i just realised that the reason why the left breast is so ubiquitous in lesbian fiction is because it’s the closest one to the heart. and i had to share it.

THE HARD ONS are being joined by THE ASSASSINATION
COLLECTIVE from Melbourne, THE THAW and CALL THE
MEDIC, CALL THE NURSE in a benefit gig to raise money
for people arrested after the G20 protests.

G20 arrestee benefit gig with:

The Hard Ons
The Assassination Collective (melb)
The Thaw
Call the medic, call the nurse

Date: Thursday 7th February
Cost: $10
Venue: Annandale Hotel
Cnr. Parramatta Rd & Nelson St, Annandale

first band on by 8:30

All proceeds to the G20 arrestee fund.

In November 2006, people took to the streets of
Melbourne to confront the G20, a meeting of the
world’s most powerful finance ministers whose policies
perpetrate suffering and violence in countless
communities around the world every day. Since that
protest, Victorian and Federal police have carried out
a vast operation of surveillance and arrests, raiding
houses at dawn and slapping protestors with ludicrous
charges and repressive bail conditions. This is a
campaign of intimidation and part of an attempt to
criminalise protest; it is an attack on everyone’s
ability to resist war, poverty and oppression.

To defend political protest, people are organising in
solidarity with those arrested and supporting them by
raising money to help with legal costs and other
expenses. For more information see www.afterg20.org

The assassination collective is number one on my punk band list. They are really freakin excellent.

1001 nights cast
…it’s a stories and performance durational art project by barbara campbell. I’d like to write something for it, except i’m caught in a stasis between work and possibility, potential daydreams and stories that will swallow up the whole day, and then i will have done nothing, perhaps not even written a thing, just listened quietly to the sounds inside and out of the office, wondering what i am doing here.

what is a story anyway? and what could i possibly tell? heh - everything, nothing.

perhaps you want to write something?

soooo, i’m back at work, lining up at the coffee cart, and noticing the price list has little stickers all over it from where they’ve rebranded the students’ union from one innocuous and ingratiating euphemism to another. It used to be “SAM” - students at/@ macquarie; now it’s U@MQ. Come to think of it, how the hell do you pronounce that acronym in 1 syllable? Wamk? It’s far too awkward to recite one letter at a time. But this is not the point in my story. It’s the advertising byline gracing the back of the accompanying coffee card:

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
From Dennis Overbye

via 3 quarks daily

Time was the not-so-secret weapon of the medieval church; the tolling of the church bells every quarter hour was a ubiquitous reminder of Death-the-Universal-Leveler. In the early centuries of the first millenium, the Gnostics believed that the souls of dead people entered the earth’s atmosphere as pure information. It was like the first sci-fi technology of time-travel. The living can absorb the dead at any time. Therefore everyone knows everything and all time exists simultaneously. The species has an infinite capacity for memory. Time is mixed with blood. At the end of the French Revolution’s reign of terror in 1789, the Jacobins invented a new calendar. The revolution is a break with past recorded time, ushering in a new regime. The years had names: Humidor and Thermador. Pol Pot, who’d studied history at the Sorbonne, tried to do this too after murdering half the population of Cambodia. Time starts new. In the 1920s, the Dadaist Hugo Ball saw his nomadic movements around the backwater towns of Europe as a flight out of time. He wanted to arrive someplace where time stood still. Is it a coincidence that Ball, like [Paul] Thek and Simone Weil, was ambivalently Catholic?”

Aliens and Anorexia, Chris Kraus, Semiotext(e) Press

via sicksummerinbed

i’ve been a little aloof from the internets, trying to have a holiday and ‘connect with people’, but a new friend said… i was reading this thing about how perhaps the nervous system doesn’t use electrickery to communicate through the body, but soundwaves, ie, on a cellular level.

this sounds interesting, don’t you think?

Consider the following: Anything that moves has a vibration. Though invisible, every aspect of our material world at the atomic level moves constantly. Wherever there is motion, there is frequency. Though inaudible at times, all frequencies make a sound. All sounds resonate and can affect one another. In the spectrum of sound - from the movement of atomic particles to the sensory phenomenon we call music - there is a chain of vibration:
• All atomic matter vibrates.
• Frequency is the speed at which matter vibrates.
• The frequency of vibration creates sound (sometimes inaudible).
• Sounds can be molded into music.

