toxic textbooks helped cause the economic meltdown

The current economic meltdown is not the result of natural causes or human conspiracy, but because society at all levels became infected with false beliefs regarding the nature of economic reality. And the primary sources of this infection are the “neoclassical” or “mainstream” textbooks long used in introductory economics courses in universities throughout the world.

A new movement (its manifesto is at the bottom of this message) is being launched to encourage universities and schools to use economics textbooks that engage honestly with the real world.

Recently several prominent economists, including Hodgson and Keen, have publicly called for worldwide student protest to help bring about serious change in academic economics, especially in teaching. Although the circumstances for this have never been so favourable, the problem is how to get protest started up to the point where it becomes self-sustaining and nationally and internationally contagious.

To this end a website www.toxictextbooks.com has been set up and, more importantly, also a Facebook group named Toxic Textbooks. The Facebook group is intended to provide the means by which students and others can organize themselves and spread the word.

Three or four minutes, literally, of help from each of you will give this movement a big kick start. I imagine that most of you, like myself until a few days ago, have had no experience with Facebook. But the thinking is: if it worked for Obama, it might also work for us.

Most of you are teachers of economics rather than students, and, true, this Facebook group is more likely to be run on the contributions of the many students who we hope will join it. But seeding it and legitimising protest by students is a very important role.

Joining Facebook and then the group is dead easy. Click facebook.com. Now all you need to give them is your name, email address and date of birth, which if you request, as I did, they promise not to reveal. Skip the optional rest (no photo required), click and you are signed up – two minutes.

Now to join Toxic Textbooks, click on "View and edit your profile". At the very bottom of the screen there should be a toolbar labelled "Applications". Click on the first icon to the right, a pair of heads, and this takes you to Groups. In the "Search for Groups" box at the top of the page type in Toxic Textbooks and click. A Toxic Textbooks rectangle should appear with a "Join Group" box on right. Click it, and then click "join" again and that's it.

foundations of war with china

NYTimes | Historical injustice aside, the Chinese also insisted that they should not be held responsible for the greenhouse gases they emit when producing goods for foreign consumers. But they refused to accept the logical implication of this view — that the burden should fall on those foreign consumers instead, that shoppers who buy Chinese products should pay a “carbon tariff” that reflects the emissions associated with those goods’ production. That, said the Chinese, would violate the principles of free trade.

Sorry, but the climate-change consequences of Chinese production have to be taken into account somewhere. And anyway, the problem with China is not so much what it produces as how it produces it. Remember, China now emits more carbon dioxide than the United States, even though its G.D.P. is only about half as large (and the United States, in turn, is an emissions hog compared with Europe or Japan).

The good news is that the very inefficiency of China’s energy use offers huge scope for improvement. Given the right policies, China could continue to grow rapidly without increasing its carbon emissions. But first it has to realize that policy changes are necessary.

There are hints, in statements emanating from China, that the country’s policy makers are starting to realize that their current position is unsustainable. But I suspect that they don’t realize how quickly the whole game is about to change.

As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. They will complain bitterly that this is protectionism, but so what? Globalization doesn’t do much good if the globe itself becomes unlivable.

It’s time to save the planet. And like it or not, China will have to do its part.

economic manhattan project

crisis opinions of the elite

In a speech delivered at Columbia Business School, Jeffrey D. Sachs discusses outcomes of the recent G-20 economic summit and what can be done to calm the effects of the global financial crisis on the world's poorest. Sachs is the Director of the Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University.

