According to Kimball, when the barrier of entry is lowered and more folks have an opportunity to peddle their wares in the marketplace of ideas, the room available to “thoughtful, considered editorial”‘ is severely diminished, because “everyone has an equal voice” on “this ship of fools.”

Hamilton Nolan countered the notion on Gawker, saying, “the democratic aspect of the internet that’s so terrifying to the old guard is not one that means that every opinion is equal; it just means that every opinion can be equally heard.” And that’s what makes it so easy to find thoughtful, considered editorial in the wilderness of the Web: the fact that people who have thoughtful, considered things to say about a topic and may very well be experts on that topic -  but might not have had the means, the time, or the inclination to speak on that topic in a traditional media outlet – can go ahead and talk about it.

Of course, there’s plenty of bullshit on the Internet, too, but it’s hardly like the apocalyptic vision Kimball has running through his head, because the shit isn’t just flowing freely. The trick is that on the Internet, every reader is their own gatekeeper. We don’t have to rely on any Christopher Kimballs to tell us which information is worth our time which experts and pundits pass muster and which editorial is thoughtful and considered. A reader keeps pointing and clicking and hunting and pecking, and the wheat is eventually separated from the chaff and the cream rises to the top.

Now, the best part of all of this is that only a few days before the Gourmet news broke, I received a sample issue of Cook’s Illustrated in the mail. If you want thoughtful, considered editorial of the type that Kimball talks about, I suggest you run screaming in the other direction. Keith Dresser’s (obviously an expert created from the top down and with a lifetime of experience, otherwise he would not have made it onto Mr. Kimball’s hallowed pages) “How to Pan-Sear Shrimp,” insists that shrimp can be caramelized. This is wrong and happens to be a pet peeve of mine. The browning that happens when you pan sear shrimp, or a burger, or grill a steak, etc. isn’t caramelization at work, but the Maillard reaction, a complex series of chemical reactions that occur when the carbonyl group of a reducing sugar reacts with the amino group of an amino acid, usually in the presence of heat. This non-enzymatic browning results in an array of molecules and compounds responsible for positive and negative flavors and odors. In layman’s terms, it’s the chemical reaction that gives your meat that wonderful brown, flavorful crust.

The results of the Maillard reaction (named after Louis-Camille Maillard, the French physician and chemist who was the first person to describe it) often look and taste the same as those of caramelization, but they’re two very different processes. The Maillard reaction involves both reducing sugars and amino acids, while caramelization involves only sugars undergoing various chemical reactions (among them, sucrose inversion, intramolecular bonding, isomerization and dehydration, condensation, fragmentation and polymerization reactions).

It’s a mistake that’s easy enough to make (even celebrity chef Robert Irvine talks about caramelizing meat in an episode of Dinner: Impossible), but the facts are easy enough to find on various food science web sites. Maybe Kimball should make sure is own house is in order before blaming the Internet for anyone’s woes.

[1] The first comment on the recipe reads: “I found this website from a New York Times article I read today and I am so happy I did! This was the best broccoli casserole ever and my family devoured it and they will not even eat broccoli most of the time.” There’s a special place in heaven for smart asses like that.

Images: Maillard Reaction diagram – Foodmate.net, Louis Camille Maillard – The Louis Camille Maillard organisation via Wikimedia Commons

The study started in 1975 at Ridge Lake, an experimental study lake in Fox Ridge State Park in Charleston, Illinois. Over the course of four years of controlled fishing, the bass from the resident population of the lake were caught, measured and tagged to keep track of how many times each fish had been caught, and then released.

The researchers recorded thousands of catches and found that some fish went for the bait more often than others, a lot more. One fish was caught three times in the first two days of the experiment, and another was caught 16 times in one year. When the lake was drained, the researchers also found some 200 fish that had never been caught during the study.

A total of 1,700 fish were collected from the drained lake. Male and female fish that had been caught four or more times in the study were designated High Vulnerability (HV) parents, and those that had never been caught were designated Low Vulnerability (LV) parents. The HV and LV groups were placed in separate university research ponds, where they spawned and produced lines of HV and LV offspring. These two lines were marked, raised in common ponds until they were big enough to be fished and then the anglers were let loose, starting the process over again.

Through three generations, the fish in each group followed closely in their parents footsteps (finsteps? finswims?) of either getting caught, or not (the difference in vulnerability between the HV and LV lines grew even larger with each generation), confirming that vulnerability to being caught by fishermen is a heritable trait in largemouth bass.

