New jaws in an old bird

One difficulty in building evolutionary trees of life from fossil evidence is the fact that "simpler" doesn't necessarily mean "older."

It's an understandable enough mistake.  Taken as a whole, from life's first appearance some 3.7 billion years ago until today, there has been an overall increase in complexity.  The problem occurs when you try to apply that overarching trend to individual lineages -- and find that over time, some species have actually become less complex.

A good example is Subphylum Tunicata, less formally known as tunicates or sea squirts.  At a glance, tunicates look a little like sponges (to which they are only very distantly related); simple, sessile filter feeders.  It was only when biologists discovered their larvae that they realized the truth.  Tunicates are much more closely related to vertebrates than they are to simple invertebrates like the sponges and corals they superficially resemble.  The larvae look a bit like tadpoles, but as they develop the sequentially lose structures like the notochord (the flexible rod that supports the dorsal nerve cord; in us, it ends up becoming the discs between our vertebral bones), most of the muscle blocks, and in fact, just about all their internal organs except the ones involved in processing food and reproducing.

As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins put it, evolution is "the law of whatever works."  It doesn't always lead to becoming bigger, stronger, faster, and smarter.  If being small, weak, slow, and dumb works well enough to allow a species to have more surviving offspring -- well, they'll do just fine.

The reason this topic comes up is because of a paper in Nature about a re-analysis of a bird fossil found in a Belgian quarry two decades ago.  The comprehensive study found that one of the bones had been misidentified as a shoulder bone, but was actually the pterygoid bone -- part of the bony palate.  And that bone showed that the species it came from, a heron-sized toothed bird Janavis finalidens, had been misplaced on the avian family tree.

And that single rearrangement might restructure the entire genealogy of birds.

Artist's reconstruction of Janavis finalidens [Image courtesy of artist Philip Krzeminski]

There are two big groups of modern birds; neognaths, which have jaws with free plates allowing the bills to move independently of the skull, and paleognaths, whose jaw bones are fused to the skull.  The paleognaths -- including emus, cassowaries, tinamous, and kiwis -- were thought to be "primitive" in the sense of "more like the ancestral species."  (If you know some Greek, you might have figured this out from the names; paleognath means "old jaw" and neognath means "new jaw.")

But the new analysis of Janavis, a species dating to 67 million years ago -- right before the Chicxulub Meteorite hit and ended the Cretaceous Period and the reign of the dinosaurs -- shows that it was a neognath, at a time prior to the split between the two groups.

Meaning the neognaths might actually have the older body plan.

If this is true -- if the paleognaths evolved from the neognaths, not the other way around -- the puzzle is why.  The flexible beaks of neognaths seems to be better tools than the fused jaws of the paleognaths.  This, though, brings us back to our original point, which is that evolution doesn't necessarily drive species toward complexity.  It also highlights the fact that if a structure works well enough not to provide an actual survival or reproductive disadvantage, it won't be actively selected against.  A good example, all too familiar to the males in the audience, is the structure of the male reproductive organs -- with the urethra passing through the prostate gland (leading to unfortunate results for many of us as we age), and the testicles outside the abdominal cavity, right at the perfect height to sustain an impact from a knee, the corner of a table, or the head of a large and enthusiastic dog.  (If this latter example seems oddly specific, I can assure you there's a galumphing galoot of a pit bull currently asleep on my couch who is the reason it came to mind.)

Anyhow, it looks like we might have to rethink the whole "paleognath" and "neognath" thing.  Makes you wonder what else on the family tree of life might need some jiggering.  

****************************************

The arms of the ancestors

My maternal grandmother was born Flora Meyer-Lévy, in the little town of Chackbay, Louisiana, in 1893.  I never knew her -- she died fourteen years before I was born, at the young age of 53 -- but I have photographs of her that show a striking woman with auburn hair and a serious expression (consistent with my mom's description of her mother as being a no-nonsense type).

Flora's grandfather, Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was an Ashkenazi Jew, born in the village of Dauendorf, in Alsace.  He emigrated to the United States in the 1850s, only to get caught up in the Civil War -- he fought for a time on the Confederate side, and after the war came home and gave a go at raising horses.  He never made much of a success of it.  One of his grandchildren told me, somewhat euphemistically, that "he made bad deals while drunk."  Solomon, like his granddaughter, died young, at the age of 44.  His widow -- a French Creole woman named Florida Perilloux -- outlived him by over forty years.  She never remarried, and lived most of that time in poverty, converting their home into an inn just to make ends meet.

