Take it to eleven

Today’s find in the Oxford English Dictionary. pic.twitter.com/Y8zBDDExkg

— Jack Lynch (@JackLynch000) April 30, 2019

It don't mean a thing if it don't got that swing – Happy Birthday, Duke Ellington!

Remembering Duke Ellington, born on this day in 1899 in Washington, D.C. Here's Duke Ellington and His Orchestra performing "It Don't Mean a Thing" in 1943. pic.twitter.com/zfUwRVzdVh

— Dust-to-Digital (@dusttodigital) April 29, 2019

Take off

Miles Davis, the painter

The Paintings of Miles Davis. Started painting & drawing in his 50s and never looked back. https://t.co/wLHBBTS2cc pic.twitter.com/7VrrLTnENk

— Open Culture (@openculture) April 28, 2019

Synthetic philosophy

This is a good essay: "Synthetic philosophy", by Eric Schliesser. Ostensibly a review of recent books by @danieldennett & Peter Godfrey-Smith, it's a good discussion of a type of intellectual project.

Maybe that's what I am, a synthetic philosopher??https://t.co/QD05T4WI2t

— Thom Scott-Phillips (@tscottphillips) April 28, 2019

From Schliesser's essay:

By ‘synthetic philosophy’ I mean a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). Synthetic philosophy may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences, a new science connected to the framework adopted in the synthetic philosophy, or new projects in philosophy. So, one useful way to conceive of synthetic philosophy is to discern in it the construction of a scientific image that may influence the development of the special sciences, philosophy, public policy, or the manifest image. [...]

Synthetic philosophy, which shares kinship with what was once known as ‘natural philosophy’ or (later) ‘philosophy of nature’ is made possible by, and a response to, the intellectual division of labor within and among the scientific disciplines. It requires skills that are orthogonal to the increasing specialization within the increasingly esoteric sciences. It is, thus, a modern phenomenon of the last two centuries. Of course, it is not the only possible philosophical response to such specialization; for example, Neurath’s conception of orchestration and the development of a unified, scientific language was an alternative approach.

I suppose there's a lot of synthetic philosophy around these days. I certainly had something like that in mind in the first two paragraphs of Synch, Song, and Society, my essay review of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals:

There are at least two reasons why an intellectual specialist writes for a general audience, including intellectual specialists from other disciplines. One is to contribute to civic life by explaining difficult but important subjects in a way that makes them accessible to the citizen who is curious about the world. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct is a distinguished recent example of such a book. But a specialist in some discipline may also seek a broader canvas than is available within the guiding principles of the specialized journal article or professional monograph. Here I think of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. When done well, a book of this type has a value for the specialist that the unadorned popularization, no matter how well done, does not have.

There are important problems that cannot be handled within confines of a single intellectual discipline. The origins of humankind is one of these problems. No matter which facet of that problem interests you, you inevitably find yourself looking at everything – or so it seems. Is music an offshoot of language or did a music-like activity evolve prior to language? In principle we could answer this question by traveling back in time and making direct observations. Unfortunately, that particular principle cannot be realized in the world as we know it, so we must instead approach human origins indirectly by gathering evidence from a wide variety of disciplines – archeology, physical and cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and the neurosciences – and piecing it together. Such work entails a level of speculation that is incompatible with the publication demands of the specialist literature. It also demands a breadth of knowledge that is all but impossible. When done well, however, such a book contributes to specialist investigations by establishing a framework within which more detailed work can be done.

I figure my own Beethoven's Anvil is of this type as well. In my preface I characterized my method as speculative engineering:

Beethoven’s Anvil is about the building blocks and design principles, not so much of music, but of the brains and societies that create that music. My argument is simply that these building blocks—mostly neural circuits and social structures—are necessary. I have no particular reason to believe that I’ve defined the complete set; in fact, I have some some small reason to believe that the set is not yet complete, nor ever will be. The nervous system is plastic, taking the impress of its environment. As culture molds the human environment, so it molds the nervous system. I see no end to culture’s possibilities. Thus, it seems to me quite possible that our descendents a century or two from now will have nervous systems that differ from ours in small but critical ways.

