FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks

Coffee, Cannibis, Tobacco, Skunk, Beer, Lemons, and what else, all share a common smell from a common chemical called furfuryl mercapton.

Upon verifying this fact , I came across the following:

Miracle Berries
Explore the many ways to use mberry tablets. Host "flavor tripping" dinner parties. Get your kid to eat their vegetables. mberry miracle berry tablets are hand-picked fruit and 100% natural.
http://mberry.us/

And it reminded me of an ever-present crazy idea from a crazy culinary friend of mine:

Abstract Foods

--Thai curry and Nutella? Cream Cheese.
--Tobacco and peanut butter? BBQ sauce.

I also call it the Jelly Belly Effect, as they have a chart on the back of the box that shows you how to mix and match some flavors to 'create' other flavors.

and finally, this brings us to the topic of

FLAVOR NETWORKS

Flavor Network and the Principles of Food Pairing
This study uses a network-based approach to explore the impact of flavor compounds on ingredient combinations, analyzing 56,498 recipes, and measuring links between flavor profiles of separate ingredients in various recipes

Barabasi Labs-2011

"The flavor network allows us to reformulate the food pairing hypothesis as a topological property: do we more frequently use ingredient pairs that are strongly linked in the flavor network or do we avoid them? To test this hypothesis we need data on ingredient combinations preferred by humans, information readily available in the current body of recipes. For generality, we used 56,498 recipes provided by two American repositories (epicurious.com and allrecipes.com) and to avoid a distinctly Western interpretation of the world’s cuisine, we also used a Korean repository (menupan.com). The recipes are grouped into geographically distinct cuisines (North American,Western European, Southern European, Latin American, and East Asian)."

"This distribution reveals that North American dishes use far more compound-sharing pairs than expected by chance, and the East Asian dishes far fewer." [...] "The results largely correlate with our earlier observations: in North American recipes, the more compounds are shared by two ingredients, the more likely they appear in recipes. By contrast, in East Asian cuisine the more flavor compounds two ingredients share, the less likely they are used together." [...] "...suggests that the food pairing effect is due to a few outliers that are frequently used in a particular cuisine, e.g. milk, butter, cocoa, vanilla, cream, and egg in the  North America, and beef, ginger, pork, cayenne, chicken, and onion in East Asia." [...]

"North American food heavily relies on dairy products, eggs and wheat; by contrast, East Asian cuisine is dominated by plant derivatives like soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice and ginger."

"The fact that recipes rely on ingredients not only for flavor but also to provide the final textures and overall structure of a given dish provides support for the idea that fitness values depend on a multitude of ingredient characteristics besides their flavor profile."

"More generally this work provides an example of how the datadriven network analysis methods that have transformed biology and the social sciences in recent years can yield new insights in other areas, such as food science."

Barabasi Labs-2011

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing
--Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-La´szlo´ Baraba´si
--Center for Complex Network Research, Department of Physics Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115,
--Center for Cancer Systems Biology Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02115
--School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47408
--Theory of Condensed Matter, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK
Scientific Reports, published 15 December 2011
http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs/CCNR-ALB_Publications/201112-15_Nature-Flavor/201112-15_Nature-Flavor.pdf

Barabasi Labs-2011

The only link I see on the sample diagram is 'tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol', found in soy sauce

very similar study:
Chinese Cuisine Patterns Revealed By Food Network Analysis
July 25, 2013

I would like to make copious personal mental notes between this study and the Evolution of Adult Lactose Absorption study cited in W.H. Dunham's Coevolution.

But, most importantly, reference to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel idea, which suggests why North America would have a dairy-based diet based on animal husbandry. It was a combination of just-so variables, the most significant (in reference to the above topic) being that of the protein-per-gram ratio of wheat vs. rice. Wheat yields a higher return-on-investment. This in addition to the east-west landmass of Europe/North America (increasing the spread of agricultural technology upon similar day lengths) vs. the more north-south axis of East Asia. This combination facilitated faster population abundance; the resulting higher population densities then led to the use of medium-sized domesticable animals (which ~Europe/North America both had in abundance) for food. In ^Coevolution with human-manipulated genetic adaptation, the dairying practices of these cultures make the same setting described in the Flavor Networks studies above.

