The Case Of The Zombie Chickens

Oh what a world we live in:

When Jim Stauffer of Petaluma saw a chicken crawling out of a mound of compost like the living dead, he knew something had changed at the egg farm next door. “We called them zombie chickens,” Stauffer said. “Some of them crawled right up out of the ground. They’d get out and stagger around.”

What Is Music?

The super-stimulus theory:

The main idea of the theory is that music is a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality, where “musicality” is actually a perceived property of speech. “Musicality” refers to the property of music that determines how “good” it is, how strong an emotional effect it has, and how much we enjoy listening to it.

The book is available as a free download. (via)

Nonmusicians

Using a Nelson Riddle orchestral arrangement of “You Make Me Feel So Young” […], Wolpert had a professional singer perform the melody. Then she used a digital multi-effect processor to create two bitonal versions of the accompaniment: one a full musical step higher (G when the singer was in F), and the other a step lower (E-flat). She then played the “music” for 40 nonmusicians and 10 professional musicians.

You can see where this is going, right? (via)

Did A Vehicle…

Says Gary McKinnon, who was arrested after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks:

Old-age pensioners can’t pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy.

Tinfoil Helmet Alert? Time may tell… (via)

Like, Uptalk?

Are you an uptalker? You know? Like when everything you say sounds like an interrogatory statement?

I had no idea that a change in the “intonation contour” of a sentence, as linguists put it, could be as contagious as the common cold. But before long I noticed a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation in my own speech. I first heard it when I myself was leaving a message. “This is Jim Gorman? I’m doing an article on Klingon? The language? From ‘Star Trek’?”

The Wisdom Of Crowds

As with many things, our appreciation of a given piece of music is largely influenced by what others think of it, New Scientist reports:

…participants [in the study] who could see how often a song had been downloaded tended to give higher ratings to songs that had been downloaded often, and were more likely to download those songs themselves. That created a snowball effect, catapulting a few songs to the top of the charts and leaving others languishing.

Debbie Does Demography

You stick it to them Native ‘mericans, Debbie!

… But the study also found that “Native” Americans have dry ear wax and body odor similar to Asians, proving they migrated here from Asia. So whom did THEY steal the land from? Somebody else, obviously. Yet, no “Dances With Wolves” and “Into the West” from Hollywood about that.

Good grief.

Via the oft-entertaining blog.zog.org.