Psychobilly sleaze-rockers Nashville Pussy will be returning to Australia in March. There are a couple of festival dates; hopefully more will follow. Check them out for some hard-rockin’, trashy goodness.
Nashville Pussy. Photo from Dena Flows via Creative Commons license
Hey, Brits. Remember when I wrote about Belgian band Sukilove? They’re playing some UK dates soon: check them out.
The regular outlets don’t seem to be carrying tickets, but I’m sure you can show up on the night.
There’s an mp3 from the band’s new album in my Box, on the right-hand side of my blog page, where you can sample one of the songs. You can hear more here.
Sydney’s Newtown has a community festival each year. Live music features heavily, so I went along to check it out. I was especially keen to see a couple of acts I’d read about in TimeOut recently, The Barons of Tang and Dead Letter Office.
I missed the very start of the The Barons of Tang’s set, but the bit I did catch was a lot of fun. Lots of high-energy punked-up gypsy-folk, a la Gogol Bordello. “Dogs of Rotterdam” is a fun song, with lots of dynamics to keep your attention. Although the rain started, they had the crowd down front dancing. Lots of fun.
The Barons of Tang. Photo from *Insomnia via Creative Commons license
Next was a surprise: Canadian songstress Jill Barber. Her style is very mellow, very chilled-out. I thought it was a good entry for sitting on a lawn with a few thousand other people on a now dry – and increasingly sunny – Sunday afternoon. It gave everyone a chance to chill and have a cold beer and soak up the festival vibe properly.
We stuck around a bit for Dead Letter Chorus. Their gentle, country-tinged indie was well-played, but it didn’t strike the right note. They were neither rambunctious enough to get the crowd up and moving, nor happy-mellow enough to make us smile. Someone behind me said it was “dreary”. It was just misplaced, I think.
On the way out I stopped by one of the smaller stages and heard an excellent closing song from hip-hop/reggae guys Rumpunch. Loud, fun, shoutalong and catchy!
Rumpunch. Photo from chris frape via Creative Commons license
As reported on Wired.com:
During two recent lightning storms, [Gamma-ray Space Telescope] Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could only have been produced by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. The observations are the first of their kind for lightning storms.
My understanding is that particles of antimatter occur very rarely in nature (at least in this observable part of the universe), usually in the radiation belts of charged particles held in place around bodies (like planets – the Earth’s is the Van Allen belt) by their magnetic fields. Finding them closer to home, so to speak, might hold some clues.
Photo from phatman on flickr, via Crative Commons license
Looks like I left behind a storm of public policy on science in the UK.
Professor David Nutt is the chairman of the government-sponsored Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. He’s been trying to put into perspective some of the hysteria around the relative levels of harm of cannabis and ecstasy – drugs to which the UK government had softened, then recently re-hardened, their stance.
It seems that caused some public arguments that resulted in Nutt questioning the UK’s drug policy. That, in turn, got him fired from his position on the Council.
The BBC reports that senior UK academics are now urging the UK government to live by principles of scientific independence, and not to politicise the viewpoints of experts.
Of course, that paper-based collection of excrement The Daily Mail – which loves a good drugs panic – indulges in some deep moral and intellectual relativism about how those arrogant scientists don’t know everything. Unbelievably, they even break Godwin’s Law.
Sydney radio station triple j is a well-known rock and indie radio station here. They claim to have done their part in breaking new artists.
The whole month of November they’re focusing – on a website and digital radio station called triple j Unearthed – on these new and unsigned artists. It’s my new one-stop shop for up-and-coming Aussie acts!
In between looking for a job and a place to live, I’ve been trying to dip my toe into Australian music. If you look at my recent Blip.fm stream you’ll see some of the results of that dipping: a playlist of alternating older and newer Aussie rock tunes.
The classic tracks from that playlist were:
The newer bands’ tracks – some of which are brand new to me in the last few days – were:
Barons of Tang and Dead Letter Chorus are both playing at the Newtown Festival this weekend. I’m going to make an effort to catch both.
It seems Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top’s guitarist, likes being a tourist, and took the tube to Wembley before the band’s big gig last week [BBC story]. In true London fashion, the line he wanted to take was down, and he had to detour. He still beat his bandmates to the stadium.
Thanks to the Aussie for the story tip.
From ScienceDaily:
Two University of Rhode Island associate professors, biophysicists Yana Reshetnyak and Oleg Andreev, have discovered a technology that can detect cancerous tumors and deliver treatment to them without the harming the healthy cells surrounding them, thereby significantly reducing side effects.
The key lies in the acidity level of cells. While normal cells maintain a pH of 7.4 with little variation, cancer cells, expend a great deal of energy as they rapidly proliferate, pumping protons outside and creating an extracellular pH level of 5.5 to 6.5.
While scientists have known about tumor acidity for years, they had not devised a way to target it.