POST SCRIPT

Nutrigenomics

Also known as nutritional genomics, this is the study of the complex interplay between food and genetic expression. Scientists working in this field seek to understand the role of genetic variation, dietary response, and the ways in which nutrients affect our genes. And indeed, food has a profound effect on our health — and it starts quite literally at the molecular level. Nutrigenomics works both ways; our genes influence our dietary preferences, and vice-versa. A key goal of nutrigeneticists is to establish personalized nutrition — matching what we eat with our own unique genetic constitutions. More here.

[pdf]

^11 Emerging Scientific Fields That Everyone Should Know About

George Dvorsky 27 Feb 2013

The Truth About Taste (Documentary)

BBC Horizon, 2013

25 Amazing Food Infographics, Drawn From 49,733 Recipes

Cliff Kuang 10.29.13, Wired

Chinese Cuisine Patterns Revealed By Food Network Analysis

July 25, 2013

Milk digestion's 'more recent rise'

BBC News - June 11, 2015

Inside-Out Side

Via the –membrane-, the cell controls exchange between interior/exterior to its own advantage in order to maintain a high level of internal organization, but in so doing it also requires reciprocation of the exterior – the two coevolve. (p155)

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford

Einstein Writing to Solvene

“Unless one sins against logic, one generally gets nowhere;…"

Also,

“One cannot build a house or construct a bridge without using a scaffold which is really not one of its basic parts.”

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford

Phase Change

Nothing at all happens to the individual molecules when phase change takes place, instead only a rearrangement of their positions and motions. AND the two phase can coexist (like ice floating in water) at any scale in the whole (little ice or big ice) – the pattern of the two phase are spread over a large range of scales. [like Fractals] (p169)

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford

The Dual Processing System

Dealing with Difference: From cognition to semiotic cognition

Barend van Heusden. Department of Arts, Culture, and Media Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

BIOSEMIOTICS vs. ANTHROPOSEMIOTICS

Cognitive Semiotics, Issue 4 (Spring 2009), pp. 116–132

I have clipped what I consider to be some interesting parts of a very powerful article on the nature of thought:

In this paper, it will be argued that semiotic cognition can be conceived as a distinctive form of cognition, which evolved out of earlier forms of non-semiotic cognition. Semiotic cognition depends on the use of signs and it will be shown that a sign is not a ‘thing’, but rather the name given to a specific organization, or structure, of the cognitive process. Once semiotic cognition was available to humans, its structure may have provided the ground for an evolutionary development that was no longer strictly Darwinian, but followed its own semiotic logic. Semiotic cognition confronts humans with a difference that cannot be eliminated, and it is in the ways in which this difference is dealt with that we may discover a logic of cultural evolution that determines the course of long term cultural change. (p116)

If we want to explain this absence of meaning and with it the emergence of a specifically human sense of reality, of time, space, and self, we have to assume that human cognition is based upon a very peculiar system of representation (or ‘pattern matching’) which allows us to process what is seen and heard at the same time, both in terms of stable patterns and of global, concrete and necessarily ‘fuzzy’ patterns. This double processing generates a difference between the stable pattern, which corresponds to what we have called memory, on the one hand, and an instable, always changing pattern corresponding to what one could name the ‘here and now’ or the ‘present’, on the other hand. In a conscious human mind the two patterns never merge completely. (p122)

[Difference] may have freed humans from immediacy, from the continuous ‘now’ in which most, if not all, other organisms live and it probably enabled us to deal with our environment independently of what is simply ‘the case’ in fantasy, myths, religion, technology, the arts and sciences, philosophy. These worlds that we construct in our imagination allow us to cope with change in a more sophisticated way than other organisms do. It does not take long to figure out the profit. What distinguishes human cognition and culture from that of other organisms is not meaning, but the absence of meaning. (p123)