01. Examining the Economic Crisis 02 min 44 sec

02. Poverty, Scarcity, and Other Global Crises 03 min 54 sec

03. The Interrelation of Global Crises 02 min 25 sec

04. Crisis 1: The Economic Crisis 02 min 27 sec

05. Causes of the Crisis 03 min 47 sec

06. Failings of Greenspan's Monetary Policy 04 min 51 sec

07. Lead-Up to the Current Economic Collapse 02 min 42 sec

08. The Collapse and Its Aftermath 03 min 35 sec

09. The Loss of Bank Capital 02 min 53 sec

10. Problems with the Current Stimulus Package 01 min 56 sec

11. Crisis 2: Corruption, Deregulation, and Poverty 02 min 25 sec

12. How Wall Street Controls Washington 03 min 22 sec

13. Growing Gap Between Rich and Poor in America 02 min 15 sec

14. American Greed and Global Poverty 03 min 43 sec

15. Crisis 3: Global Warming 05 min 22 sec

16. Failings of the G20 04 min 36 sec

17. The Lack of True Reform 03 min 14 sec

Full Program 56 min 19 sec

who rules america?

Creators Syndicate | What do you suppose it is like to be elected president of the United States only to find that your power is restricted to the service of powerful interest groups?

A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees and a lucrative book contract. If he is young when he assumes office, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure.

Fighting the special interests doesn't pay and doesn't succeed. On April 30, the primacy of special over public interests was demonstrated yet again. The Democrats' bill to prevent 1.7 million mortgage foreclosures — and, thus, preserve $300 billion in home equity by permitting homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages — was defeated in the Senate, despite the 60-vote majority of the Democrats. The banksters were able to defeat the bill 51 to 45.

These are the same financial gangsters whose unbridled greed and utter irresponsibility have wiped out half of Americans' retirement savings, sent the economy into a deep hole and threatened the U.S. dollar's reserve currency role. It is difficult to imagine an interest group with a more damaged reputation. Yet, a majority of "the people's representatives" voted as the discredited banksters instructed.

Hundreds of billions of public dollars have gone to bail out the banksters, but when some Democrats tried to get the Senate to do a mite for homeowners, the U.S. Senate stuck with the banks. The Senate's motto is: "Hundreds of billions for the banksters, not a dime for homeowners."

If Obama was naive about well-intentioned change before the vote, he no longer has this political handicap.

little brown shirts

NYTimes | The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.

“Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.”

One participant, Felix Arce, 16, said he liked “the discipline of the program,” which was something he said his life was lacking. “I want to be a lawyer, and this teaches you about how crimes are committed,” he said.

Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses compressed-air guns — known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets — in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed range.

“I like shooting them,” Cathy said. “I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.”

end "drug" war now

HuffPo | Sen. Jim Webb has introduced legislation, with co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, to create a blue-ribbon commission to examine criminal justice and drug policies and how they have led to our nation's jam-packed jails -- now filled with tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders.

"With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world," Webb wrote in a recent Parade cover story, "there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different--and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter."

I understand that drugs continue to be a political hot potato, fueled by what the Latin American presidents described as "prejudices and fears that sometimes bear little relation to reality." And I can easily picture some on the president's team advising him to keep the issue on the backburner lest it turn into his "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

But the cost of the drug war -- both human and financial -- is far too high to allow politics to dictate the administration's actions. Indeed, with all the budget cutting going on, how can anyone justify spending tens of billions of dollars a year on an unwinnable war against our own people?

Change won't be easy. The prison-industrial complex has a deeply vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Which is why we need to keep the pressure on the president and his team to follow through on their drug policy promises.

As with the regulation of Wall Street, real reform of our nation's drugs policies won't happen without someone in the administration making it a top priority.

cuba's undersea oil

WaPo | Deep in the Gulf of Mexico, an end to the 1962 U.S. trade embargo against Cuba may be lying untapped, buried under layers of rock, seawater and bitter relations.

Oil, up to 20 billion barrels of it, sits off Cuba's northwest coast in territorial waters, according to the Cuban government -- enough to turn the island into the Qatar of the Caribbean. At a minimum, estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey place Cuba's potential deep-water reserves at 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, stores that would rank the island among the region's top producers.

Drilling operations by foreign companies in Cuban waters are still in the exploratory stage, and significant obstacles -- technological and political -- stand between a U.S.-Cuba rapprochement eased by oil. But as the Obama administration gestures toward improved relations with the Castro government, the national security, energy and economic benefits of Cuban crude may make it a powerful incentive for change.

