Peter Serafinowicz (Look Around You, The Peter Serafinowicz Show, and Paul McCartney in the upcoming Robert Zemeckis CGI remake of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine) directed this new music video for the British electropop band Hot Chip. Just went live a few minutes ago. Stay with it. Brilliant creepy hilarity. LAZERS.

Watch video on MySpace

(I hate linking to MySpace but they have an exclusive on the video for the first few days, and I can't embed stuff from their crap platform. Sorry. I hate linking to "The Sun," too, but their review is hilarious).

I really love the research that they're doing over at Yale's Haskins Laboratories: instead of studying speech perception and production in terms of faithfully replicating alllll of the sounds we make with our mouths, (like the minute clicks, pops, and hisses of consonants), the team is proposing that all we need to understand speech is to track and re-create a few select resonances of the vocal tract. I like to think of speech production in this context as a series of bottles with varying levels of water in them--the mouth is one bottle that changes pitch resonance when you move it to open it or close it, the nasal cavity another, and so on throughout the vocal tract. It ends up sounding like a bunch of complicated melodies that are then combined into a complex micro-tonal harmony, a.k.a., we're all better at perceiving and making music than we think we are!

The examples below break it down into isolated sine-wave patterns that you can combine yourself to build a sentence. What do you think? How easily can you hear words emerge?

Tone combinations

Play Tone 1 alone | Play Tone 2 alone | Play Tone 3 alone | Play Tones 1 and 2 together

Play Tones 1 and 3 together | Play Tones 2 and 3 together

Thanks to Robert E. Remez, as well as Phillip Rubin and Jennifer Pardo at Haskins Labs for allowing me to embed their work here.

Coming up, I'll be writing about a cool ethnographic example of a language that actually uses something like this in practice!

Photo by James Rodriguez, from this multimedia image gallery documenting the inauguration of a memorial monument by the National Coordination of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA) in the former military garrison of San Juan Comalapa in Guatemala. This photo essay includes a multimedia presentation with images and sound recorded during the event. Between 2003 and 2004, the remains of 179 wartime victims were exhumed near this site.

Cartoonist and comic book historian extraordinaire Craig Yoe sent me a copy of his latest book, Milt Gross: Comic Books and Life Story. Most people probably don't know who Milt Gross is, but in the 1920s and 1930s he was a cartoonist beloved by millions for his zany, frenetic comic strips and was hailed as "America's Great Yiddish Humorist." It's safe to say that without Milt Gross, Harvey Kurtzman and Robert Crumb would have turned out to be very different kinds of artists.

The 354-page monster of a book includes a 38-page biography, which tells the story of how Gross went to work with Charlie Chaplin and Joan Crawford, and how he created his famous (at the time) characters and comic strips such as Nize Baby, Izzy Human, Babbling Brooks, Frenchy, Kinney B. Alive, Amateur Night, Sportograms, In the Movies They Do It, Dave's Delicatessen, Looy Dot Dope, Count Screwloose of Tooloose, Joe Runt, Banana Oil, Otto & Blotto, That's My Pop!, and Then the Fun Began.

The remaining 300-plus pages are devoted to full color reprints from extremely rare 1940s Gross comic book stories, which are still funny in the same way that I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and The Flintstones are. Here's an excerpt from Yoe's biography of Gross:

Gross perfected a unique comic Yinglish, a linguistic marriage of Yiddish and English. It permeated his work, particularly in his written and illustrated newspaper column Gross Exaggerations and its resulting compilation book, Nize Baby. Gross explained that this slanguage was "a literal translation of the Anglicized Russian Jew. At least I try and make it so. It is the language of the people--conveyed at times in somewhat ludicrous character. But, so far as I know, it is never false, never out of register. I am too much of a nut on getting things right for that. Its only departure from the actual might, as I've said, lie at times in its ludicrous element. That's necessary, of course, in the work itself."

Max Shulman, the creator of the Dobie Gillis stories and television show, said of Gross, "He is far and away the best Yiddish dialect humorist that ever practiced. His ear is tuned with radar-like delicacy to the locutions of first-generation American Jews. He captures not only the mispronunciations, but also the misconstructions--the subjects scorning predicates, the gerunds peering around corners, the tenses blithely commingling, the participles without visible means of support. The effect in his skilled hands is not caricature, but hilarious accuracy." Shulman added, "You will find a warming absence of spikes, barbs, and jagged edges. Only good nature is here, and light heart. You get a feeling that Mr. Gross wants you to laugh because he likes you. It's a nice feeling."

