Stanley and the pineapple

I recently had one of my classes watch this funny, nonsensical video in the lab. They seemed to like it quite a lot and I had the idea of sharing it here with all of you…

Are you ready to meet Stanley? “He’s real nice!”

(You can find the script at  http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_words_to_Stanley_and_the_Pineapple … there’s a spelling mistake in the script… can you find it?)

Which Side is the Future?

Can language shape our perception of time?

The answer seems to be “yes”…

A Stanford researcher, Lera Boroditsky, in a lectio magistralis during the “Festival delle Scienze” in Rome, explains that English speakers tend to see time on a horizontal plane, from “left” (past) to “right” (future), the same way they write. But an Arab speaker, as he writes from “right” to “left”,  has the opposite perception on time: past is on the right, while future is on the left. For example, an English speaker would arrange (in a chronological order) the photos of an intact egg and a broken egg in this way:

while an Arab speaker would arrange them in this way:

And what about a Mandarin speaker?

Well, Mandarin Chinese associates “up” with the past and “down” with the future! And re­search shows Mandarin speakers often arrange photos in a vertical plane with the earliest at the top.

But Lera also spent time in a remote aboriginal village in Australia, where she discovered that Pompuraawan (the tribe of the village) do not have terms for spatial relationships such as “left” or “in front of.” Instead they use directions as descriptors, such as “my south arm.” They think of time the same way: when asked to arrange four pic­tures showing a person’s life, Pompuraawans laid the photos in a line from east to west.

People’s way of thinking is important, too: for example, we also arrange time putting the past behind us and the future ahead of us, but there are people who think that it’s impossible for us to see our future, while the past is something that we have already seen. Therefore, they put the past ahead of them, while the future behind them – because they can’t see it!

That’s funny, isn’t it?

COME DINE WITH ME

Hi everyone!

I hope you enjoyed your  well deserved holiday and that the new year has got off to a great start.

I spent the holiday in England and I took some pictures of some of the food I ate so I could share them with you.  I’ll explain everything that you see in the pictures, starting from the appetizers and finishing with scrumptious desserts.

So, are you all ready to come dine with me?

STARTER

Forest and Flat Mushrooms in white wine and herb cream, served on toast with crispy bacon

 

MAIN COURSE

Here are four typical main course dishes that you can order in most pubs serving food.

Beef, Mushroom and ale (a type of beer)  Pie accompanied by  mash, broccoli and leeks.

Pies are pastry on the outside filled with either meat or fish.

Fish pie

Cod fillet, smoked haddock and king prawns in a white wine and coriander cream, topped with crushed potatoes, peas and cheese and served with seasonal greens

Chicken, leek and ham Pie served with peas and chips.

A typical child’s meal

DESSERTS

And this is my favourite bit of the menu!

Delicious warm lemon sponge served with crème fraiche 

Apple, Pear and Sultana Crumble with vanilla ice cream and custard

Raspberry Crème Brûlée

31 songs: Rhymes and Reasons

And you wonder where we’re going
Where’s the rhyme and where’s the reason
And it’s you cannot accept
It is here we must begin
To seek the wisdom of the children
And the graceful way of flowers in the wind

I’ll start from the first song I remember having loved, and I’m going to tell you about how much I loved it, lost it and then found it again.

I was a child, and one evening I was watching a TV commercial about a famous brand of chamomile tea. The advertisement showed some people (it might have been a family, but I’m not sure about it… as for the ad in itself, my memories have become a bit blurred) joyfully walking in a flowery meadow… and that song playing, oh how I loved it! It was just an acoustic guitar arpeggio and a male voice singing, a kind of dreamy ballad I immediately fell in love with. I kept waiting for that TV commercial every evening, only for that minute or two of the song. The only thing I knew for sure was that it was in English, but I didn’t know any English by then, so I couldn’t grasp any words to make out a possible title for it (yes, this is a trick I use every now and then with songs I don’t know), nor could I walk into a record shop and sing the song to the shop assistant asking for help! You must try to understand (I know it may be difficult for your generation), but I was –I’m not sure – maybe 7 years old, computers and Internet didn’t exist, and there was nobody to help me. And I really LOVED that song. But could do nothing.

So when they stopped broadcasting that commercial I felt as if I had been robbed of a really precious thing. They say children forget easily… uhm, not me! So I set myself to “stand-by” mode and in the following years, while listening to and falling in love with new songs, I kept on secretly waiting for that song. Oh well, I had to wait some time… it was not until I was 18 that I listened to that song again on the radio! It was as if all those years had not passed, as I immediately recognized it… the song had the same dreamy flavour it had had when I was a child, and appealed to all of me… I decided all those years of secretly waiting had been enough! I pulled myself together, grabbed pencil and paper  and when the song was over I had the title, and the artist’s name!