When I had my DNA tested a couple of years ago, I was fascinated to find that it detected my Ashkenazi great-great grandfather's contribution to my genetic makeup.  I am, the test said, about six percent Ashkenazi -- just about spot-on for having one Jewish ancestor four generations back.  I was surprised that my Jewish heritage was so clear; I didn't realize that Ashkenazi DNA is that distinct.

Apparently, the Ashkenazi have retained their genetic signature because of two factors -- being reproductively isolated and having experienced repeated bottlenecks.  The former, of course, is due to the taboo (on both sides) against Jews marrying non-Jews.  (My great-great grandparents are an interesting counterexample; he was a devout Jew, she was a devout Catholic, and neither one ever changed their religion.  They apparently lived together completely amicably despite their religious differences.  All seven of their children were raised Jewish -- and every single one converted to Catholicism to marry.  Evidently such tolerance was not the rule in nineteenth century Louisiana.)

The latter -- a genetic bottleneck -- refers to the situation when a population has its numbers reduced drastically, and the resurgent population all descends from the small group of survivors.  The bottlenecks in the European Jewish population, of course, were due largely to the repeated pogroms (massacres) that at times looked like eradicating the Jews from Europe entirely.  In fact, this is why the topic comes up today; a paper in Science that came out this week about a genetic investigation of the remains in a Jewish cemetery in Erfurt, Germany.  Many of the dead there were victims of a pogrom in March of 1349, and their teeth -- which contain intact DNA -- confirmed that the Ashkenazi were even then a genetically distinct population, descended from a small group of people who came originally from the Middle East or the Caucasus, and settled in central Europe some time around the year 1000 C.E.

Interestingly, the DNA from Erfurt was strikingly similar to DNA from a twelfth-century Jewish cemetery in Norwich, England, the subject of a paper only four months ago.  The geographical distance, apparently, was not enough to erase the distinct Ashkenazi signature.  "Whether they’re from Israel or New York, the Ashkenazi population today is homogenous genetically," said Hebrew University geneticist Shai Carmi.

Which explains how the DNA test was able to pick up my own ancestry.

It's fascinating to me that, on that one line at least, my family tree can trace its origins to a little group of migrants from the Near East who made their way to what is now eastern France, survived repeated attempts to eradicate them, and eventually produced a branch that went to Louisiana, ultimately leading to me here in upstate New York.  I can only hope I've inherited some of the dogged tenacity these people obviously had.

It's interesting, too, to look at the stern visage of the grandmother I never met, and to know a little more about her heritage.  Even though she, like all the generations before her, now rests in the arms of the ancestors, her genetic legacy lives on in me and her other descendants -- a handful of the "countless stars in the sky" that represent the lineage of Abraham.

****************************************

Switching on humanity

Humans, chimps, and bonobos share a little over 99% of their DNA.

That remaining just-under-one-percent accounts for every physical difference between you and our nearest ape relatives.  It's natural enough to be surprised by this; we look and act pretty different from them most of the time.  (Although if you've read Desmond Morris's classic study The Naked Ape, you'll find there's a lot more overlap between humans and apes behaviorally than you might have realized.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Greg Hume, Bonobo-04, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Part of that sense of differentness is from the cultural context most of us grew up in -- that "human" and "animal" are two separate categories.  In a lot of places that comes from religion, specifically the idea that the Creator fashioned humans separately from the rest of the species on Earth, and that separation persists in our worldviews even for many of us who no longer believe in a supreme deity.  The truth is we're just another branch of Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Class Mammalia, Order Primata, albeit a good bit more intelligent and technologically capable than most of the other branches.

It's that last bit that has captured the curiosity of evolutionary geneticists for decades.  The similarities between ourselves and apes are obvious; but where did the differences come from?  How could less than one percent of our DNA be responsible for all the things that do set us apart -- our larger brains, capacity for language, upright posture, and so on?

Just last week, a paper in the journal Cell, written by a team out of Duke University, may have provided us with some answers.

