Here is “Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March” from Richard Wagner’s opera Gotterdammerung of the Ring Cycle played by the London Philharmonic conducted by Klaus Tennstedt. This piece was used to great effect by director John Boorman in the movie Excalibur.
The twentieth century’s greatest pianist Vladimir Horowitz (arguments?) plays Domenico Scarlatti’s Keyboard Sonata in B minor, K. 87. Baroque composers Scarlatti, George Frideric Handel, and JS Bach were all born in 1685.
When I was a post doc at BU in the nineties, I used to go to a cafe on Commonwealth Ave just down the street from my office on Cummington Street. I don’t remember the name of the place but I do remember getting a cappuccino that looked something like this:
Now, I usually get something that looks like this: 
Instead of a light delicate layer of milk with a touch of foam floating on rich espresso, I get a lump of dry foam sitting on super acidic burnt quasi-espresso. How did this unfortunate circumstance occur? I’m not sure but I think it was because of Starbucks. Scaling up massively means you get what the average customer wants, or Starbucks thinks they want. This then sets a standard and other cafes have to follow suit because of consumer expectations. Also, making a real cappuccino takes training and a lot of practice and there is no way Starbucks could train enough baristas. Now, I’m not an anti-Starbucks person by any means. I think it is nice that there is always a fairly nice space with free wifi on every corner but I do miss getting a real cappuccino. I believe there is a real business opportunity out there for cafes to start offering better espresso drinks.
Here is a piece by turn of the last century British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, named after the poet who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge-Taylor met with some racism because he was of mixed African descent but had achieved some renown before dying at the young age of 37.
The New York Times Magazine has a nice profile on theoretical neuroscientist Sebastian Seung this week. I’ve known Sebastian since we were graduate students in Boston in the 1980’s. We were both physicists then and both ended up in biology though through completely different paths. The article focuses on his quest to map all the connections in the brain, which he terms the connectome. Near the end of the article, neuroscientist Eve Marder of Brandeis comments on the endeavor with the pithy remark that “If we want to understand the brain, the connectome is absolutely necessary and completely insufficient.” To which the article ends with
Seung agrees but has never seen that as an argument for abandoning the enterprise. Science progresses when its practitioners find answers — this is the way of glory — but also when they make something that future generations rely on, even if they take it for granted. That, for Seung, would be more than good enough. “Necessary,” he said, “is still a pretty strong word, right?”
Personally, I am not sure if the connectome is necessary or sufficient although I do believe it is a worthy task. However, my hesitation is not because of what was proposed in the article, which is that we exist in a fluid world and the connectome is static. Rather, like Sebastian, I do believe that memories are stored in the connectome and I do believe that “your” connectome does capture much of the essence of “you”. Many years ago, the CPU on my computer died. Our IT person swapped out the CPU and when I turned my computer back on, it was like nothing had happened. This made me realize that everything about the computer that was important to me was stored on the hard drive. The CPU didn’t matter even though every thing a computer did relied on the CPU. I think the connectome is like the hard drive and trying to figure out how the brain works from it is like trying to reverse engineer the CPU from the hard drive. You can certainly get clues from it such as information is stored in binary form but I’m not sure if it is necessary or sufficient to figure out how a computer works by recreating an entire hard drive. Likewise, someday we may use the connectome to recover lost memories or treat some diseases but we may not need it to understand how a brain works.
The most dangerous form of bias is when you are unaware of it. Most people are not overtly racist but many have implicit biases that can affect their decisions. In this week’s New York Times, Claudia Dreifus has a conversation with Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, who has been studying implicit biases in people experimentally. Among her many eye opening studies, she has found that convicted criminals whose faces people deem more “black” are more likely to be executed than those that are not. Chris Mooney has a longer article on the same topic in Mother Jones. I highly recommend reading both articles.
Here is the paper I’ll be covering in the Laboratory of Biological Modeling, NIDDK, Journal Club tomorrow
Michael J. Sheehan & Michael W. Nachman
Abstract: Facial recognition plays a key role in human interactions, and there has been great interest in understanding the evolution of human abilities for individual recognition and tracking social relationships. Individual recognition requires sufficient cognitive abilities and phenotypic diversity within a population for discrimination to be possible. Despite the importance of facial recognition in humans, the evolution of facial identity has received little attention. Here we demonstrate that faces evolved to signal individual identity under negative frequency-dependent selection. Faces show elevated phenotypic variation and lower between-trait correlations compared with other traits. Regions surrounding face-associated single nucleotide polymorphisms show elevated diversity consistent with frequency-dependent selection. Genetic variation maintained by identity signalling tends to be shared across populations and, for some loci, predates the origin of Homo sapiens. Studies of human social evolution tend to emphasize cognitive adaptations, but we show that social evolution has shaped patterns of human phenotypic and genetic diversity as well.
Generally, any European music written before the age of Vivaldi and the Baroque Era is called Early Music. It is often performed with instruments that are no longer in use in traditional symphony orchestras such as the viola da gamba, the lute, and the recorder. Here is a nice piece performed by the Opus 5 Early Music Ensemble.
Scientific Clearing House 