Limited commercial ties between U.S. businesses and the island's communist government have been quietly expanding this decade as Cuban purchases of U.S. goods -- mostly food -- have increased from $7 million in 2001 to $718 million in 2008, according to census data.

Thawing relations could eventually open up U.S. investment in mining, agriculture, tourism and other sectors of Cuba's tattered economy. But the prospect of major offshore reserves that would be off-limits to U.S. companies and consumers has some Cuba experts arguing that 21st-century energy needs should prevail over 20th-century Cold War politics.

will designer brains divide humanity

NewScientist | Today, our minds are even more fluid and open to enhancement due to what Merlin Donald of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, calls "superplasticity", the ability of each mind to plug into the minds and experiences of countless others through culture or technology. "I'm not saying it's a 'group mind', as each mind is sealed," he says. "But cognition can be distributed, embedded in a huge cultural system, and technology has produced a huge multiplier effect." In other words, humans already have minds evolving beyond anything seen before in history.

The next stage of brainpower enhancement could be technological - through genetic engineering or brain prostheses. Because the gene variants pivotal to intellectual brilliance have yet to be discovered, boosting brainpower by altering genes may still be some way off, or even impossible. Prostheses are much closer, especially as the technology for wiring brains into computers is already being tested (see "Dawn of the cyborgs"). Indeed, futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil believes the time when humans merge with machines will arrive as early as 2045 (New Scientist, 9 May, p 26).

It won't be long before "clip-on" computer aids become available for everybody, says Andy Clark, a pro-enhancement philosopher at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. These could be anything from memory aids to the ability to "search" for information stored in your brain. "We'll get a flowering of brain augmentations, some seeping through from the disabled community," he says. "I see them becoming fashion items, a bit like choosing clothing." Clark says that even today, devices such as head-up displays on spectacles or simply being adept at using computer programs like Photoshop come close to being physical extensions of people's minds.

Malafouris also believes such augmentation is the next logical stage in human development. "If we accept that tool use was part of the reason we came to develop language, then why should we perceive neuro-engineering as a threat rather than as the new stone industry of the 21st century?"

Not everyone thinks this is a good idea, however. Dieter Birnbacher, a philosopher at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, says there are risks in technological self-improvement that could jeopardise human dignity. One potential problem arises from altering what we consider to be "normal": the dangers are similar to the social pressure to conform to idealised forms of beauty, physique or sporting ability that we see today.

People without enhancement could come to see themselves as failures, have lower self-esteem or even be discriminated against by those whose brains have been enhanced, Birnbacher says. He stops short of saying that enhancement could "split" the human race, pointing out that society already tolerates huge inequity in access to existing enhancement tools such as books and education.

The perception that some people are giving themselves an unfair advantage over everyone else by "enhancing" their brains would be socially divisive, says John Dupré at the University of Exeter, UK. "Anyone can read to their kids or play them music, but put a piece of software in their heads, and that's seen as unfair," he says. As Dupré sees it, the possibility of two completely different human species eventually developing is "a legitimate worry".

moscow warns of future energy wars

War games show that the capacity to wage war effectively will be constrained by resource depletion. Because of this fact, some state will seek the "advantage" of carrying out sooner and pre-emptively what's inevitably beyond that signpost up ahead.

Al Jazeera | Russia has warned that military conflicts over energy resources could erupt along its borders in the near future, as the race to secure oil and gas reserves gains momentum.

A Kremlin policy paper, which maps out Russia's main challenges to national security for the next decade, said "problems that involve the use of military force cannot be excluded" in competition for resources.

The National Security Strategy's release coincides with a deadline for countries around the world to submit sea bed ownership claims to a United Nations commission, including for the resource-rich Arctic.

The paper, signed off by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, says international relations in the next 10 years will be shaped by battles over energy reserves.

"The attention of international politics in the long-term perspective will be concentrated on the acquisition of energy resources," it said. "Amid competitive struggle for resources, attempts to use military force to solve emerging problems can't be excluded.