The researchers found that the most striking differences between the genomes of humans and those of chimps and bonobos lay in a set of switches they dubbed Human Ancestor Quickly-Evolved Regions (HAQERs -- pronounced, as you might have guessed, like "hackers").  HAQERs are genetic regulatory switches, that control when and how long other genes are active.  The HAQER sequences the team discovered seem to mostly affect two sets of developmental genes -- the ones that influence brain complexity and the ones involved in the production of the gastrointestinal tract.

"We see lots of regulatory elements that are turning on in these tissues," said Craig Lowe, who co-authored the paper, in an interview with Science Daily.  "These are the tissues where humans are refining which genes are expressed and at what level...  Today, our brains are larger than other apes, and our guts are shorter.  People have hypothesized that those two are even linked, because they are two really expensive metabolic tissues to have around.  I think what we're seeing is that there wasn't really one mutation that gave you a large brain and one mutation that really struck the gut, it was probably many of these small changes over time."

What's most interesting of all is that the HAQER sequences provide another example of how evolution is so frequently a trade-off.  Consider, for example, our upright posture; our vertebral column evolved in animals that walked on all fours, and when we switched to being bipedal it gave us the advantage of freeing up our hands and being able to see farther, but it bequeathed a legacy of lower back problems most other mammals never have to worry about.  Here, the HAQERs that seem to be responsible for our larger and more complex brains also correlate to a variety of disorder susceptibilities.  Particular variants of HAQER sequences are associated with a higher risk of hypertension, neuroblastoma, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.

It's just the way genetic change works.  Sometimes you can't improve one thing without screwing something else up.  And if, on balance, the change improves survival and reproductive likelihood, it's still selected for despite the disadvantages.

So we seem to finally be making some inroads into the question of why such a tiny slice of our genome creates all the differences between ourselves and our nearest relatives.  It's worth a reminder, though, that we aren't substantially different than the other species we share the planet it.  It reminds me of the famous quote from Chief Seattle: "We did not weave the web of life, we are merely one strand in it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves."

****************************************

The code breakers

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.

I've read a bit about the work British computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing did during World War II regarding breaking the "unbreakable" Enigma code used by the Germans -- a code that relied on a machine whose settings were changed daily.  And while I can follow a description of how Turing and his colleagues did what they did, I can't in my wildest dreams imagine I could do anything like that myself.

I had the same sense of awe when I read Margalit Fox's fantastic book The Riddle of the Labyrinth, which was about the work of linguists Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in successfully translating the Linear B script of Crete -- a writing system for which not only did they not initially know what the symbol-to-sound correspondence was, they didn't know if the symbols represented single sounds, syllables, or entire words -- nor what language the script represented!  (Turned out it was Mycenaean Greek.)

I don't know about you, but I'm nowhere near smart enough to do something like that.

Despite my sense that such endeavors are way outside of my wheelhouse, I've always been fascinated by people who do undertake such tasks.  Which is why I was so interested in a link a friend of mine sent me about the breaking of a code that had stumped cryptographers for centuries -- the one used by King Charles V of Spain back in the sixteenth century.

Charles was a bit paranoid, so his creation of a hitherto unbreakable code is definitely in character.  When the letter was written, in 1547, he was in a weak position -- he'd signed the Treaty of Crépy tentatively ending aggression with the French, but his ally King Henry VIII of England had just died and was succeeded by his son, the sickly King Edward VI.  Charles felt vulnerable...

... and in fact, when the letter was finally decrypted, it was found that it was about his fears of an assassination plot.

As it turned out, the fears were unfounded, and he went on to rule Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for another eleven years, finally dying of malaria at age 58.

His code remained unbroken until recently, however.  But the team of Cécile Pierrot-Inria and Camille Desenclos finally was able to decipher it, thanks to a lucky find -- another letter between Charles and his ambassador to France, Jean de St. Mauris, which had a partial key scribbled in the margin.  That hint included the vital information that nine of the symbols were meaningless, only thrown in to make it more difficult to break.  (Which worked.)

Even with the partial solution in hand, it was still a massive task.  As you can see from their solution, most of the consonants can be represented by two different symbols, and double letters are represented by yet another different (single) symbol.  There are single symbols that stand for specific people. 

But even with those difficulties, Pierrot-Inria and Desenclos managed to break the code.