Thus I like to think of this book as an exercise in speculative engineering. Engineering is about design and construction: How does the nervous system design and construct music? It is speculative because it must be. The purpose of speculation is to clarify thought. If the speculation itself is clear and well-founded, it will achieve its end even when it is wrong, and many of my speculations must surely be wrong. If I then ask you to consider them, not knowing how to separate the prescient speculations from the mistaken ones, it is because I am confident that we have the means to sort these matters out empirically. My aim is to produce ideas interesting, significant, and clear enough to justify the hard work of investigation, both through empirical studies and through computer simulation.

Advice from Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk’s 25 Tips for Musicians (1960).

"What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play."https://t.co/0nTrdpeCx3 pic.twitter.com/o2EBKg4XXO

— Open Culture (@openculture) April 24, 2019

On the importance of description (in science)

The extraordinary effort to successfully take a picture of a black hole is only the latest example of something too many social researchers fail to grasp---that a lot of the most important science is *just descriptive* https://t.co/yGXdREU0gF via @WSJ

— Mario L. Small (@MarioLuisSmall) April 20, 2019

Red, orange and the city

Skyward

What happens to the human body in space?

Carl Zimmer, "Scott Kelly Spent a Year in Orbit. His Body Is Not Quite the Same." The NYtimes, April 11, 2019.

Scott Kelly spent 340 days on the International Space station while his twin brother, Mark, stayed on the ground. "He drew blood from his arms. He saved his urine. He played computer games to test his memory and reaction speed. He measured the shape of his eyes." And his brother did the same. A comparison of the data indicates a large number of differences between then two:

On Thursday, just over three years after Mr. Kelly, 55, returned to Earth, NASA researchers reported that his body experienced a vast number of changes while in orbit. DNA mutated in some of his cells. His immune system produced a host of new signals. His microbiome gained new species of bacteria

Many of these biological changes seemed harmless, disappearing after he returned to Earth. But others — including genetic mutations and, after his return, declines in cognitive test scores — did not correct themselves, provoking concern among scientists.

Some considered the risks manageable, while others wondered whether it would ever be safe for astronauts to take long journeys to Mars or beyond. Final answers will depend on studies of still more astronauts. [...]

By many measures, the scientists eventually found, Mr. Kelly changed about as much as astronauts who stayed on the space station for only six months. Eventually the pace of biological change slowed, suggesting that perhaps the human body reaches a new equilibrium in space.

But Mr. Kelly’s body was also altered in some surprising ways.

Dr. Bailey studied special sections of his DNA called telomeres, which sit at the end of chromosomes, protecting them from deterioration.

As people age, their telomeres tend to get shorter. Stress — such as radiation or pollution — may hasten aging by fraying telomeres even faster than usual.

Strangely, the average length of Mr. Kelly’s telomeres increased in space, rather than decreasing, as if his cells were becoming more youthful.

Regular exercise and a healthy diet might be part of the reason. But going to space also might have awakened a quiet population of stem cells in Mr. Kelly’s body, Dr. Bailey said. [...]

The strange lengthening of Mr. Kelly’s telomeres disappeared after less than 48 hours on Earth. In fact, Dr. Bailey and her colleagues started finding many cells with telomeres that were shorter than before Mr. Kelly went to space. [...]

These two lingering changes — in Mr. Kelly’s cognition and DNA — left a number of experts concerned about the risks of a trip to Mars, which could take a year.

Obviously, there's much that we do not know.

A full technical report of the study: The NASA Twins Study: A multidimensional analysis of a year-long human spaceflight.

Tyler Cowen is not in despair over Brexit – "I don’t yet see that anything has fallen off the rails."

I must have read two hundred tweets about how dysfunctional the British government is, or what a bad leader Teresa May has been. Really? That has yet to be demonstrated. I’ve all along been “vote Remain,” but I also recognize Remain works only if British membership in the EU has a certain amount of internal legitimacy.

What might a process of testing that legitimacy look like? Long, extended confusion, lots of back and forth, indecisiveness, and inability to form a durable majority for any other option, perhaps?

Right now the chances of Remain seem to be rising, or perhaps some version of Norway plus, and those are among the better options. I am hardly distraught, noting that I genuinely do not have a strong sense of what will happen next. I am pleased to see that not one of the eight (was it eight?) versions of Brexit could command a majority.

