Get that sleep!

Now I know why I have been forgetting things lately! :)

Common Sleep Problem Linked With Memory Loss

The part of the brain that stores memory appears to shrink in people with sleep apnea, adding further evidence that the sleep and breathing disorder is a serious health threat. The findings, from brain scan studies conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, show for the first time that sleep apnea is associated with tissue loss in brain regions that store memory. And while the thinking and focus problems of sleep apnea patients often are attributed to sleep deprivation, the scans show something far more insidious is occurring.

ClustrMaps

Ali Farka Toure, again

Heaven's having fun rocking with Ali Farka Toure. This video's from last.fm and is a live peformance of the track 'Amandrai' (from Talking Timbuktu) from the Segou Festival in Mali and features Bassekou Kouyate on ngoni along with Farka Toure.



Previous posts on Ali Farka Toure: 1, 2. Also two posts on his son, Vieux: 1, 2.

Some of my earlier posts about music from West Africa, in particular Mali: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

via http://blog.prathambooks.org/2008/06/is-google-making-us-stupid.html

via http://blog.prathambooks.org/2008/06/is-google-making-us-stupid.html

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

So asks Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic.

“For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Cesaria Evora

I should have gone to see her when she performed in Boston last year at the Berkeley Performance Center.

Cesaria Evora, the singer from Cape Verde, in a haunting performance of a morna, Besame Mucho.



Also: An interview with the singer on NPR's All Things Considered from June 2007.

Malian song-birds

Presenting three videos featuring a Malian singer, Rokia Traore, whose voice I have loved second only to the incomparable Salif Keïta (illustrative songs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), ever since I first heard her in early 2007.







P.S. Another very capable Malian singer is Oumou Sangare (songs: 1, 2) but more about her some other time.

In music is God

Brilliant performance by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan from 1985, thanks to youtube. A shorter excerpt of the same is here. "A Voice from Heaven" indeed [1]!

A more recent performance is here. (Many other shorter clips also on youtube, available through "Related videos" at the above links. I've spent a good hour or two listening to the Ustaad this morning.)