All of this gives hope to linguists and cryptographers working on the remaining (long) list of writing systems that haven't been deciphered yet.  (Wikipedia has a list of scripts that are still not translated -- take a look, you'll be amazed at how many there are.)  I'm glad there are people still working on these puzzles.  Even if I don't have the brainpower to contribute to the effort, I'm in awe that there are researchers who are allowing us to read writing systems that before were a closed book.

****************************************

A coin out of chaos

Allegedly there is a traditional Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times."

It's certainly true that the periods in history that are the most engaging to read about are often the ones no one in their right mind would want to experience first-hand.  For myself, I've always had a near-obsession with the western European "Dark Ages" -- between the collapse of Roman rule in Britain at the end of the fourth century C. E. and the consolidation of Frankish rule under Charlemagne in the middle of the eighth.  Part of the reason for my fascination is that so little is known for certain about it.  When people are fighting like hell just to stay alive, not too many of them are going to prioritize writing books about the experience, or (honestly) even bothering to learn how to read and write.  Add to that the fact that during the turmoil, a great many of the books that had been written beforehand were destroyed, and it all adds up to a great big question mark.

I riffed on this idea in my recently-completed (not yet published) novel The Scattering Winds, in which a similar crisis in the modern world propels us into a new Dark Age -- and five hundred years later, when the surviving remnants of humanity have reverted to a non-literate agrarian culture, one man discovers what's left of a modern library that has somehow survived all the intervening chaos.

The effects such a discovery would have on a people was fascinating for someone like me -- a linguist and (very) amateur historian -- to explore.  But to find out what happened, you'll need to wait till it's in print!

Anyhow, back to reality.  Only a hundred years earlier than the onset of the canonical European Dark Ages, the Roman Empire went through its own Interesting Times -- the "Crisis of the Third Century."  Things had been moving along rather nicely for the Romans (if not for all of the various people they conquered), but then a series of short-lived and completely incompetent emperors led to a period of about seventy years of utter chaos. 

The spiral began with the emperor Elagabalus, who was only fourteen when he succeeded to the throne.  Historians haven't been kind to the young man, largely because he was (1) a raging egotist, (2) completely uninterested in running the government, and (3) gay.  Elagabalus seemed to look upon his position as being not much more than a golden opportunity to find large numbers of hot-looking young men to have sex with, and it's unsurprising that his reign didn't last long.  Just under four years after he was crowned, he was assassinated by the members of his own Praetorian Guard, and was succeeded by his cousin, Severus Alexander.

Severus Alexander was only thirteen when he was crowned (222 C.E.), but for a while, it seemed like things were going to be okay.  The "interesting times" started in earnest when Rome was invaded (for the umpteenth time) by Germanic tribes from the north and then from the Sassanid Empire from the east.  Severus Alexander did a pretty good job meeting both of these threats, but there were members of the Roman army who didn't like the fact that he used both diplomacy and bribery in his peace efforts -- and in the year 235, they murdered the emperor and put one of their own, a man named Maximus Thrax, on the throne in his place.

Maximus Thrax was the first of the "barracks emperors" -- men who had been declared emperor by some faction of the military, despite having neither the skills to rule nor the hereditary claim to gain support of the people.  238 C.E. was called "the Year of Six Emperors," during which six men rose to the high throne and were one after another defeated and killed within weeks to months.  The once-mighty Roman army became a fragmented mess, where different legions supported different claimants to the throne, and spent more time fighting each other than fighting the threats on the imperial borders.

Then, in mid-century, the Plague of Cyprian struck.  No one is completely certain what the disease was, but whatever the cause, it was bad.  Here's an account of the epidemic, by one Pontius of Carthage:

Afterwards there broke out a dreadful plague, and excessive destruction of a hateful disease invaded every house in succession of the trembling populace, carrying off day by day with abrupt attack numberless people, every one from his own house.  All were shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion, impiously exposing their own friends, as if with the exclusion of the person who was sure to die of the plague, one could exclude death itself also.  There lay about the meanwhile, over the whole city, no longer bodies, but the carcasses of many, and, by the contemplation of a lot which in their turn would be theirs, demanded the pity of the passers-by for themselves.  No one regarded anything besides his cruel gains.  No one trembled at the remembrance of a similar event.  No one did to another what he himself wished to experience.