If the assumption put forward here is correct we may investigate further in two directions. ‘Backward’, in order to try to find out and explain how such a double processing could have come about in the evolution of hominids, which is the subject of evolutionary psychology. And ‘forward,’ to find out if and how the peculiar structure of human cognition may have influenced the evolution of human culture. Let us first try to go ‘backward’, finding out about the possible evolutionary development of the human capacity for double processing. It is highly probable that this development made use of the strong lateralization of the human brain. I do not want to suggest that lateralization caused human culture, but what I do suspect is that a lateralization, which was already present (and which is related in primates to handedness*), allowed for the double processing, in terms of stable and changing patterns, of visual and acoustic information in animals with full stereoscopic vision, resulting in a 100% identity of the visual input in the two hemispheres. The coordinating process required a substantial enlargement of the equally present ‘comparator’ or ‘cockpit’, according to the term coined by Elkhonon Goldberg. (p123)

The double processing of the stream of incoming information results in a combination of two types of patterns: stable structures, on the one hand (which we can now identify as ‘schemata’, ‘scripts’, ‘concepts’, ‘structures’, or ‘signs’) and a changing situation, on the other hand (identified as ‘reality’, ‘substance’, ‘object’, ‘the thing itself’, etc.). Memories can now be stored and worked upon independently of the actual situation. Evidently, the most could be made of this development if the set of available memories were considerable. Both factors (a large set of memories and a strong comparator) required brain space. This could be that ‘compelling reason’ why the human brain got so large between 2 and 1.5 million years ago and why the costs of such a large brain were worth paying. (p124)

The stable pattern (memory) is related to a changing pattern (an occurrence). It is this activity of relating that turns the stable patterns into signs, which are used to recognize (to give form to, to interpret, to signify) that other more floating set of patterns constituting actuality. The here and now of the situation, in turn, is what is not a sign. It is ‘reality’, ‘the world’, ‘the object’. Although we immediately admit that this too is a construction based on memories. But the difference between the two is not a construction of our memory, and that is crucial. Thus cognition becomes intentional or semiotic. (p124-5)

The first step in the evolution of culture, as we have seen, must have been that of the doubling of the information processing system: basically the doubling of the representation of perception. (p126)

Semiotic mimetic actions are fundamentally different from imitations, as imitation involves the copying of behaviour, whereas mimesis comes with a new way of representing behaviour, namely without actually performing it (cf. Donald 1991, 2006). Through mimesis, the stable memories, or signs, are acted out and become audible and visible.*

*This corresponds to Piaget’s (1962) notion of “representative imitation”, which according to him emerges out of sensory-motor imitation, via deferred imitation (cf. Zlatev 2007).

Human culture is the process in which more or less stable memories are used to deal with the difference that the world forces upon us. (p127)

Our identity as human beings is thus a process in which we continuously invest energy. […] We exist as a set of memories and as a process in which these memories are used to deal with a dynamic environment. I am, we are, ‘in the making’. Viewing the self as a process rather than as an object therefore becomes more natural (Noble 2006). (p128)

Self-consciousness, both individual and collective, is thus a form of recursion; not formal, but semiotic recursion. Whereas in formal recursion a form consists of elements that reproduce that same form (as in a triangle consisting of three smaller triangles, each of which again consists of three smaller triangles, etc.), in semiotic recursion the process of representation (of ‘aboutness’) is about that process itself. This is what we call reflexivity, meta-representation or meta-cognition. The self is always a constructed self as well as a remembered self or, rather, a self ‘under construction’. (p128-9)

Moreover, the process as such is again remembered, which gives us a strong feeling of being, and having been, alive (cf. Metzinger 2003). […] Art and philosophy are two important forms of meta-cognition in modern and in contemporary culture. Whereas art reflects our life in concrete images, sounds, and stories, philosophy does so through abstract conceptualizations. (p129)