John Denver, Rhymes and Reasons

Do you think it was easy to find John Denver’s album? Of course not! As for the lyrics, I had to sit hours listening to the song, trying to grasp all the words… and then hours again to find the chords on the guitar (apart from “self-teaching” myself a country-style arpeggio!) until I could play it and sing it to myself.

Such were the “Middle Ages”,  long, very long ago…

But it was worth the effort, and later I also added other beautiful songs by John Denver to my guitar “repertoire”…  they’re all very lovely country songs, easy to play and sing, and I liked them a lot… but Rhymes and Reasons will always hold a special place in my heart. Thanks, John.

I can’t say “it only took me 5 minutes to find the video on the Internet today”, as I’m afraid there’s no “real” video: the song dates back to 1969 and no videos were shot then… but I have found something for you: here it is, the first song to have struck your teacher b… I know you won’t feel the same, times have changed, for me, too…  but I’m glad I shared this song and my memories with you.

And the song that I am singing
Is a prayer to non believers
Come and stand beside us
We can find a better way

John Denver was an American country singer/songwriter, who wrote some 200 beautiful songs, most of which about his loved Colorado State, in the US. He died in a plane crash in 1997 at the age of 53.

Wish to know more?

Left-handedness: famous left-handers (2)

In the previous post we have seen how left-handedness was seen in the past and how scientist have studied this characteristic. Now we’re going to know about some famous left-hander… Do you know any famous left-handed person? Reading this article you will be surprised to read some names that are very familiar to you!

We’ve already talked about George VI of England, whose left-handedness correction is said to have caused his stammer. But he’s not the only king that was left-handed. Queen Victoria, whose reign was the longest in English history, was left-handed. Prince Charles and William are left-handed, too. Some other famous left-handed kings and emperors were Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Louis XVI of France and maybe Napoleon Bonaparte.

Some US presidents were left-handed: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, George H. W. Bush (father of George W. Bush, president from 2001 to 2009) and Bill Clinton. The current president of USA Barack Obama is left-handed, too, and so is his main rival during the 2008 elections, John McCain.

We have said that in left-handed people the right brain, the side concerned with creative activities, is predominant. It is not by chance that many artists (including musicians) are left-handed. Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Noel Gallagher from Oasis, Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin, Guy Berryman from Coldplay, Bob Dylan, Celine Dion, Beethoven and Mozart are included in the list.

Renaissance artists Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci were left-handed. The latter, in particular, is also known for his mirrored handwriting directed from right to left.

The American cartoonist Matt Groening, creator of the “yellowest” family in the world, The Simpsons, is left-handed, and so are his characters Ned Flanders (owner of the Leftorium, a store specialized in products for left-handed people) and Bart Simpson (he writes on the famous blackboard with his left hand… This is the first time you’ve realized it, haven’t you?)

What about actors? From Julia Roberts to Tom Cruise, Hollywood is full of left-hander. Here are some other names just to let you know: Charlie Chaplin, Robert DeNiro, Whoopie Goldberg, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Marilyn Monroe, Emma Thompson, Bruce Willis and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Well, I hope this is enough… Do you know some other famous left-handed person not listed here? Let us know in the comments below

An art to feel good

Today I want to tell you about the positive effects of  singing, the art that I study and love.
This activity, one of the most ancient forms of expression, isn’t, in fact, only a succession of sounds ordered to form a melody, but also a way to feel good.

1)    When you sing, you calm down
Singing produces relax. When we think, our vocal chords are in activity, even if they form silent words. If they are occupied to produce a sound, they mustn’t simultaneously create the words that compose our thoughts.
You don’t need a song: vocalizations have the same effect.
So, if sometimes you need to relax, sing!

2)    The movements that you do when you sing are healthy for your body
They’re perfect to exercise all the muscles, in particular your heart and  abdominal.
They’re a good help if you want to have a more correct posture.

3)  Everyone has the chance to sing
Because everyone has the chance to sing, according to me those who don’t sing lose an opportunity. (Do you agree?)

4)    Remember that singing gives happiness
Someone said that “We sing to cancel the suffering of the spirit. And if the adversities of life aren’t striking me, they are striking someone else.”

The border between science fiction and reality

Hi everybody!
Are you a fan of Star Trek? If you are or if you have ever seen it, you surely know that their spaceship, the Enterprise, runs on antimatter: the reactors rely on matter-antimatter annihilation (total destruction) for energy production.

Even if you have read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, you probably remember that the protagonist, Robert Langdon, was chasing a man who had stolen a cylinder containing antimatter in order to destroy Vatican city.

But what is this so famous antimatter and who discovered it?