"The existing balance of forces near the borders of the Russian Federation and its allies can be violated," it added.

The document said regions including the Middle East, the Barents Sea, the Arctic, the Caspian Sea and Central Asia could all be at the centre of competing claims for resources.

Russia, the world's biggest natural gas producer, has already accused the United States, with which it shares a small sea border, of coveting its mineral wealth.

But Moscow is also finding its control over natural gas exports under threat, as the European Union seeks alternative supply routes that would bypass Russia and the Ukraine.

The country is also embroiled in a territorial dispute with Norway over claims to the Arctic sea bed, where around 25 per cent of the world's untapped reserves are believed to lie underneath the ice.

ambassador to cuba?

jesus of suburbia

BurningPlatform | Beneath the finely groomed blissful suburban façade of America lurk desperation, denial, hypocrisy, and anger. The kids of suburbia today have an entirely different reality than the suburbs I grew up in during the 1970’s. The Ozzie & Harriet idealized version of suburbia from the 1950’s has degenerated to the Green Day nightmare vision of today. The suburbs have mansion-like homes with spotless interiors, entertainment centers, three car garages, manicured lawns, and no soul. The children of suburbia have been brought up on soda pop and Ritalin. They come home to empty mansions, as both parents must work to pay for the glorious abode. Our homes have gotten bigger and better, while our lives have gotten smaller and less satisfying. One third of all children in the United States are growing up in a single parent household. Many kids feel angry and disconnected from their families, friends and home. Fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce. The kids feel rage and hopelessness at their existence in a suburban nightmare. There are 2 million children who take Ritalin every day. Is this because they truly have ADHD, or it is the painless way out for overstressed suburban parents?

My parents both grew up in South Philly. My Dad had a good secure job with Atlantic Richfield and they took the leap to the 1st ring of suburbs outside of Philadelphia in 1955. They bought a 1,120 sq ft row home in Collingdale for $10,000. It had 3 small bedrooms and one small bathroom. They raised three kids (and three dogs) in this home and my Mother still lives there today. I shared (not happily) a 100 sq ft room with my brother and when I was six, the boogeyman who lived under the bed. We had a double bed, two bureaus, a nightstand, a bookshelf and a desk for studying in this room. When I walk in the room today, I wonder how we possibly shared this small space. Prisoners at Guantanamo have more space. In the summer, with no air conditioner upstairs, I’m sure it got as hot as a Guantanamo prison cell. The walls were so thin between row homes I knew what the people next door were thinking. People never moved. We were a neighborhood where everyone knew everyone. You could depend on your neighbors. There were cookouts, holiday parties, and you could ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar. If your son (me) fell through the basement stairs and cracked his head open on the concrete floor, a neighbor would drive him to the hospital. The fathers went to work. Mothers worked at home, because they could. Mothers were there when the kids arrived home from school. No one was divorced in our neighborhood. All the kids went to the same school. No one was diagnosed with ADHD. I cut our lawn with a manual push mower. Times have surely changed. Bigger hasn’t translated into better over the decades.

the real "inconvenient" truth

Oil Drum | On American Sustainability—Anatomy of a Societal Collapse (Summary)

Most Americans believe that we are “exceptional”—both as a society and as a species. We believe that America was ordained through divine providence to be the societal role model for the world. And we believe that through our superior intellect, we can harness and even conquer Nature in our continuous quest to improve the material living standards associated with our ever-increasing population.

The truth is that our pioneering predecessors drifted, quite by accident, upon a veritable treasure trove of natural resources and natural habitats, which they wrested by force from the native inhabitants, and which we have persistently overexploited in order to create and perpetuate our American way of life. The truth is that through our “divine ordination” and “superior intellect”, we have been persistently and systematically eliminating the very resources upon which our way of life and our existence depend.