Omar Chatriwala, a correspondent based out of Doha, Qatar, with Al Jazeera English, has an interesting post up detailing the daily drudgery and detail of reporting in Iraq. Snip from the section about his entry into the country:

It was another hour and a half before a US military administrator called me in. She proceeded to take photos of me from five angles and scan my fingerprints - first my thumbs, then four fingers on one hand, then four fingers on the other, then all five digits individually rolled across the scanner, then forefingers and thumbs again on another scanner. After that, it was retinal scans.

So here again is why I have to say, credit is due to those who report in the country, day in and day out, despite these obstacles.

The Chinese government is offering to subsidize the creation of a trans-Eurasian rail system that would have direct, high-speed links between Beijing and London. It would be the largest infrastructure project ever attempted. Trains would also run to India, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.

Wang said Beijing was already in negotiations with 17 countries over the rail lines, which would also allow China to transport raw materials more efficiently.

"It was not China that pushed the idea to start with," said Wang. "It was the other countries that came to us, especially India. These countries cannot fully implement the construction of a high-speed rail network and they hoped to draw on our experience and technology."

Two grim IRS agents travelled to Harv's Metro Car Wash in Sacramento to hand him a demand-letter for his taxes owing in arrears: $0.04 worth.

Update: To be clear: it was $0.04 in unpaid tax that had accrued over $200 in penalties.

Arriving at Harv's Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. "They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending," says Harv's owner, Aaron Zeff.... "It's hilarious," he says, "that two people hopped in a car and came down here for just 4 cents. I think (the IRS) may have a problem with priorities."

(Image: wealth of pennies, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from r-z's photostream)

In 1993, The Journal of Chemical Ecology published a study concerning chemosensory investigation in snakes, which the crew from NCBI ROFL believes you will find interesting. If you have a delicate disposition, please pretend the post ends here.

From Sociological Images:

The Florida Family Policy Council [a conservative Christian organization] sent out a message about a judge’s ruling to allow a lesbian couple to adopt a relative’s child they had been fostering. The FFPC, which opposes gay adoption, sent out an alert to its members and including an image of the couple... well, in theory. On the left is the photo included with the alert; on the right is a photo of the actual couple.

It’s very obvious use of a stereotype what lesbians look like as a scare tactic. The actual couple doesn’t fit the ideal of the androgynous-looking, angry, mannish lesbian couple. They look like nice middle or upper-middle class professional women who can raise a child perfectly well. They’re attractive by mainstream heterosexual norms of femininity. They look happy and non-threatening.They are simply not sufficiently menacing.

As Nicole points out, the couple on the left isn’t just a stereotype of lesbians, it’s associated with a particular working-class aesthetic, especially the mullets. They aren’t thin and conventionally attractive like the couple on the right.

The FFPC says the use of the wrong image was a mistake. Though it seems they’ve made similar errors before when alerting members about gays and lesbians trying to adopt children.

Animator Mark McDonnell flips through his sketchbook filled with incredibly good drawings. This both inspires me and makes me want to throw in the towel.

The best part of this story from TimesOnline, about the "therapeutic ringtone" craze currently seizing Japan, isn't the fact that there are ringtones that allege to adrenalize you, ringtones that allege to improve your skin tone ("through the power of alpha waves") or ringtones that allege to "cause pollen lodged [in the sinuses] to fall from the nasal cavity." The best part isn't even that the guy behind the concept is the same guy who came up with a synthetic mosquito drone which is inaudible to people over 60 but useful for discouraging teenagers from "congregating in parks at midnight." These are just gravy. The really beautiful part of the story is the awesomely disingenuous endorsement offered by a spokesperson for Index, the mobile phone company that peddles the wonder tones: While it's true that there's a scarcely a shred of research to indicate any basis for the claims that the sounds do anything, "The number of downloads suggests the ringtones must be working to a certain extent." This is exactly the kind of logic that suggests Shake Shack must have the best burgers in New York because the lines are so long, and it needs to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame for Business Doublespeak.