Dirac was the first physicist who hypothesized the existence of antielectrons (antiparticles endowed with the same electron mass but with a positive charge) studying the movement of electrons; this theory was later confirmed by Carl Anderson, who discovered positive electrons, named positrons. Other physicists discovered antineutrons, antiprotons and antihydrogen atoms , so Charles Janet envisaged a complete periodic table of antimatter.

Nowadays, some physicist have hypothesized the possible existence of antiplanets, antistars, antigalaxies and even an antiuniverse! Their aspect would be very similar to our universe, galaxies, etc., so no one could distinguish its real content.

I think that an example will clarify the concept of antimatter: imagine you stamp out a coin from a metal sheet: you get a coin and a hole in the sheet that we can call “anticoin”. This is what happens when energy transforms into matter: you produce both particles and their mirror images, antiparticles. Energy is necessary to create them, so when you bring them back together (the annihilation that fuels Star Trek Enterprise) this energy is released, as if you put the coin back into the hole and you get the original metal sheet.

All the particles around us were created from energy just after the Big Bang, indeed according to Einstein’s theory (E = mc2 ) mass is concentrated energy. New particles and antiparticles were created thanks to the very very high temperature, and then annihilated back into energy.

Matter is always created with antimatter, so originally there must have been the same amounts of particles and antiparticles. However, scientists haven’t yet discovered why this symmetry was broken and matter “won” over antimatter: for every billion antimatter particles, there were a billion plus one matter particles. But what has become of all antimatter particles? They were transformed into energy after the annihilation with the matter particles; one second after the Big Bang temperature had dropped too low to create new particle-antiparticle pairs and only that small surplus of particles survived. The result of matter-antimatter annihilation is the cosmic background radiation, while we’re all made from the remaining matter.

A source of antimatter are cosmic rays: when they hit the outer atmosphere, they’re mainly fast-moving, high-energy protons; then they collide with atoms in the air and some of the collision energy transforms into new pairs of particles and antiparticles.
The most important laboratory where physicists always “play” with particles and antiparticles is CERN (European organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. Their goal is to know these particles better and to understand what we and the universe are made of. The recent progress of this organization is remarkable, for example researchers have captured some antihydrogen atoms for 16 minutes last summer: they’re made up of positrons and antiprotons and they’re contained in complex traps called magnetic bottles.

When electron and positron meet they annihilate, but, at high energy, they can rematerialize as new particles and antiparticles: this is what happened at Cern; at a low energy, however, it’s used in different ways, for example to study how the brain works in the technique called Positron Emission Tomography (PET).

If the mixing of matter and antimatter is the most powerful source that a starship could use to travel huge distances every week, why don’t we use it as fuel? I think it’s a bit complicated because it’s difficult to produce, but I guess that scientists will find new ways to get it in the future.
Can you imagine a universe powered by antimatter?

Science fiction is not so far away…

Look at this interesting video in which Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln describes antimatter and its properties.

31 songs

Music was my refuge.  I could crawl into the space

between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. 

Maya Angelou

I read a book with this very peculiar title…“31 songs”, a couple of years ago. Its author, Nick Hornby, writes about 31 songs that he has loved throughout his life.  Hornby’s very original, personal “soundtrack” has then brought me to consider  that each of us has a personal “soundtrack”, made of the songs that we have listened to and loved since we were children.

Some people may have very similar personal soundtracks, although I doubt  there are two people in the world who share exactly the same list of favourite songs.

Moreover, you should consider that very often the songs in your list are not always the ones you would “expect” yourself to appreciate… I mean, they are not always “right” for your age, social status, cultural background. I felt I totally agreed with Hornby when reading the following passage in the book:

Oh, of course I can understand people dismissing pop music. I know that a lot of it, nearly all of it, is trashy, unimaginative, poorly written, slickly produced, inane, repetitive and juvenile (…) I know, too, that Cole Porter was ‘better’ than Madonna, or Travis, that most pop songs are aimed cynically at a target audience three decades younger than I am, that in any case the golden age was thirty-five years ago and there has been little value since. It’s just that there’s this song I heard on the radio, and I bought the CD, and now I have to hear it ten or fifteen times a day…

You don’t “choose” which songs to like and which not to… songs come to you, and simply strike something in you. Or they don’t. Very often they are “right” for you, they are “in accord” with your age, or with your musical tastes up to that moment… while sometimes… well, you simply find yourself whistling a tune, or you wake up with a refrain playing in your head… and that’s not the kind of music you usually listen to!!! How can this be???

I’ve picked up that book again for some reason recently, and I’ve had this idea of sharing my “31 songs” with you while at the same time inviting you to do the same on this blog, whether writing about them in a post or simply leaving your comments.