We now find ourselves in a “predicament”. We are irreparably overextended—living hopelessly beyond our means ecologically and economically—at a time when the supplies of many critical resources upon which we depend will soon be insufficient to enable our American way of life. We are about to discover that we are simply another unsustainable society subject to the inescapable consequence of our unsustainable resource utilization behavior—societal collapse.

bdsm mormons got PAID under W...,

Der Spiegel | CIA Outsourced Development of Interrogation Plan

The torture practices used in interrogations of al-Qaida prisoners were not developed by government officials in Washington, but by private security experts. In return for a daily consulting fee, they personally supervised the program at the CIA's secret prisons from the very beginning.

James Mitchell's new life begins with the same ritual every morning: He goes jogging, wearing Adidas shorts and a black tank top, his iPod in his ear. Then he gets into his luxury SUV and drives back to luxury home on Lake Vienna Drive in Pasco County, Florida.

The hacienda-style house, with a natural stone façade, columned walkways and palm trees in front of the door is brand-new. Mitchell has just had it built, in the midst of an upscale, gated community.

The freestanding garage to the right of the house is big enough for three or four cars, and a mountain bike is mounted to the back of the SUV. Mitchell, a tanned man in his late 50s with silver-gray hair, a neatly trimmed beard and trendy sunglasses, spends two hours a day exercising. In fact, exercise plays an important role in his new life under Florida's blue skies.

Mitchell is the man who, on the behalf of the administration of former President George W. Bush, developed the rules of the program that was somewhat shamefacedly referred to as "special interrogation techniques" and was authorized by the president in the summer of 2002. In truth, Mitchell developed a torture manual. His client was the CIA. The American foreign intelligence agency has engaged in its own share of dubious practices over the years, activities it initially treated as praiseworthy and would later come to bitterly regret. But now it has become clear that the CIA, ironically enough, outsourced its torture practices in interrogations during the darkest years of the Bush administration. It entrusted the development and supervision of these interrogations to a private security firm run by James Mitchell and his partner, Bruce Jessen.

The two psychologists, who had never even conducted an interrogation before -- in other words, two amateurs -- were largely responsible for developing the CIA's prisoner interrogation program. The recently published report of the Committee on Armed Services of the US Senate came out with new proof and details about this collaboration, ABC News succeeded in filming both Jessen and Mitchell who both refused to answer any questions concerning their past saying that they were not allow to speak about it.

swarm savvy

ScienceNews | “There is a new excitement in this whole field of decision making these days,” says ant biologist Nigel Franks of the University of Bristol in England. Franks and Seeley organized a multidisciplinary conference on collective decision making held in January at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. And both biologists contributed to a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (March 27) on the same topic. The issue considers insects as well as the European Parliament.

Even compared with gatherings of diplomats in bespoke suits, bee nests and ant colonies have plenty to contribute to the field. “The really lovely thing is that we can take these things apart and put them back together again, and we can challenge them with different problems,” Franks says. Seeley notes that studying honeybees has taught him a lot about how to run faculty meetings.

All but the darkest view of university professors credits them with more cognitive power than can be found in the minuscule brains (sorry, bees) of insects. So one might wonder how well collective wisdom works for nonhuman animals.

That question is what makes the research so intriguing. Bee colonies have been making collective decisions for about 30 million years, Seeley says, “so they’ve had lots of chances for failing systems to get pruned out by natural selection.” Bees have unique needs of course, but when it comes to real estate (alas, humans), bees almost always get it right.

the american dream is dying

The Trumpet | The American dream is fading. For many Americans, the idea is this: Simply survive. The borrow-and-spend-your-way-to-happiness model has evaporated. Now the harsh light of economic reality is pouring through the windows.

In its latest “Study of the American Dream” survey, MetLife reports that the country has “experienced major changes” that will likely leave “a lasting impact on how Americans achieve and sustain the dream.” The American dream has “once again been revised—possibly to a greater extent than could have been imagined just one year ago.”

Where previous generations generally defined the American dream as a combination of a good family life, home ownership, and a degree of financial security, the 2009 study found that the Americans dream now consists of an almost singular focus on financial security.