This chain explains the omnipresence of sound.

Resonance is the single most important concept in understanding the constructive or destructive role of sound in your life. Entrainment, sympathetic vibration, resonant frequencies, and resonant systems all fall under the rubric of resonance.
-from Psychoacoustics

and then she leant over my shoulder “ellen band, pink noise”

Acoustic Mirage: A Sound Installation

Acoustic Mirage invites you to enter a uniquely designed sonic environment in which the boundary between aural reality and illusion dissolves.

As you enter the installation, you will hear “pink noise”, a particular type of filtered hiss which excludes the higher frequencies heard in”white noise”. The sound is derived from many sources including, humidifiers, air filtering machines, ocean surf, and a dishwasher. Because the sounds are combined in random patterns, as you move through the room the “soundscape” changes subtly; new sounds appear and disappear, revealing a complex web containing other sonic information, details and imagery. For many people the combination of these noises produces a mysterious perceptual dilemma: “Did I hear what I thought I heard?” By moving slowly, focusing selectively on combinations of sounds, it is possible to create personalized acoustic images of your own, identifying “sweet spots” that you find particularly compelling or intriguing. ellen band

and further on from finding ellen was some big nerdfest ‘SoundCulture 96′, documentation of which includes this observation:

In Richard Lerman’s Changing States, a tiny flame was used to heat metal strips attached to contact microphones. As the metal deformed in slow and unpredictable ways under the heat, its eerie transformations were heard greatly amplified. Evoking at once the micro-world of the grain of metal and the macro-reality of plate tectonics, the piece served as an allegory for the process of generating sound itself: sound like fire is simply an artifact of the transfer of one form of energy into another, expended in an instant and then gone. the rest of the article

but it’s time to return to the nerves and soundwaves, so i’ve picked this article to share with you… no i haven’t! That one is good, but “The Nerve”, by Wes Phillips at Stereophile is far more interesting and entertaining, and for those reasons alone, I am going to reproduce it in full! Blockquote stand by!

The Nerve!
By Wes Phillips
March 11, 2007 — (This article has been edited to reflect factual changes and comments from our learned colleague, Dr. Kalman Rubinson, Associate Professor at NYU’s Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, who is careful to point out that he is commenting, not on the research, which he has not read, but only Heimburg’s and Jackson’s criticisms of current understanding and terminology—areas with which he has more than a passing acquaintance.)

In a statement that turns conventional knowledge on its ear, Thomas Heimburg and Andrew Jackson of Copenhagen University have declared that nerves do not relay electrical impulses from the brain to other parts of the body.

“For us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation,” Heimburg says in a statement on the University of Copenhagen website. “The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that such heat is not produced.”

(Rubinson observes: “The reason is that the heat is produced in the creation and maintenance of a large ionic imbalance. The generation of electrical impulses (action potentials) uses the energy stored in the imbalance.”)

Conventional wisdom holds that neurons, the nerve cells that transmit information, send messages electrochemically—chemicals (ions) create an electrical impulse that is passed along to the next neuron. The impulse passes from one neuron to the next in one of two ways: either through direct electrical links (electrical synapses) or via chemicals called neurotransmitters (chemical synapses), which act on external receptors, which open channels that allow smaller ions (such as sodium, potassium, and chloride) to pass through.

Heimburg and Jackson theorize that sound propagation—a purely mechanical explanation—makes more sense than electrochemical conversion. One drawback to that suggestion would be that sound propagates as a wave, spreading out and becoming weaker over distance. Ah, they say, if the transmission medium has certain properties, it is possible to create localized pulses (solitons) which propagate without losing their strength, changing shape, or spreading.

(Rubinson thinks the answer is even simpler: “Vibrations (a better term than sound since no one ever hears this) can be confined to a single element if the physical impedance of energy transfer to other elements is high. That’s why most of sound bounces off the surface of a pool and a submerged swimmer hears little of what is going on above. Of course, that requires the restriction of the energy to a less dense medium.”)