While that fact might make for great trivia, the study gives us more than just gee-whiz science. It suggests that recreational fishing can cause evolutionary changes the same way commercial fishing can.

The researchers found that most of the selective pressure is occurring on the LV fish, making fish that are already unlikely to be caught even less vulnerable. On the other hand, there was only a small increase in vulnerability to being caught in the HV group[1].

The researchers aren’t sure which inherited behavior causes these differences (it may be a wariness of anglers’ hooks and general lack of aggression that are passed on to offspring), but both these changes, they suspect, have implications for the bass’ reproductive success. Female largemouth bass swim away from their eggs after laying them, while the males stay with the eggs and until they hatch and guard the fry for the first month of their lives. The LV males may go after anglers’ hooks less often, or not at all, but their lack of aggression may also mean that they provide less protection from predators for their young. More aggressive HV males likely have higher mating success and are good protecting their fry from predators, but that aggression also makes them more likely to go after lures, get caught and leave their offspring vulnerable to predators.

During spawning season (in Illinois, this is from about April 1-June 15), males are caught the most, which causes concern for the HV males. Most bass anglers practice catch-and-release fishing, and the research team says that perception is that this has no negative impact on the fish, but during spawning season, if a male bass caught and kept away from their nests for more than even a few minutes, that may be enough time for predators to find the nest and eat the eggs or fry (a previous study by other researchers showed that, if a smallmouth bass is away from the nest for 1.4 minutes, as many as 1,100 eggs can be eaten).

The researchers suggest that wildlife management agencies set aside portions of lakes as bass spawning sanctuaries, where all fishing would be prohibited, and makes catch-and-release mandatory in the rest of the lake during the spawning season. They also recommend immediate catch-and-release regulations in fishing tournaments held during the bass’ reproductive period.

Reference: Philipp, David P., Cooke, Steven J., Claussen, Julie E., Koppelman, Jeffrey B., Suski, Cory D., Burkett, Dale P. Selection for Vulnerability to Angling in Largemouth Bass. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 2009;138:189–199. DOI: 10.1577/T06-243.1

Image:”Largemouth Bass – Micropterus salmoides.” Trisha M Shears.

The Batronaut, a free-tailed bat whose age was unknown, passed away on Sunday, March 15 near his perch on the north side of the Space Shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The cause of death is believed to be the 1400°C exhaust of the shuttle’s rocket boosters.

The Batronaut is believed to have been a resident of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and enjoyed sleeping upside down and eating bugs.

The Batronaut will be fondly remembered by America as the bat that almost made it into space. An account of his final hours, “Interim Problem Report 119V-0080,” has been written by NASA’s Systems Engineering and Integration team.

In lieu of flowers, please build a bat house.

A team of researchers at the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences at the University of Montpellier, France who surveyed the existing literature on the evolutionary perspectives of left-handedness, including its mechanisms and the costs and benefits acting as selective forces on the left-handed, say they may have found the secret to southpaw survival. We lefties simply had a tactical advantage in one-on-one competition.

The team’s study suggests that because lefties are in the minority, right-handed opponents may not have been used to the way they fight, and the element of surprise gave lefties an advantage. Their very uncommonness, and a good left hook, gave them an edge.

Because the advantage allowed them to survive physical confrontation and win resources and mates, left-handedness ies became more frequent over the generations through natural selection.

We can see sort of the same thing happening in the success of left-handed boxers like “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and Oscar de la Hoya and left-handed tennis players like John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Death isn’t on the line at Wimbledon, but everyone loves a winner, so they attract more sex partners and are more likely to reproduce.

The researchers also noted that lefties in many European countries have higher average incomes and are well represented among gifted children with high IQs. Although an advantage in fist fighting explain that, a place at the top of the socio-economic ladder certainly promotes reproductive success, so smarts and cash would result in higher birth rates for lefties and the passing along of left-handedness.

Reference: Llaurens, V., Faurie, C. and Raymond, M. 2009 : Why are some people left-handed? An evolutioanry perspective. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0235

Are There Really Virgin Births?

Who Sent the First Christmas Card?

Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike?