My only hope is that, just as it has been for me when reading Hornby’s 31 songs (as I didn’t know all the songs he wrote about), you’ll very likely “get curious” and feel the need to “know more” about a musician, his songs or its lyrics, or simply to “understand” why a song in particular has meant so much for someone else… and maybe decide to make that song also one of your songs, or decide it is definitely NOT the kind of song you might like, who knows…

What matters, as far as I am concerned, is that you further practise the language while having fun, widening your horizons… linguistically, culturally and – why not – musically speaking!

“ Music is enough for a lifetime,

but a lifetime is not enough for music”

Sergei Rachmaninov

The Hammond organ

Did any of you know that the most famous instrument used in Jazz and Blues was… a church organ?

I’m talking about the famous Hammond organ. Well, it is not exactly an instrument designed for churches: just imagine that it was masterly adopted in bands of international level such as “Pink Floyd”, “Deep Purple” or “Emerson, Lake & Palmer”. But where does it come from?

It all started back in the ’30s, with the genial mind of Laurens Hammond. He was a prolific inventor who also got the idea of the first automatic transmission system for gears in a motor vehicle (though it was refused at first). He was a great clockmaker, too. His experience and skills, along with his interest in music, allowed him to project and build up this particular example of “electronic organ” that would have replaced the classic wooden “pipe organ”. Since he was not a musician, Mr Hammond took advantage from the help of a friend, an organist, and after a long and hard period of work the completed instrument took the name after its inventor.

An earlier model of an electronic instrument of that kind was the less famous “Telharmonium”, but due to serious mechanical issues and also to its “gargantuan” proportions (it almost reached 200 tons of weight!), the Telharmonium quickly disappeared from the musical scene.

But how does the Hammond organ actually work? Since we are talking about an electric machinery, the sound is produced through metallic tonewheels (very similar to cog-wheels) which are activated pressing the keys on the organ keyboard. Those wheels, when activated, start rotating next to a magnetic bar and in this way, thanks to the teeth on the wheels, the magnetic variations produce particular signals, whose frequency depends on the speed and number of teeth of the tonewheel associated to a specific key. In the end the signal is sent to an amplifier that expresses the final sound.

But there’s more (oh no please!…)

The classic Hammond organ is always associated to a peculiar type of amplifier: the Leslie speaker (from the name of its inventor, Don Leslie). As the saying goes, “there’s no real Hammond without a good Leslie speaker”. This curious engine creates the well-loved vibrato or “rotary” sound utilizing the Doppler effect, that is the dynamic variation of the waves’  length caused by a shift of the sound font position (…what?). It is composed of a rotating system of two wheels, each with a pair of sound “trumpets” on them (for the higher and lower pitches of sound, respectively called “tweeter” and “woofer”) that can also be regulated in speed. There are two basic speeds: Chorus and Tremolo. In the first case the wheels rotate slower and the sound seems pretty flat, but when we speed the machine up we put a stronger vibe on the sound, which becomes more “scratching”. More recent Leslie speakers can also be stopped, just to reproduce the older pipe organ feel, though this amplifier was introduced as a solution for the boring flatness of the earlier models of that organ.

There’s more information about this fantastic instrument to be shared, but we’re going to see it in the next post.

Everybody, for now, just relax and listen to a few pieces. Enjoy!

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Thinking of Winter…

The holidays are about to end and we’ll soon have to return to school… But I want you to relive for a few moments the magic and mysterious atmosphere of these days with some lines I wrote thinking of the current season of Winter.  Hope you’ll enjoy them!

Signs of Winter

The hot summer sun has already scorched the leaves,

brown, red, orange, yellow they were on the trees

and Autumn has taken them away from their branches,

He’s made them fall down on the bare ground…

Comes on December with its white mantle,

blows on us with its icy breathing;

the morning is short, the sun goes down early

and the moon takes its place to guide our dreams.

Nature seems dead: the animals are sleeping in their little dens,

the frozen plants are silently surviving the cold season,

waiting for March to revive and show their coloured flowers.

Snowflakes fly light in the air,

moved by the sound of the fighting winds

and then, weary, they settle down after their dance.

The feeble sunbeams warm the little red noses

of children playing in the snow,

chasing each other or dressing the snowman with a hat and a scarf.

At home, by the warmth of the fireplace,

mum and dad are telling fantastic stories to their children,

while outside rain drops on people’s faces

their eyes rapidly searching for the way back home.

Then Christmas comes bringing joy and peace

for black and for white, for rich and for poor

and Santa Claus, dear old, with his loyal reindeer,

makes everyone happy with a gift, big or small,

travelling all night on his sleigh

above the roofs all over the world.

This is Winter, now you know,

one of the seasons, “Nice to meet you!”,

that with its cold, big embrace

takes another year away!