After making some modifications to [pHLIP, the peptide that targets acidity, Reshetnyak and Andreev], they demonstrated that pHLIP could find a tumor in a mouse and deliver imaging or therapeutic agents specifically to cancer cells.
In addition to targeting cancerous tumors, the couple has discovered a novel delivery agent, a molecular nanosyringe, which can deliver and inject diagnostic or therapeutic agents specifically to cancer cells.
Pioneering metal guitarist Tony Iommi owes at least part of the Black Sabbath sound to the fact that he lost two fingertips in an industrial accident when he was a teenager. Rather than give up playing guitar he fashioned artificial plastic- later leather-covered – fingertips and kept on strumming. He still uses them today.
Now into his 60s, Iommi has experienced cartilage degradation due to the repeptitive strain of rockin’ out all these years. But he claims he’s undergoing adult stem cell therapy to regrow some of that cartilage.
There have been successes in using adult (as opposed to the fetal ones that still freak some people out) stem cells to grow replacement knee and windpipe cartilage. And see that first link for a mention of new procedures on how stem cells are guided to areas that need cartilage regrowth.
Good luck to Iommi.
Alright, I’m here in Sydney, and getting close to normal again. What better way to regain normality than regular blogging again?
The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is Australia’s national science agency. They manage national R&D facilities and focus on several areas of interest to the country. Their current “national challenges” include focusing on:
[Side note: by the time this blog appears, I should be in Australia. I've not scheduled any more posts, and I'm unsure how quickly I'll get blogging again. Jet lag will determine, I guess.]
From the BBC: the European Parliament has dropped an amendment to its package of telecom legislation that would have required that countries get court approval to take steps like cutting off internet services to persistent file sharers (music still being the biggest portion of shared files).
It dropped the amendment due to pressure from member states who want to implement tougher laws on internet controls. France is one example. Obviously not everyone is happy with this.
Here’s a good article from the Guardian about Michael Green, a pioneer of string theory and the new Lucasian chair of mathematics – taking over from Stephen Hawking – at Cambridge. It skims the history of string theory and interviews Green for a bit.
The new Homme/Grohl/Jones supergroup Them Crooked Vultures will follow their string of live performances with a self-titled album on 17 November 2009.
From ScienceDaily:
Music serves as a natural and non-invasive intervention for patients with severe neurological disorders to promote long-term memory, social interaction and communication. However, there is currently no plausible explanation of its neural basis for why and how music affects physical and psychosocial responses.
[However] researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center’s have shown neurons tuned to the fundamental frequencies and harmonic sounds, and such neural mechanisms of harmonic processing lay close to tonotopically organized auditory areas.
A first step?
“Emily Howell” is a computer programme created by David Cope, a professor of the University of California – Santa Cruz. Emily – named after Experiments in Musical Intelligence – makes classical music. Initially, Cope had her learn and emulate the style of the great classical composers. Now he’s made her come up with original bits.
Mark Lawson at the Guardian, along with others, thinks that artificially-created music will never have the “soul” of human-created music, and implies that it’ll never reach us in the same way.
I think I disagree. It’s very early days for computer-generated music. And if you’re a materialist – like me – then you probably think that the brain is only a biochemical computer anyway. There’s no reason why an electronic brain couldn’t experience and consolidate and reflect and create just like a biochemical one does.
Listen to some of Emily’s earlier compositions and see what you think.Her first full album, From Darkness, Light, is due out next spring.
I leave London in a couple of hours; my wife and I are emigrating to Australia. Blog posts for the next few days will be scheduled ones I’ve recently written. I don’t know how quickly I’ll get myself sorted out and blogging again in Sydney, but I expect it won’t be too long. There’s all sorts of upside-down music and science Down Under, you know.
The BBC has announced that it will add another regular radio slot with someone from a musical background in the new year: Jarvis Cocker will be given a Sunday afternoon slot on 6 Music. Nice.
What?
From the Guardian:
Next month sees the release of a CD entitled Bill Cosby Presents the Cosnarati: State of Emergency, a hip-hop concept album that sets out to “tackle such social issues as self-respect, peer pressure, abuse and education… that doesn’t rely on profanity, misogyny, materialism or ego exercise”.
Ill Cosby
Cool, a bionic eye! From ScienceDaily:
A new artificial retina, an array of electrodes implanted on the back of the eye, has been found to restore partial vision to totally blind people. In a study focused on 15 blind participants who had the implant for at least three months, 10 of the patients subsequently tested were able to identify the direction of moving objects.
In this case, the researchers worked around the destroyed cells. Each participant was given a pair of glasses with a small video camera mounted on it, and a belt with a tiny computer attached. The computer processed video images from the camera and transmitted the data to the implanted electrodes on the retina. When the users “looked” at a monitor with a white bar sweeping across a black screen, the electrodes that corresponded with the moving bar stimulated cells in the eye, creating spots of light in their fields of vision.
