On the Beat

andrewducker linked to this post on the Huffington Post: Why The Smartest People Have The Toughest Time Dating. It is pretty USA-centric, but since I know some pretty clever people out there, I post the link here as a public service!

[Edit: ...and I am amused that Google ads served up "moving on after divorce"!]

andrewduckerlinked to this blog posting about taming perfectionism.

I think there may be others on my f-list who find it interesting.

I have been playing jazz on the iPod through the hifi.

I just recognised a tune from the first note: a cymbal crash. I heard the sound and started singing (well, I call it singing…) the theme as it came in.

From that simple sound, I knew the tune and all its parts – the tempo, mostly – and knew all the rest.

It was of course a tune I knew well, and particularly like: Spiritual, by John Coltrane, from the Afro Blue Impressions album (which you can listen to for free on Last.fm: all of it. If you don’t know it, it is a brilliant album, full of exciting, life-affirming music. Go listen!)

I am pretty good at recognising artists from tunes, and often early on into a tune: a couple of notes in to what is playing now I knew it was Colin Steele – a trumpeter.

But I am still surprised that I recognised Spiritual from the first cymbal beat.

My last partner used to quiz me repeatedly on how I recognised pieces of music. I could never say; it annoyed the hell out of her. How do I know Coltrane when I hear him? How do I know that the saxophonist I’m listening to now is Andy Sheppard? (The really interesting thing is that I have just realised it is Andy Sheppard; but it is not an Andy Sheppard CD, which I had thought it was – it is a Gil Evans’ big band CD.)

Part of it is down to recognising the tune; a lot of it is down to recognising the style - but I don’t know how I recognise a musicians’ style: I know it’s Sheppard, but I can’t say why. Yesterday, shuffle threw up a piano trio piece, and I knew the bassist was Charlie Mingus. But I couldn’t say how I knew. Miles stands out on trumpet.

Part of it is in the music, too. I have little early jazz, so it is either going to be Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington – easy to tell apart. Small group 1940s jazz – either Lester Young (Count Basie) or Ellington again. The main practitioners of bebop are pretty easy to identify, too. Jazzrock? I have only a handful of jazzrock CDs, and they are ok to tell apart.

I suppose I should be good at recognising drummers, anyway. Art Blakey is a dead giveaway – something in the way he did his fills: there is something instantly recognisable about Blakey. Elvin Jones – the drummer most associated with Coltrane – had a unique style, too.

But I am still surprised to identify him off a single cymbal beat.

The human brain is really rather remarkable.

Euan Semple got tagged for a meme on Mindapples.org:

• Write a post telling your readers five things you do that help keep you mentally well (and answer any of the other survey questions too if you like)
  
• Link to the Mindapples site www.mindapples.org

I found it quite hard to come up with my list: there are things I like to do a lot, but I don't know if those are what keep me mentally well.

But this is what I came up with:

• try new things when I can
  
• listen to music
  
• go walking
  
• think about the people I love
  
• read... cook... eat... drink wine...

See, I told you I found it hard!

From the_red_shoes...

From the Scotsman: Cleverer children are more likely to vote for the Green Party or the Liberal Democrats in a general election as adults, research has suggested.

Actually, it doesn't sound like a particularly good piece of research.

"The researchers found people who reported voting in 2001 for the Green Party and Liberal Democrats had the highest average childhood intelligence scores.

Those who were cleverer were also more likely to take part in rallies and demonstrations, to sign petitions, and to be more interested in politics generally."

It's in the Times Online, too: Brainy children ‘likely to vote Green’. Though actually it is both LibDem AND Green.

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about social networking, trying to work out how I felt about online identity.

When I was visiting some friends a short while after, they had a bit of a shock regarding their daughter’s online identity. A friend of hers had emailed her from school with a link to a website that was picked up by the school’s anti-pornography email filter. The headmaster had forwarded the email to my friend – he couldn’t look at the site (for obvious reasons!), and he wanted my friends to be aware of the email’s content.

It turns out that my friends’ daughter shares her name with a porn star.

(Actually, she shares her first name and her mother’s maiden name with a porn star; but it is the same thing, really.)

The girl’s friends had simply attached a google search of her name to the email; since they had done the search at school, they couldn’t have looked at the site that came top. (Thinking about it though, the school should really have better filters – I think you can set google to ignore porn websites: you’d have thought a school would want to do that!)

The mother was really freaked out by this; her husband and I were a lot less phased, which might simply be that as blokes we are aware of the commercial nature of most of the internet. She was also really disturbed that anyone googling her daughter’s and her names would find material like that, and that this would haunt her daughter through her life.

I can see it is a problem: if she takes her mother’s maiden name, which isn’t wholly unlikely, that is what employers or friends would google to see what was out there. But also, there is more or less nothing that one can do about it.

Except buy all possible web addresses comprised of your names!

I have just been reading a piece on the New York Times website about the increasing role Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media play in our lives (via BoingBoing.

It reminded me a lot of an article I read in the Independent earlier in the summer; I meant to blog about it at the time (indeed, I was going to tie it in to an article in The Economist about Jimmy Whales – the founder of Wikipedia - although, irony or ironies, articles on the Economist website can only be read by subscribers: it is distinctly not open source or “web 2.0”).

The article in the Indie, by Michael Savage (no idea if he is this Michael Savage or not; but it was in keeping with his thesis that I needed to Google him!), takes a privacy angle: are we happy that all this personal information is out there? (I was going to write “private”; but of course if it is on the internet, private is the one thing it isn’t.)

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I heard about about this piece of research on the radio yesterday morning.

Scientists from Heriot-Watt are looking at personality traits and musical preference.

Apparently liking classical music indicates "high self-esteem, creative, introvert and at ease" whilst jazz indicates "high self-esteem, creative, outgoing and at ease.

And if you like opera, you are "gentle".

You can take part in the research by completing the questionnaire here.

There was a bit on the radio news this evening about how many managers in organisations are actually clinically psychotic.

Unfortunately, I can't find a link for it.

How annoying.

(Googling "psychotic managers" produced all sorts of interesting things. But not the right thing.) It was from a conference on psychology. Maybe I should ask secretly_evil.

Anyhow. When I find it, I'll post it.

Until then, take my word for it. Managers can be psychotic...