Earthquakes in music

I already have written about earthquake records transformed into music (here and here). However, I did not realized that earthquakes could also have inspired music compositions. As I was reading The Melodies of Monsoons: Weather in Indian Classical Music, I was wondering if earthquakes also inspired classical music. 

And, certainly, a few works have been composed after these natural disasters. Among them, the beginning of Handel’s Messiah and Telemann’s Die Donnerode. The later particularly interests me because it was inspired by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. 

The Lisbon earthquake struck in the height of the Age of Enlightenment. Two opposing ideas, the orthodox religiousness, and the prevalence of the reason, tried to explain such a natural disaster. It inspired Voltaire’s Candide, which would be later transformed into a Bernstein’s operetta, and a strong debate about the existence or not of a benevolent deity. Rousseau found in this earthquake grounds for returning to the natural life, far from the cities. The Lisbon earthquake inspired the creation of the Portuguese fados (fate), so embedded now into their culture. And here I leave you, with Amália Rodrigues:

Visualization of Japan earthquakes in 2011

Very interesting video of the earthquakes in Japan in 2011, when the devastating Tōhoku earthquake occurred. Enjoy!

Spanish is the happiest language

So it seems that we tend to use more positive words than negative ones in our language. Not only Spanish, as the title of this entry says, but in general. The thing is that Spanish people tend to use more positive words than the rest of people. Or so they say in this article. They say “The words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias”. It seems that Spanish speaking people tend to be more positive than other people. 

It surprised me that the word gift has a negative meaning in German. I guess they are just thinking about giving something and not receiving, or, who knows? What can you expect from people that have the word Schadenfreude, which means the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others? 

So, why is Spanish somewhat biased towards positive words? I have no answer for that, but I guess it has to be with our openness and the good food, wine

and weather. What do you think?

Music in the DNA

I have read this article and I found it very interesting. It summarizes the different ways in which our DNA can be translated into music. Read it if you are interested in the topic. One of the ways to create music is translating the 22 amino acids that can be obtained from our DNA bases into microtones. 

One of the composers that use DNA is Stuart Mitchell. Check this composition. It is absolutely beautiful:

The Ig Nobel prizes

As every year, the Ig Noble prizes have been awarded. For those who don't know what the Ig Nobel prizes are, I will explain a little bit: they are awarded to real research studies that, somehow, end up almost like a joke, and are amusing. As they say, improbable research is research that makes people laugh and then think.

This year, the winners are: 

MEDICINE PRIZE: Masateru Uchiyama et al., for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Laurent Bègue et al. for confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive. 

JOINT PRIZE IN BIOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY: Marie Dacke et al., for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way. 

SAFETY ENGINEERING PRIZE: The late Gustano Pizzo [USA], for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers — the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. 

PHYSICS PRIZE: Alberto Minetti et al., for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond — if those people and that pond were on the moon. 

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Shinsuke Imai et al., for discovering that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realized. 

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE: Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl, for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days — all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not. 

PEACE PRIZE: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding. 

 PROBABILITY PRIZE: Bert Tolkamp et al., for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again. 

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Kasian Bhanganada, et al., for the medical techniques described in their report "Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam" — techniques which they recommend, except in cases where the amputated penis had been partially eaten by a duck. [THAILAND] . 

You can see the whole ceremony at: 

I would love to be awarded, but I think I'm not good enough :(

Are we living in a simulation?

I was reading the other day about the Simulation Argument here. I found it very interesting.

 The question raised is: are we living in a simulation?

The concept was popularised by the film The Matrix. Are we living in a virtual world? The Simulation Argument states: One of these are true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

The argument is very simple: if there is any stage when humanity can simulate the human mind, and a lot of people are dedicated to simulate human beings, it is very probable that we are a simulation.

There are many subtleties about this postulate. The first question would be: can we simulate a human mind? If we assume that our minds are only the result of our physical substrate, then, in theory, we could do that. I say in theory because the technological problems of simulating all our neurons and their interactions would be very difficult.

But, for the sake of the argument, let´s say that we can simulate a human brain. Then, what about the universe in which it is immersed? We should simulate it too in order for that mind not to realise it is not a human being. That seems a little bit difficult. In the first place we should know everything about our universe. Could we create a different universe that looks like ours without knowing our own?