There are no good estimates of the death toll, but what is certain is that for the Roman Empire, it made a very bad situation a great deal worse.  Fortunately, in around 270, there were a series of barracks emperors who at least were able to garner enough popular support (and to stay alive long enough) to fight back invasions from the Goths and the Vandals, and the whole miserable period finally ended when Diocletian was crowned in 284.  While he was no one's idea of a nice guy -- Diocletian's known as the leader of the last and bloodiest persecution of the Christians the Roman Empire perpetrated -- there's no doubt that his reform of the government and military was a brilliant success.  He also did something virtually unknown amongst crowned leaders; he ruled for twenty-one years then voluntarily abdicated, preferring to spend his final years gardening.

The reason all this comes up is that the chaos in Europe in the third century leaves historians having to piece together what happened from fragmentary records, and new discoveries can sometimes generate some surprises.  Like the gold coin discovered in 1713 in Transylvania, long considered a fake, that was just demonstrated to be genuine by microscopic analysis of the material it was embedded in.  And the image and inscription on that coin turned out to be of an emperor no one even knew about -- a man named Sponsian.

Sponsian seems to have been another of the barracks emperors, and ruled at least part of the Roman province of Dacia (now part of modern Romania) some time between 260 and perhaps 270.  Given that he's only known from a single coin, we don't know much about him -- the likelihood is that he met the same end as most of the other mid-third century claimants to the Roman throne.

All of which makes me wonder why any of these people wanted to be emperor during this period.  Did they really think, "Okay, the last fourteen guys have all been brutally murdered by howling mobs, but everyone is gonna love me!"?  Myself, I think I'd pre-empt Diocletian and take up gardening from the get-go.

Be that as it may, this new analysis of an old discovery is pretty cool -- and points out that even the Dark Ages may have left behind enough traces that we can piece together what happened.  Even if we never find an intact library, like in my novel, we can still know something about an era that until now has been largely a mystery.

****************************************

The creation of Loab

Just yesterday I ran into a new internet phenomenon that had me literally shouting at my computer screen, "Will all you people just calm down for a moment?"

What started me yelling at inanimate objects was a story about -- I shit you not -- an "AI-generated demon that is now haunting the internet."  The claim is that an AI art generator -- a program that can produce art based upon various prompts -- had unexpectedly produced a horrifying image of a woman with sunken cheeks and decaying eyes, and that image somehow "became real" and is now showing up all over the place.

The first part is actually true.  A woman named Steph Swanson, of Uppsala, Sweden, who goes by the online handle "Supercomposite," was working with something called a "negative weight prompt."  A negative weight prompt is an AI command to create an image that is as different from the prompt as possible.  So when Swanson was messing around with this idea, she put in a negative weight prompt using "Marlon Brando" as the input.  The result looked like a business logo.

Which is, honestly, pretty different from a photograph of Marlon Brando.

When it got interesting was when she took the business logo image and used it as the input for a negative weight prompt.  In a completely logical world, what you'd expect to get is Marlon Brando.

What she got was this.

Now, up front, I must admit this image is creepy as fuck.  Swanson herself was pretty shocked, and tried it again -- and kept coming up with similar horrifying images.  One of them had some scrawled writing on it -- "LOAB" -- so the woman in the image started being referred to by that name.

Rationally, it's not all that weird that what came out wasn't a picture of Brando.  It's analogous to what happens with internet translators; they're notorious for failing this kind of input reversal test.  Two possibly apocryphal examples are pretty well known.  The first is when someone put "Out of sight, out of mind" into a translator, sent the output into a second translator to return it to English, and what came out was "invisible insanity."  Even funnier is when they used "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" and got back "the liquor is good but the meat is rotten."

What's going on here, though, is considerably more subtle than simple connotation misunderstandings in an online translator, and even people who understand AI programs (I am very definitely not one of those people) haven't really been able to explain why -(-(Marlon Brando)) gives you the hideous, corpse-like visage of Loab.

But if you know anything about urban legends, conspiracy theories, and so on, you will certainly be able to predict what happened next.