Heimburg and Jackson argue that the nerve membrane, composed as it is of olive-oil–like lipids, is a medium that changes its state from liquid to solid at a particular temperature trigger-point. And wouldn’t you know it? That freezing point is perfectly suited to propagating concentrated sound impulses.

(You can almost hear Rubinson’s eyebrow arch at this one: “Is that freezing point in the biological range? I’ve used olive oil, as have you, and it gets viscous in the cold—but at temperatures not found in a living mammal.)

Heimburg and Jackson have a number of publications looking at medical issues from a physics perspective, most recently a joint paper in Biophysical Journal on “”The thermodynamics of general anesthesia.”

It appears that Heimburg and Jackson’s focus on anesthetics is what has led them to this radical theory. In their précis, the physicists ask: “How is it possible to operate on a patient without pain? It has been known for more than 100 years that substances like ether, laughing gas, chloroform and the noble gas xenon can serve as anesthetics. These substances have very different chemical properties, but experience shows that their doses are strictly determined by their solubility in olive oil. In spite of this, no one knows precisely how anesthetics work and how the nerves are ‘turned off.’”

(Rubinson found a lot to rumble with here. First, he points out, “ether, laughing gas, chloroform and the noble gas xenon” are “really CNS poisons and do not eliminate pain but, rather, eliminate consciousness so that pain and every other sensibility is blocked.” He points out the claim that any substance that has to cross the lipid bilayer that makes up the cell membrane must also be soluble in lipids—even our old friend ethanol. As to the claim that we don’t know ” precisely how anesthetics work and how the nerves are ‘turned off,’” he begs to differ: ” We do know how topical anesthetics work, including those that are injected for local anesthesia: They generally block the membrane channels that let the small ions in/out of the cell. So, this entire paragraph is dreadfully misleading even if the original papers deal with it responsibly.”)

Heimburg and Jackson write: “If a nerve is to be able to transport sound pulses and send signals, the membrane’s melting point must be sufficiently close to body temperature. The effect of anesthetics is simply to change the melting point—and when the melting point has been changed, sound pulses cannot propagate. The nerve is put on stand-by, and neither nerve pulses nor sensations are transmitted. The patient is anesthetized and feels nothing.”

(Again, Rubinson is dubious: “This paragraph seems to be pure speculation of a phenomenon that can already be accounted for by current knowledge.”)

Do we buy it? Is it time to throw out everything we know about the nervous system—and trickier still, revoke a few Nobel prizes? Of course not—but we do love to watch a good fight, even if we don’t have a dog in the fray. We’ll be watching developments in neurophysiology with great interest.

Not to mention starting an office pool predicting when we’ll see the introduction of the first lipid-augmented audio cables.

(03/14/07 Update: We received the following letter:
“Dear Stereophile,

As a long-time reader, I was surprised and delighted to read your piece on the website (”The Nerve!” March 11, 2007) about my work with Thomas Heimburg.

“Regarding the office pool, it may interest you to know that we have already produced lipid cables (called ‘tethers’ in the trade). Thomas, who does the experiments, has beautiful photographs clearly showing the tethers and alternating regions of liquid and solid phase. Our next step is to introduce electrical contacts with the aim of exciting solitons in these ‘artificial nerves.’ Since Thomas and I are both serious Bach listeners, we will certainly attempt to be the first to transmit his music along these lipid-augmented cables!

“Of course, it’s not likely that such cables will be in your local audio store soon. At the moment, they are short (about 100 microns) and quite fragile. And they would probably be both of poor audio quality and expensive.

“Our work seems to have touched a nerve (sorry), and it has received an amount of media attention that is somewhat bewildering for a pair of ivory-tower types. Your piece stands out both for the fidelity with which it presents our scientific ideas and for its accuracy in mirroring the fun we have had in developing them.

“Many thanks!”
Andrew D. Jackson,
Professor of Theoretical Physics
The Niels Bohr Institute)

Rocking out with the scientists! Gimme high 5! Hi fi! Hi sci!