Is it really so tragic and terrible to have all this — whatever comes to pass — revealed only at the last moment? Isn’t that often how optimal search looks? Isn’t it how the “to Remainers all-holy EU” so often does its business? Alternatively, how smooth, open, and transparent did the American constitutional convention actually run?

I’m not predicting triumph or victory here, only that I don’t yet see that anything has fallen off the rails. Nor is the British pound being hammered in the markets. Nor do I know many (any?) people who could have done much better than Teresa May.

But now is the time to pay more attention again, these are the proverbial last five minutes of the basketball game…

Comments over at Marginal Revolution.

Randomness and determinism in dynamical systems

This is kind of incredible. A proof that all dynamical systems (within a large class of such systems) are a blend of randomness and nearly pure determinism. My story in @QuantaMagazine on the weak Pinsker theorem. https://t.co/37km62olWk

— Kevin Hartnett (@KSHartnett) March 27, 2019

Armstrong, early jazz and barbershop harmony

Steve Provizer reviews Vic Hobson, Creating the Jazz Solo: Louis Armstrong and Barbershop Harmony, University Press of Mississippi.

Armstrong and several of the other musicians explicitly say that this was the technique that instrumental bands would also use to learn new material. The part being taken by a given instrument was dictated by the range in which it played: tuba or string bass doing the bass, the baritone part being carried by trombone and the two tenor parts by trumpet and clarinet.

[...] When I listen to early Armstrong music, or read transcriptions, I tend to filter my reactions through received wisdom about why particular notes were played. That is, I accept the primacy of the blues scale and the traditional presupposition that a “European” system of harmony was, in some way, guiding the musician through a solo. [...]

As simply as I can put it: There were techniques of what is called voice-leading that are applied in barbershop harmony. These are the rules that determine what the next note can be, bearing in mind all the other notes in the chord that have to be taken into consideration. I assume that these techniques were predicated on some combination of what sounded good in that era and what was feasible for someone to sing. In a number of cases, this meant choosing notes that would not be correct in a standard harmonic sense. Such notes might be “out of” the chord as then understood and/or create dissonances that were supposed to be avoided. “Snakes,” “swipes,” “funnel harmony” are some of the terms used to denote the moves that a voice could or would make.

Hobson does close analyses of Armstrong solos in “Copenhagen,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “Potato Head Blues” and other tunes in order to show the reader that many of the choices Armstrong makes are rooted in his considerable background in barbershop singing. He comes up with ample quotes from Armstrong to back up the idea that he was not playing the chord, per se, but how the chord sounded to him and what that sound led him to play, as filtered through his long experience with close harmony singing. I had, in fact, often wondered about certain note choices that Armstrong made in his solos and this explanation helped clarify some of these choices for me.

Religion evolves after large-scale societies do

In @nature today, Harvey Whitehouse, @pieterwfrancois, @Peter_Turchin, 9 other coauthors and I analyze 414 societies across 10,000 years of world history to show that religion has coevolved with society to stabilize large-scale societies after they arise. https://t.co/mfbEr2gDtl pic.twitter.com/xdrAhGeVqt

— Pat Savage (@PatrickESavage) March 20, 2019

From a summary article at The Conversation:

We analysed data on 414 societies from 30 world regions, using 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of supernatural enforcement of moral norms to get to the bottom of the matter. New research we’ve just published in the journal Nature reveals that moralising gods come later than many people thought, well after the sharpest rises in social complexity in world history. In other words, gods who care about whether we are good or bad did not drive the initial rise of civilisations – but came later. [...]

Our statistical analysis showed that beliefs in supernatural punishment tend to appear only when societies make the transition from simple to complex, around the time when the overall population exceed about a million individuals.

We are now looking to other factors that may have driven the rise of the first large civilisation. For example, Seshat data suggests that daily or weekly collective rituals – the equivalent of today’s Sunday services or Friday prayers – appear early in the rise of social complexity and we’re looking further at their impact.

Addendum, May 3, 2019:

However:

. . . misrepresentation of experts, changing online data coding in @nature
article after (!!) publication, and placing inappropriate expectations on Research Assistants . . . 2/3https://t.co/p9UIL83sib

— David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) May 2, 2019

Primate mind-reading

Humans aren’t the only great apes that can ‘read minds’ https://t.co/CT9vGiScgR

— The Leakey Foundation (@TheLeakeyFndtn) March 20, 2019