist unique integers q and r such that a = qd + r and 0 ≤ r < |d |, where |d | denotes the absolute value of d.

You manipulate the symbols in a particular way- hey presto. Ditto for calculus - getting good marks in no way required you to understand what you were doing. In fact, it probably would have been distracting. Leibniz and Newton would roll in their graves.

5th grade geometry: "Parallel Lines Never Intersect"... except in the real world!- and that is why if you walk 400km north, then 400km east, 400km south and 400km west you will very likely end up far far away from where you started. I've always been interested in the idea that, when placed on a map "North & South" seem analogous to "East and West" as if they were equivalent to Cartesian y and x. Walking "South" is not like simply walking East in a different direction.

Luckily, when you get off the surface of the earth and into deep space, the universe really does seem to be "flat" -according to data from the WMAP satellite. There was some suspicion that it was actually a 4-dimensional doughnut shape (no joke) but this apparently has been discredited now much to my disappointment.

* also, why is it correct to use a plural when talking about "zero" somethings???

Tom Waits, Ron Perlman, Nick Cave

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a weird convergence between Nick Cave and Tom Waits (all Nick cave songs would sound better if sung by Tom Waits) , and between Ron-Hellboy-Perlman and Tom Waits (Ron Perlman looks more like Tom Waits than Tom Waits does).

please compare:

That's One Big Amoeba

The New York Times has an interesting article about a giant 1.5 inch diameter amoeba (Gromia sphaerica) that can roll itself along the ocean floor. That's pretty big for a single celled organism! I wonder what the biggest 'single cell' is? I guess for length you'd have to go for a blue whale neuron ... For size? An Ostrich egg perhaps (if you can include gametes). Interesting that whale ova are smaller than ostrich ova- this is probably the whole point of a placenta.

Why are we happy to eat the ova of chickens but not rooster semen? I wonder what Gromia tastes like?

Other Food Things I Wish I Could Forget:

1. eggs are chicken ova

2. gelatine is made from boiled animal bones and skin.

3. musk comes from a gland near the anus of deer.

4. the bacteria responsible for stinky cheese is also found between the toes.

Count your Great-Great Grandparents

How many great-great grandparents did you have? If the answer is less than 16 then there must have been some inbreeding. Don't worry- an Icelandic study has found that 3rd cousin marriages are the most fecund! (although the actual reasons behind this are hotly disputed).

In any case, we are all inbred- if we weren't we'd all have more ancestors than have ever lived on the planet. I got to thinking about this after listening to iTunes U Berkeley History 4A (again) on the end of the Roman republic- specifically regarding Cleopatra (VII) - empresss of Egypt.

Although the Ptolemaic dynasty were Greek ( descendents of one of Alex-the-Great's generals) - they continued the Egyptian tradition of inbreeding. Cleo herself only had 6 great-great-grandparents ... and most of these were related! Reminds me of the hysterical "30 Rock" episode with Prince Gerhard Messerschmidt Rammstein von Haupt - the genetically deformed Habsburg prince who falls in love with Jenna. I guess the character was based on the last Habsburg king of Spain: the mentally and physically disabled Charles II.

The New Genetics

Another great article by the always-brilliant Carl Zimmer on migrating exons, HERV's, epigenetics - and 'non-coding DNA'.

Fascinating that somebody just made up the word 'gene' ... just as somebody else made up (co-opted) the work "quark". I guess it makes sense - these two concepts are so revolutionary that they needed new words created for them. What will be the neologism that will define our current networked era? Probably "Spam".

No Need for Religion to be Religious

Probability waves- interacting and becoming particles, held together by nuclear glue, orbiting electrons, atoms and molecules, DNA unwinding, transcribing, proteins made on a ribosomal anvil, pushing out into the cytoplasm, nerves transmitting, thoughts, moving fingers made of bone, typing sentences made of language. Love, children, happiness, music. All this from a single cell- divided again and again- folded, kneaded and then pruned. Grown in my mother. The recipe now 14 billion years old. At midnight- staring out with monkey eyes at a starry sky - each point from a different age, a billion neutrinos silently streaming up from the sun through my feet. Imagining i'm pulling on the universe just as it is pulling on me.