Well, the question of the universe is important if we want to create a human mind that is free in its own universe. We could just create a life sequence where the individual thinks he or she is free, but that in fact is deterministic.

It that sense, there are different kind of simulations: the life of this person is completely simulated, or only their psychology is simulated, and they are actually free; you can simulate a population, instead of only one person, both with freedom or without it. In a free simulation with a population their minds would interact and could “discover” their world as we do, that is, creating an objective reality that is made of all the common things they experience. They could develop a science in their world.

But, would they realise they are simulations? Let´s go back to the simulation of the universe. Could we simulate our universe? There are different positions: some people like Wolfram believe that we are just an algorithm, a Cellular Automata, which rules we do not know yet. But, knowing those rules and the initial conditions, we would be able to simulate our universe. However, other people think that it is not possible (see my post “What does the Universe know?”). Would we reach a point where we find the “flaws” of The Matrix?

This also creates a problem for those who think about the simulation of specific lives, such as Einstein´s life, or Napoleon´s life, etc. The Simulation Argument would give the opportunity of having a holyday by living the life of some important person in History. For that we should know, as we said, the rules and initial conditions of the universe.

If the rules were known, the initial conditions could be calculated by an optimization method, by knowing the state of the universe at one point. That is not so “difficult”: we could use the holographic principle and measure the state of the universe in its boundary only.

And that is only if the universe is deterministic. What if it is not so? Could we simulate our History? Perhaps we would be able to create Histories that look alike, but with different details (like in The Foundation series, by Asimov). Or perhaps not.

The Simulation Argument raises a lot of questions, that I think are very important. The main one is: can a human mind be simulated? Well, since I believe that we are only a bunch of atoms (or quarks, or whatever), I think that “in theory” that could be possible. Only we do not have the technology necessary to do so. Then, would it be ethic? That is another question.

More questions come to my mind, but I think I will leave it there. I hope you found it interesting too.

Kevin Bacon is the center of the Universe

Watching TV in UK I came across a commercial with Kevin Bacon making fun of his many connections. What started as a game (see here for a thorough explanation), made the theory of complex networks known for the general public. The Bacon number is the lower number of links an actor has with Kevin Bacon. For example, if an actor (or actress) played a role in the same film Bacon did, he or she has Bacon number 1. If he or she played a role with somebody who directly played with Kevin Bacon, he/she has Bacon number 2, and so on. Of course, Bacon has 0 as his Bacon number. You can check the Bacon number for all the actors and actresses in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) in The Oracle of Bacon. It is striking to see that the higher number is only 9. So, it seems that everybody is very closely linked to Kevin Bacon. Thus the joke of he being the center of the Universe.

This concept is similar to the 6 degrees of separation popularized by the experiment of Milgram. This experiment was like this: you pick two people at random in the world (Milgram did it for the USA), and send a parcel to one of them, telling them that he or she has to reach the other person by direct links, sending the parcel to a known person that could be 'closer' (who knew the other person, or somebody who could know them) to the final receiver. He discovered that, in average, there were only 6 links of separation between sender and receiver. He called that the 'Small world' phenomenon. 

This closeness between the individuals in the world can also be seen in the natural world. The trophic chains, cellular biology, evolutionary relationships, internet, scientific citation networks, even seismicity (I have published some papers on this particular field). In complex networks, the most important concept is not the individual, but the nature of its relationship with the other individuals.

Complex networks studies are based on the mathematical graph theory. And graph theory started as a game too, proposed by the eminent mathematician Leonhard Euler: can you find a path that crosses all the Bridges of Königsberg only once? Euler solved it inventing graph theory in the process. 

It is important to analyze the relationships in a network. For example, it tells you who eats who in a trophic chain, or the main hubs in the internet. Why redundancy is important in the networks, so that a specific attack does not destroy the whole system. And many other applications. You can look it up in the internet, another network. Who said that playing games is not productive? 

As a curiosity, in the scientific publication network (who published with whom) the center of the Universe is Erdős. Even some people has Erdős-Bacon number!