Paying the bills and putting food on the table has become the main concern for growing numbers of Americans. And more Americans define the dream not as a destination, but as a “never-ending chase.” The report’s executive summary states:

Across generations, the economic crisis has been a loud wake-up call for consumers. Economic concerns that arose in 2007—e.g., savings, job security, retirement shortfalls—have expanded dramatically over the past 12 months; cracks in the foundation of the American dream have worsened considerably. Concerns about the health of the American economy, inadequate personal safety nets and the erosion of corporate and social safety nets have left major portions of the American public—across all socio and economic demographics—exposed to financial hardship (possibly even ruin) on a scale not seen in most Americans’ lifetimes.

Americans are living on the edge. Half of those surveyed said they could only meet their financial obligations for one month if they were to lose their job. Almost 28 percent said they could not even last two weeks.

A whopping 72 percent of America’s population says it doesn’t have enough savings to last more than three months.

music and genetic code

Concerning to interesting theme on music, I would like to pay attention on physiological aspects of music and their connection with genetic code.

From the information viewpoint, living organisms are information essences. They live due to receiving of the genetic information from the ancestors, and they exist to transfer the genetic information to their descendants. In the biological literature it is possible quite often now to meet the statement that living organisms are the texts since a molecular level of their organization. Just from the information-hereditary viewpoint, all living organisms are unified wonderfully: all of them have identical bases of system of genetic coding (from many other possible viewpoints - for example, locomotion, metabolisms, etc -, living organisms have no such unification, they are differ one from another in many cases).

All heritable physiological aspects of living organisms are co-ordinated with basic structures of genetic code (heritable physiological subsystems of organism can’t be transmitted to next biological generations without such agreement with basic mechanisms of genetic coding).

It’s well known, that special musical forms have essential physiological possibilities to stimulate processes of biological growth, to have therapy effects, etc. So, it can be supposed, that these musical forms are connected (co-ordinated) with genetic coding system structurally. And interesting question is the following: on the base of using of our modern scientific knowledge of structures of genetic code, can we create musical forms which will be else more effective in physiological aspects to use them in the field of mass media, medicine, ergonomics, sport, etc?

My own investigations in this direction are connected with new results on genetic code structures. These results are described at the FIS site http://fis.iguw.tuwien.ac.at/recources/papers.html in my article “Genetic
Code and the Ancient Chinese “Book of Changes”” . An existence of binary sub-alphabets of genetic code was shown and a biperiodic octet table of 64 genetic triplets was constructed by me there. This genetic biperiodic table was coincided practically with a historical famous table of 64 hexagrams of the Ancient Chinese “Book of Changes””, written several thousands years ago (according to Ancient Chinese statements, the system of this Book is the main archetype of all nature; this system is a base for many branches of Orient medicine, culture, philosophy, etc.). If “physiological music” has a connection with genetic code, the question on its connection with this ancient conception of archetypes is urgent. According to Ancient Chinese statements, “music is that that represents a harmony of sky and earth, a co-ordination of Yin and Yang” (“Lui shi chun tsu”).

Some of these questions are considered in a special paragraph “Genetic code and music» in my book: S.V.Petoukhov “Biperiodic Table of Genetic Code and Number of Protons”, Moscow, 2001, 258 p. (in Russian; information on this book, on its content, etc. in English is at site http://members.tripod.com/vismath/sg/petoukhov.htm ).

I believe that binary sub-alphabets of genetic code and its biperiodic table permit to investigate a language of music more deeply and to create special forms of musical compositions characterized by the most physiological activity (so named “genetic music” or “genomusic”). Perhaps, due to its structural relationship with genetic code, this genetic music will be addressed to Jungian archetypes of people by the shortest route. (By the way, Carl Jung was connoisseur and profound expert of this “Book of Changes”, and the biperiodic table of genetic code has a connection with Jungian archetypes).

