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How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time - Issue 9: Time

How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time - Issue 9: Time
One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. During the second movement I had the unnerving feeling that time was literally grinding to a halt. The sensation was powerful, visceral, overwhelming. It was a life-changing moment, or, as it felt at the time, a life-changing eon. It has been my goal ever since to compose music that usurps the perceived flow of time and commandeers the sense of how time passes. The human brain, we have learned, adjusts and recalibrates temporal perception. We conceive of time as a continuum, but we perceive it in discretized units—or, rather, as discretized units. In recent years, numerous studies have shown how music hijacks our relationship with everyday time. Also in Music The Necessity of Musical Hallucinations By Jonathan Berger During the last months of my mother’s life, as she ventured further from lucidity, she was visited by music. Footnotes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future | Science The first thing to hit Iain Couzin when he walked into the Oxford lab where he kept his locusts was the smell, like a stale barn full of old hay. The second, third, and fourth things to hit him were locusts. The insects frequently escaped their cages and careened into the faces of scientists and lab techs. The room was hot and humid, and the constant commotion of 20,000 bugs produced a miasma of aerosolized insect exoskeleton. Many of the staff had to wear respirators to avoid developing severe allergies. In the mid-2000s that lab was, however, one of the only places on earth to do the kind of science Couzin wanted. Couzin would put groups of up to 120 juveniles into a sombrero-shaped arena he called the locust accelerator, letting them walk in circles around the rim for eight hours a day while an overhead camera filmed their movements and software mapped their positions and orientations. Couzin wanted to know what if-then rules produced similar behaviors in living things.

The Trie: A Neglected Data Structure (with diagrams) From the very first days in our lives as programmers, we’ve all dealt with data structures: Arrays, linked lists, trees, sets, stacks and queues are our everyday companions, and the experienced programmer knows when and why to use them. In this article we’ll see how an oft-neglected data structure, the trie, really shines in application domains with specific features, like word games. Word Games For starters, let’s consider a simple word puzzle: find all the valid words in a 4x4 letter board, connecting adjacent letters horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. The naive solution to finding all valids words would be to explore the board starting from the upper-left corner and then moving depth-first to longer sequences, starting again from the second letter in the first row, and so on. Now, our goal is to find the best data structure to implement this valid-word checker, i.e., our vocabulary. We’d love our data structure to answer these questions as quickly as possible. Enter, the Trie

You May Have Been Born to Flock | Science More than 70,000 people will flood into the Superdome in New Orleans this weekend, while thousands more swarm through the city’s French Quarter. From a certain perspective, might those Super Bowl fans resemble, say, a herd of wildebeest or school of fish? Or maybe a murmuration of starlings? After all, collective behaviors are found across the animal kingdom — and regardless of our penchant for Shakespeare and beer helmets, humans are animals, too. Some scientists think the essential components of flocking behavior, an instinctive tendency to join with others and follow their lead, remain alive inside us. “Where does this pull come from?” In “Spontaneous flocking in human groups,” a paper published in the January issue of Behavioral Sciences, Boos and colleagues describe an attempt to isolate underlying flocking mechanisms hinted at by the large-scale behaviors sometimes seen in crowds. 'Maybe we could trace our flocking back to fish. Some benefits of flocking might be straightforward.

300+ Mind Expanding Documentaries I watch a lot of documentaries. I think they are incredible tools for learning and increasing our awareness of important issues. The power of an interesting documentary is that it can open our minds to new possibilities and deepen our understanding of the world. On this list of mind expanding documentaries you will find different viewpoints, controversial opinions and even contradictory ideas. Critical thinking is recommended. I'm not a big fan of conspiracy documentaries but I do like films that challenge consensus reality and provoke us to question the everyday ideas, opinions and practices we usually take for granted. Watching documentaries is one of my favorite methods of self-education. [1] Life In The Biosphere Explore the wonder and interconnectedness of the biosphere through the magic of technology. [2] Creativity and Design: Learn about all the amazing things that people create with their imaginations. [3] The Education Industrial Complex: [4] The Digital Revolution: [6] Politics:

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