The traditional Scottish dish, made by taking a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, onion, oatmeal and spices and boiling it in a sheep’s stomach, is at risk because lung worms are thriving in the warming climate. The parasite has always been an occasional problem, but infections in sheep are rising because there are less hard frosts on grazing land and the worms can stay on the surface longer, where they’re eaten by the sheep. The more sheep that get infected with lung worm, the harder it is for butchers to get their hands on a decent lung.

Adding to the problem is the fact roundworm and fluke, have become less common in sheep. If evidence of these parasites isn’t found in sheep droppings, then farmers tend not to give the animals de-worming treatments.

Haggis makers have their fingers crossed and some are sourcing lungs from Ireland during shortages. Offal lovers everywhere are no doubt anxious for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to tackle the problem.

Photo: Ian Britton, supplied by FreeFoto.com

First up is a piece from March about a neurological study of jazz musicians that my co-Flosser Ransom Riggs just mentioned on the m_F blog…

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Dr. Charles Limb, a former research fellow with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and a gifted jazz saxophonist himself[1]. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind.”

If you’ve ever been in “the zone,” making it up as you go along, or even seen someone hitting that sweet spot, you know it’s more than remarkable. It’s spiritual, it’s transcendent and it’s addictive.

Now, we have a clearer picture of how the brain helps us do that, a cognitive context for creative improvisation.

Limb and his fellow researcher at NIDCD’s (which is part of The National Institutes of Health) Division of Intramural Research, Dr. Allen Braun, chief of the division’s Language Section, both assumed that, as mystical as a musician might look following their muse, creativity is a matter of firing neurons. It’s tangible. We can understand it, and even see in action. That’s what Limb and Braun wanted to do: view, in real time, the brain functions of musicians during improvisation. But how do you see what musical improv (and beyond that, improvisation of any sort, from problem solving to having a conversation) looks like from the inside out? How do you view a brain on jazz?

The World’s Smallest Jazz Club

Laying on your back in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, unable to move your head, see your hands or hear much of anything over the drone of the machine is not the ideal situation in which to show of your musical skills. Until we invent X-ray goggles, though, functional MRI (which shows the amount of blood traveling to various parts of the brain so we can measure the amount of neural activity in those areas) is our best bet, so Limb and Braun had to turn the scanner into a tiny concert hall.

Six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute and three who heard about the study through gossip in the local jazz community, lay down in the machine with their knees bent and were given some special equipment for their performance. A keyboard specially designed for the experiment (it was shortened to fit inside the machine tube and had its metal parts removed so the machine’s powerful magnets wouldn’t attract them) was rested on the pianists’ knees and a mirror was placed over their eyes so they could see the keys. The pianists also wore fMRI-compatible headphones so their music wouldn’t be drowned out by the din inside the tube.

And then, they played.

“We all do ‘do, re, mi,’ but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

“Because musical improvisation incorporates a broad range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic invention that is intrinsically difficult to control,” says Limb in his paper, Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation, “we designed two paradigms, one that was relatively low and one that was high in musical complexity.” In the “low” paradigm, named Scale, the musicians were asked to play an ascending or descending scale, and were allowed to improvise in the “high” paradigm, named Jazz. This allowed the researchers to compare brain activity during the performance of a simple task to that during the performance of a more complex, creatively demanding one.

The Scale paradigm was based on the C major scale. The musicians first played the scale up and down in quarter notes along with a metronome, something most any accomplished musician has done countless times while practicing. They were then asked to improvise, but were limited to playing those same quarter notes within the C major scale. “Although the musicians were indeed improvising, it was a relatively low-level form of improvisation, musically speaking,” Limb said in a NIH press release.

In second paradigm, Jazz, the researchers aimed to “reproduce the high degree of musical richness of a jazz performance.” First, the musicians played a blues melody, written by Limb, that they memorized in the days before the experiment. They were accompanied, via the headphones, by a pre-recorded backing band. They then improvised again, using the chord structure of Limb’s composition as a guide and the backing band as inspiration.

That’s What Jazz Looks like to Me

Once things quieted down, Limb and Braun analyzed the brain scans. All six musicians showed similar brain activity patterns, and the researchers found that, during improvisation, certain parts of the brain were consistently activated while others were consistently turned deactivated.

The prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain’s frontal lobe that controls many of our higher mental abilities, is where the majority of changes happened. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in intellectual function and action, and lateral orbifrontal cortex, which monitors and blocks out inappropriate behavior, acting as our self-censor, displayed a pattern of deactivation, almost to the point of shutdown.