This theme of “genetic structured” music is a small addition to very interesting works by Juan Roederer è Michael Leyton, discussed on this session. In my opinion, physiological mechanisms and mathematical formalisms, analyzed by them for a theory of musical perception, should be coordinated (adjusted) with the specific structure of genetic code. The biological evolution can be interpreted in a whole as a process of deployment and duplicating of the certain forms of ordering (they can be named as “archetypes”). This thesis has a realization in physiological effective music also.

With best regards
Sergei Petoukhov

information and music

Here you can find links to mails from the FIS mailing list sorted by discussion themes. This page will not always be up to date, so if you want to read new mails from the complete mailing list, choose one of the links on the left.

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Music Session

• [Fis] music session Pedro C. Marijuan
• [Fis] Music Session, kickoff text Juan G Roederer
• Re: [Fis] Music Session, kickoff text Pedro C. Marijuan
• [Fis] Reply to Pedro Juan G Roederer
• Re: [Fis] Music Session, kickoff text Pedro C. Marijuan
• Re: [Fis] Reply to Pedro Luis Serra
• Re: [Fis] Reply to Pedro Jerry LR Chandler
• Re: [Fis] Reply to Luis Michael Leyton

music between worlds

Roederer | Speech and music both involve the transmission of information by acoustic waves—air pressure oscillations within given ranges of frequency and amplitude. We have a clear understanding of what kind of information is conveyed by human speech, and strategies and algorithms are being developed to configure electromagnetic signals that may allow an alien intelligence to learn about human language and its relation to events in the environment and abstract things like numbers. Similar considerations apply to our strategies and algorithms to find out about the possible existence of linguistic communication in other civilizations. But what kind of biologically relevant information is conveyed by music? From our subjective experience we know that it has to do with feelings, i.e., the emotional states of the organism—but how do we explain this to an alien civilization? And how do we look for interstellar messages that may carry information on emotional states of extraterrestrial beings?

A related aspect difficult to convey as an interstellar message is the fact that, in contrast to speech, music seems to serve no immediate “practical” purpose (this, of course, is common to all expressions of art). Again, we know from experience that an important purpose of music is emotional arousal. But can we explain why we respond emotionally to successions and superpositions of tones which seem to have little relationship with environmental events, current or in our evolutionary past? And if we do have an answer, how would we formulate it in an interstellar message? Must we assume that musical feelings are such a ubiquitous attribute of intelligent beings that our message would be understood at once?

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze “music” as a human endeavor in the most comprehensive, objective and scientific terms possible, and to argue on neuroscientific grounds that musical arts may indeed be ubiquitous in civilizations exhibiting human-like intelligence.

music: complex shapes and memory stores?

Leyton | The book A Generative Theory of Shape (Michael Leyton, Springer-Verlag, 2001) develops new foundations to geometry in which shape is equivalent to memory storage. With respect to this, the argument is given that art-works are maximal memory stores. The present paper reviews some of the basic principles concerning our claim that, in particular, musical works are maximal memory stores. The argument is that maximizing memory storage explains the structure of musical works.

We first review the basic geometric theory of the book: A generative theory of shape is developed that has two properties regarded as fundamental to intelligence – maximization of transfer and maximization of recoverability. Aesthetic structuration is taken to be equivalent to intelligence. Thus aesthetics is brought into the very foundations of the new theory of geometry. A mathematical theory of transfer and recoverability is developed, using symmetry-breaking wreath products.

From this, it becomes possible to develop a theory of musical composition, as follows:

Musical works are complex shapes.

A theory of complex-shape generation is presented, in which any structure is described as unfolded from a maximally collapsed version of that structure, called an alignment kernel. This process is formalized by proposing a new class of groups called unfolding groups. The alignment kernel is a subgroup of that structure, consisting of symmetry ground-states which are themselves formalized by a new class of groups called iso-regular groups. In music, the iso-regular groups represent the anticipation hierarchies, for example the regular meters of the work. The process of musical composition is then described by an unfolding group, which "unfolds" the work, by successively breaking the iso-regular groups of the alignment kernel.