The ‘double processing’ hypothesis presented in this paper would allow us to shed light on the evolution of human culture and on cultural evolution as well. Semiotic cognition became possible because of a change in the primate information processing system. Once this system was in place, a new logic of development could emerge. The logic of cultural evolution seems to be based on what is, in the end, a very simple criterion, namely: whether a sign or sign system offers better chances of dealing with the difference arising in a specific personal, social and natural context, and in so doing also offers better chances of prediction and survival. Which brings us back to biology. This search for better solutions to the problem of difference can explain individual, social, and geographical variations in culture, as well as the steady increase of both abstraction and cultural complexity. (p129-30)

Even though culture certainly is a fact of human biology, what makes it so interesting is the fact that out of biology, in this case, emerges a form of cognition that became free, at least to a certain extent, of the laws of biology by adding a new dimension to these laws, namely the dimension of the semiotic. (p130)

The approach is deeply and truly Darwinian, in the sense that it applies Darwin’s perspective where it can and should be applied, and uses it to explain how and why a non-Darwinian evolutionary system, though nested in biological evolution and fulfilling the same goals, could emerge. Neo- Darwinism is fruitful, but only up to a certain point – which is that of the semiotic. Beyond that point, the laws of development change: instead of ‘BVSR = Blind Variation + Selective Retention’, the logic of the semiotic process, involving mimesis, imagination, conceptualization, and analysis will determine the course of human evolution.* Whereas selective retention may continue to function as it did in animal life, cultural variation is not blind, but informed by semiosis and driven by semiotic strategies.**

* Lassègue (2007) develops a related ‘alternative’ view (to neo-Darwinism, that is), strongly oriented towards the work of Ernst Cassirer. See also Wolfgang Wildgen’s (2003) work on the evolution of human language.

(p130)

** See Wheeler, Ziman & Boden, eds. (2002) on cultural evolution and neo Darwinism. See also David Premack’s review article ‘Human and animal cognition: Continuity and discontinuity’ (2007) where the significant differences between human and animal cognition are stressed.

(p130)

notes:

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind. Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Donald, M. (2006). Art and cognitive evolution. In M. Turner (Ed.), The artful mind.

Goldberg, E. (2001). The executive brain. Frontal lobes and the civilized mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lassègue, J. (2007). Une réinterprétation de la notion de forme symbolique dans un scénario récent d’émergence de la culture. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 2 (2007), 221–236.

Metzinger, T. (2003). Being no one: the self-model theory of subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Noble, D. (2006). The music of life. Biology beyond genes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Piaget, J. (1962). Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Premack, D. (2007). Human and animal cognition: Continuity and discontinuity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104 (35), 13861–13867.

Wheeler, M., Ziman, J., & Boden, M. A. (Eds.) (2002). The evolution of cultural entities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, for The British Academy.

Wildgen, W. (2003). The evolution of human language. Scenarios, principles and cultural dynamics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Zlatev, J. (2007). Embodiment, language, and mimesis. In T. Ziemke, J. Zlatev & R. Franck (Eds.), Body, Language, Mind. Vol. 1: Embodiment (pp. 297–333). New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

More Musicological Synchronicity

aka Musical Synchoesthesia

Not only is it basically the same song as Part Time Lover*, Maneater also finds its way into Walking on a Dream, if you like to see it that way.

*though I hear "One is in B Minor, the other in B Flat Minor." -the internet

--Hall and Oats, "Maneater", 1:13
--Empire Of The Sun, "Walking On A Dream", 0:53

But more importantly,

--Empire of the Sun, "Walking on a Dream", 0:53
--Billy Ocean, "Carribbean Queen", 1:00
the melody is the same, the lyrics sound the same, and they occur at almost the same point in the song.

"...and our hearts can beat as one, no more love on the run."