On the other hand, the medial prefrontal cortex, which hasn’t been fully explored but is suggested to be involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors, became highly activated. Other brain scan studies have shown that this same region is very active when people tell anecdotes or make up stories.

The researchers say that the suppression of the musicians’ self-monitoring mechanisms and firing up of the “story telling” part of our brain makes sense given the notion that improvisation is an outlet for a musician to express their individual musical voice.

The brain scans also show that, during improvisation, there was increased neural activity in the sensory areas responsible for touch, hearing and vision, despite the fact that there was no significant change in what the musicians were touching, hearing or seeing when they switched from the Scale paradigm to the Jazz paradigm. Limb thinks that brain might “ramp up its sensorimotor processing in order to be in a creative state.”

The most interesting finding is that the brain scans from the two improv sessions were nearly identical, the same pattern of activation and deactivation described above occurred whether the musicians were improvising within the one-octave scale or had free reign to do whatever they wanted over Limb’s tune. This lends some support to the idea that, basically, this is what creativity looks like. If the difference in neural activity between the memorized and improvisational paradigms was the result of increasing complexity, then there should have been a greater difference between the two improvisation sessions, also, since the Jazz paradigm improvisation was more complex than its Scale counterpart. Braun concludes that “there is no single creative area of the brain—no focal activation of a single area. Rather, when you move from either of the control tasks to improvisation, you see a strong and consistent pattern of activity throughout the brain that enables creativity.”

Limb says that this pattern of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior. He and Braun plan to use similar experiments to see if the brain activity they have found also occurs when other artists, like writers or painters, and non-artists are asked to improvise.

On that note, I don’t think further experiments with musicians would be a bad idea, either. This experiment overlooks an important element of improvised music, especially in jazz: the social factor. Jazz improvisation is about more than just the soloist and their instrument, the musicians play off of each other and the musical relationships unfolding during each measure affect the output of every person in the group. Designing an experiment that accounts for the social dimension of musical improvisation would be nearly impossible with the equipment we have now, though. Even if we could line up four or five fMRI machines and make sure the musicians could hear each other clearly, it would be no small feat to play the saxophone, much less the drums, inside the scanner.

***

Limb and Braun’s study was published in the February 27^th issue of Public Library of Science (PLoS) One, an open-access journal. The full paper is available to read in its entirety on the web.

Reference: Limb, C.J., Braun, A.R., Greene, E. (2008). Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation. PLoS ONE, 3(2), e1679. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001679

Image Credit: Bob Garas, via Stockvault

But that’s about to change. The endless desert part, anyway. Last Friday, the United Nations announced a plan to restore Iraq’s wetlands (according to some scholars, the site of the Garden of Eden) and list them as a World Heritage Site.

The Iraqi wetlands (saying it over and over doesn’t make the idea seem any less weird, does it?) once covered a tens of thousands of square miles and were home to snakes, lizards, frogs, fish, water buffalo, gazelles, jerboa, birds and tribes of people known as the Marsh Arabs or Ma ˤdān (’dweller in the plains,” a disparaging name given to them by desert tribes).

Today, the wetlands are mostly decimated. First, fighting during the Iran-Iraq War spilled into the area. Then, in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein began draining the area and diverting water flow in order to expand military access to the land, gain more political control over the Marsh Arabs and flush out rebels after a failed Shia uprising.

When U.S. forces invaded in 2003, only some 400 square miles of marsh remained. Once Hussein’s regime was brought down, locals began destroying the dams that held water back and allowed the wetlands to flood again. Today, more than half the original wetlands have been restored, and thousands of birds and fish, as well as the Marsh Arabs, have returned to the land.

The U.N.’s project, which is being partially funded by Italy, will concentrate providing safe drinking water and renewable energy for the Marsh Arabs, planting reed banks and beds and managing the re-flooded areas to ensure the return of plant life. If all goes well, Iraq could be able to approach the World Heritage Committee for listing in two years.

Image: “Marsh Arabs poling a traditional mashoof in the marshes of southern Iraq.” Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library

If the fact that the Earth isn’t going to be destroyed by the LHC isn’t reason enough to celebrate, then we have these lil’ guys…

Cuter than the real hypothetical ones and you can snuggle with them without having to build a particle accelerator in your bedroom.