A bunch of people decided that Loab is an actual demon who was haunting the internet, and after Swanson accidentally activated her, she's been popping out in all sorts of unexpected places.  (Loab, not Swanson.)  There's already a mythos growing around her (once again, Loab, not Swanson), with some people eagerly trying to find ways to chat with her and others screeching that she's eeeeeee-villl and wants to destroy your eternal soul.  Some folks are saying Loab is an egregore -- a creature that went from imaginary to real because of the collective "thought energy" of the ones who believe in her, so all those folks messing around with AI generators of various kinds need to stop right now before they create something really really bad and destroy the whole universe.

That was the point when I started yelling at my computer.

I mean, really.  I know there are a lot of superstitious people out there, and magical thinking is still all too common, but haven't we progressed as a society past the point where any sane adult thinks stepping on a crack in the sidewalk really will break your mother's back?  Because that's all this is, with the added trappings of computers and AI.

I'm as curious as the next layperson as to why the algorithm brought up Loab's gruesome face; but I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money that when the experts study this, they will not find out that it's because there's a real evil demon woman haunting our computers.

On the other hand, if the next time I open my laptop, my desktop background has been changed to an image of a hideous corpse-lady, I'll have to admit I was mistaken.

Assuming I don't scream like a little child and then have a stroke, which is honestly more likely.

****************************************

Songs of the heart

When I think about what my favorite song lyrics are, they can generally be sorted into two categories:

1.  Heartwrenchingly poignant/sad

examples:

"No Bad Days" by Bastille

"39" by Queen

"I Will Follow You Into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie

"Dance in the Graveyards" by Delta Rae

"100 Years" by Five for Fighting

 2.  Relentlessly upbeat and cheerful

examples:

"I Was Born" by Hanson

"Try Everything" by Shakira

"Geronimo" by Sheppard

"Good to Be Alive" by Andy Grammer

"The Sound of Sunshine" by Michael Franti & Spearhead

I've often wondered what makes certain music captivate some people and not others.  For myself, I suspect the resonance these songs have for me is because my own mood can oscillate between the high peaks and the valleys pretty quickly, and -- especially when I'm down in the low points -- a good cry can help process some of those emotions.

To be fair, though, I'm one of those people who cries as easily at happy or touching moments as I do at sad ones.  It's why I'm a misery to sit next to in the movie theater, because while everyone else is smiling, I'm sitting there sobbing, choking out, "B...b...but it's just so beautiful!"

*brief pause to blow nose loudly*

My own mild neuroses notwithstanding, it's interesting to consider what triggers the surges of emotion most of us feel when we hear a song we really connect to.  And just last week, a study was published in the Journal of the International Association for Relationship Research that looked at this topic -- specifically, how the lyrics of favorite love songs reflected an individual's own approach to romantic relationships.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kashirin Nickolai, Music listener, CC BY 2.0]

The first finding, which is perhaps unsurprising, is that people who are attachment-avoidant tend to like songs that describe an avoidant approach to relationships.  (You have to wonder if a favorite is Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats.")  Similarly, people with attachment anxiety are more attracted to songs that reflect their own insecurities about romance.

More interesting, though, were the overall trends in music over the past few decades.  From 1946 to 2015, the researchers found a steady increase in song lyrics reflecting social disengagement.  In the 1940s and 1950s the vast majority of lyrics that dealt with the topic of love were idealizations, happily-ever-after stories about Finding True Love And Never Letting Go.  Even the oddly popular subgenre Dave Barry calls "Teen Death Songs," while undeniably morbid, are really about how perfect and beautiful love is.  ("Last Kiss" by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers comes to mind, which was later -- weirdly -- covered by Pearl Jam.)

But as the years went on, lyrics about romance became more complex and nuanced -- and darker.  For example, consider Pink's song "Try," which is not only a song about how difficult love can be, but has some of the most stunning choreography of any music video I've ever seen, reflecting perfectly the clasp-and-crash relationship the lyrics describe.

A friend of mine and I were just talking about how disconnected we've all become, and how hard that is -- that so much of the depression a lot of us experience is due to disengagement and loneliness.  It's no wonder that gets reflected in the music we make, and the music that resonates with us.

Music is a powerful force in so many of our lives.  It touches us at a completely visceral level, and allows us to access incredibly intense emotions that are often walled off from us by the strictures and demands of daily life.  It's like a pressure valve for our hearts.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm gonna put on some songs.  Maybe I'll put my iTunes on "shuffle."  A sure way to get musical whiplash, but hey, it's all part of the experience.

****************************************