Why Dont You Blog?

Appealing science stuff in the news this week.

• The Guardian’s science podcast is about music. Some of the speakers have voices that could be marketed as aural Mogadon. However, if you can stay awake, the debate is interesting.
• Magpies can see themselves in the mirror.

  Apart from the interesting implications that magpies have some sense of self that’s not completely unlike ours, this is just a beautiful experiment. So elegant in terms of lateral thinking about testing a hypothesis.

  Imagine that you were wondering if magpies could see themselves in a mirror. How would you find out?
  The answer is to put coloured sticky tabs on parts of magpies that they can’t normally see. Then, place the magpies in front of mirrors. The magpies then start noticing the sticky tabs that they previously ignored and make the effort to remove them.

The elegant experiment prompts me to tell my own ludicrous magpie story. There’s no elegance in it. There’s no testable hypothesis. I haven’t even got any evidence that it happened. (I tried to aim my webcam out of the window but it’s useless enough even for its normal webcamming purpose. It just got glare off the glass and I couldn’t focus it properly.)

On a chimney behind my yard, there was a nest, with magpie chicks in it. This was really interesting. (It made a welcome change from watching rats sneak under the yard door, for a start.) I could watch the magpie-lings getting fed, growing bigger and noisier every time I saw them.

A feral tabby cat usually turns up and whines at my back door on Sunday afternoons. He mainly calls round to get warm and dry and to lie on a couch.

He’s the most pampered “feral” cat imaginable. He must have at least seven houses on his round. (Lots of people feed feral cats around here, mainly on account of the rats mentioned above.) If he doesn’t like the flavour of the cat food he’s given, he licks off the gravy/jelly then goes back to rooting through garbage. If he likes it, he demands more, plus a few hours’ sleep on the couch. He’s a very vocal cat, and very affectionate. (Neither attribute would seem like much of a survival strategy for a feral cat, but they certainly work for a cat who’s learned that meowing at humans, purring and rubbing against human legs, is the fastest way to get food and warmth.)

This situation suits me. It combines the occasional pleasure of having a pet with a complete absence of the need to be responsible for it.

A few weeks ago, I noticed him standing in the yard with a furious magpie. I kid you not. The magpie was facing him off - standing about 2 feet away from him - and cawing at him, deafeningly. The cat was neither attacking the magpie nor makng for an exit. He was just cowering, in a defeated stance looking down at the floor.

I watched this for a few minutes and nothing changed. I looked back a few minutes later and the two animals were both on top of the yard wall, doing the same things - shouting in magpie language and cringing in cat body language. (Anthropomorphising, that cat looked damn guilty.)

I looked up at the nest and there were no chicks there. I formed the untestable hypothesis that the magpie was kicking off because the cat had eaten its chicks and that the cat was accepting the magpie’s complaints, on the grounds that it might indeed have done something to get it in trouble.

I lost interest that day. There’s only so long you can wonder what’s going on between a cat and a magpie.

The next weekend, the feral cat turned up as usual. But - in the company of the bloody magpie. The two came into the yard together. The magpie waited in a corner while I opened a pouch of cat food. When the cat had finished eating, they left together.

Disappointingly, this must have been just an early summer friendship. Since then, the cat’s only called round on its own, (Maybe, the cat had incurred some sort of blood debt to the bird and was paying him off in shared plunder. Maybe, the cat finally ate it….)

Popularity: 11% [?]

Popularity: 11% [?]

A post on Rupture the Rapture talked about atheist musicians being obliged to perform religious music and bemoaned the absence of atheist equivalents.

..Tenor voiced his frustration at the “dearth of music” heard at various humanist gatherings, conventions and the like. I may be wrong here, but what I believe Tenor is looking for is accessible music with a humanist bent - music that would be appropriate for such gatherings, but that is of such a nature that the audience could relate to and/or actually participate in. (Humanist karaoke?)…

I suppress a shudder at the prospect of an atheist equivalent of Christian rock. Please, no.

Still, I like the idea of a musical expression of humanism. I did a youtube search for atheist music. Hmm, most of it falls toward the Eastern-European-Heavy-Metal end of the spectrum but there’s plenty there. (I know there’s a well known atheist rapper but I couldn’t find a link and I remember getting distracted by the wonderful existence of genres like ‘nerdcore’ last time I tried it.)

In fact, thinking about “atheist music,” most music fits into this category. It’s not so much “atheist” as “nothing to do with religion” or inherently anti-religion in celebrating the things that organised religion tends to object to.

Sad to say, a lot of religiously-inspired music is pretty damn good. (Gregorian chants, Victorian hymns, Sufi chants, roots reggae…..)

I can’t see a problem with appreciating it as music and poetry. Music exists to move us and, among other things, it can express wonder and transcendence. Just because some people filter these emotions through religion doesn’t imply that we have to buy into their beliefs to appreciate their expression.

If everyone were to start only listening to music that precisely expresses their own beliefs, the world would be pretty silent.

(I obviously don’t like the idea but I’d have no problems recommending it to the people who think everyone else on the bus wants to listen to their tinny mono phonetunes.)

In any case, no one is put off Renaissance paintings because they tend to be brimming with biblical figures. Apart from anything else, we all understand that artists have to make a living. If you live in a world where the Church gives out most commissions, you paint the Nativity or write music for monks.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Popularity: 17% [?]

On a scale of 0 to 10 for lameness, this post is clearly at the low edge of being mobility challenged. Nevertheless, does anyone else find they are getting half their music choices from the adverts?

My first foray into the demonic underworld of people who choose music on the basis of consumer promotions was the Joanna Newsom “This side of the blue” from an IBM advert - IBM no less. Soon followed, on the sort of downward path normally associated with Faust, by Jose Gonzales’ “Heartbeats” (Sony Bravia.) Now, it’s Bedouin Soundclash “When the night feels ” (T-Mobile)

Argh.

I find there is even a website devoted to this shameful practice. http://www.tvadmusic.co.uk/ It describes itself as “your number one website for songs from UK television commercials.” It just feeds the problem, by pointing out new adverts you have never seen.

Sorry.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Popularity: 22% [?]

Tonight at 22:00 http://www.rb3tv.com the band including Tom - related to most of the people writing this blog - broadcast from Barfly, Liverpool.

Counter-intuitively, if you click on tune in- don’t click the icon, click the WORDS beneath. You need winamp or Internet explorer (plus a plug in) - surely everyone has them?

Popularity: 15% [?]

Popularity: 15% [?]