And more recently discovered,
snap to the bridge:

--Stevie Wonder, "Ngicuela Es Una Historia - I am Singing" (1976)
1:35 - 1:59
--Quadron, "LFT" (2013)
0:55 - 1:10

Post Script
Beck's "The Golden Age" (2000)
Black Prairie's "What You Gave Me" (2011)
same song basically

"In Transit", Albert Hammond Jr., 1:11
"Some Guys Have All the Luck", Rod Stewart, 0:19

Post Post Script, music-recognizing algorithms
Moodbar
Moodbar is a computer visualization used for navigating within a piece of music. This is done with a horizontal bar that is divided into vertical stripes. Each stripe has a colour showing the "mood" within a short part of the song. The colour can depend on spectrum and/or rhythmic features of the part of the song. The parts of the song (intro, choruses, solos, accents etc.) as well as musical changes (dynamics, rhythm, texture, playing instruments) are clearly visible on the bar

Wood, Gavin; O'Keefe, Simon (2005). "On Techniques for Content-Based Visual Annotation to Aid Intra-Track Music Navigation and Fin-de-Siècle Predilections". Retrieved 2007-12-14.

Music Genome Project
A given song is represented by a vector (a list of attributes) containing approximately 400 "genes" (analogous to trait-determining genes for organisms in the field of genetics). Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. proprietary, for Pandora

Acoustic Fingerprinting
mostly for song recognition/identification (for use with copyright bots, for example, or Shazam), not for visualizational or relational data use

MusicBrainz
MusicBrainz captures information about artists, their recorded works, and the relationships between them. Recorded works entries capture at a minimum the album title, track titles, and the length of each track. These entries are maintained by volunteer editors who follow community written style guidelines. Recorded works can additionally store information about the release date and country, the CD ID, cover art, acoustic fingerprint, free-form annotation text and other metadata. As of 19 April 2013, MusicBrainz contained information about 750,000 artists, 1 million releases, and 12 million recordings.
"Database Statistics". MusicBrainz. Retrieved 2013-04-19.

Moodagent is a commercial service from Syntonetic that combines digital signal processing and AI techniques to create music profiles that incorporate characteristics such as mood, emotion, genre, style, instrument, vocals, orchestration, production, and beat/tempo

links:
Justify My Heart, the readymade mashup instructions for Madonna's "Justify my Love" and Alicia Keys "Listen to Your Heart"

Artificial intelligence identifies the musical progression of the Beatles
July 2014, phys.org

...computer scientists at Lawrence Technological University have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that can analyze and compare musical styles, enabling research into the musical progression of the Beatles.

The algorithm works by first converting each song to a spectrogram – a visual representation of the audio content. That turns an audio analysis task into an image analysis problem, which is solved by applying comprehensive algorithms that turn each music spectrogram into a set of almost 3,000 numeric descriptors reflecting visual aspects such as textures, shapes and the statistical distribution of the pixels. Pattern recognition and statistical methods are then used to detect and quantify the similarities between different pieces of music.

The automatic placement of the albums by the algorithm was in agreement with the chronological order of the recording of each album, starting with the Beatles' first album, "Please, Please Me," and followed by the subsequent early albums, "With the Beatles," "Beatles for Sale" and "A Hard Day's Night." 

Network Thresholds

As Facebook breaches 1billion, we may raise a conjecture. When users level off, what is the next number to follow as we stab in the dark at the value of a social utility? Connections, of course.

I would like to predict, for imaginary purposes only, the (perhaps serruptitious) use of socialbots to increase connections between users. Network Densification Algorithms, if you will.

socialbots on network interaction: before
source: http://www.webecologyproject.org/

socialbots on network interaction: after
source: http://www.webecologyproject.org/

LINKS:
I'm Not a Real Friend, But I Play One on the Internet
Tim Hwang, HOPE#9, July 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfQt6FWDi6c
PacSocial: Field Test Report
Max Nanis, Ian Pearce, Tim Hwang
November 15, 2011
http://www.pacsocial.com/files/pacsocial_field_test_report_2011-11-15.pdf

Socialbots
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/09/socialbots.html
Web Ecology Project
 http://www.webecologyproject.org/
Facebook crosses billion threshold, on quest for growth
Liana B. Baker and Gerry Shih
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO | Thu Oct 4, 2012
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/04/us-facebook-idUSBRE8930N320121004