ON A HIGH NOTE

Fancy seeing you here! Just a normal, everyday email here. Unpredictably sent to you from the mind, and dictated by the harried schedule, of Tori Westerhoff. There are likely typos. That is life. Also, the likely suspects (i.e. all the other OAHNs before this latest and not-so-greatest) are on ahighnote.weebly.com per your request. 

Subscribe yo’self. Similar to treat yo’self but not quite as luxurious. Or if you really want to, you could unsubscribe from this list :( ?

You've seen one Italian Renaissance still life, you've seen 'em all, right? Wrong. Totally wrong. Trick question! Actually this painting is used (by a professor who knows leagues more about, likely most, things then I could ever hope to know) as a biological record of how fruit, specifically watermelons, used to be normal before we messed with them. The segmented watermelon-morph to the right is actually the (more) original form of these tasty, unwieldy summertime-in-the-city fruits. Sidebar: Am I the only adult who cannot figure out how to cut and comsume melons? Cantaloupe scare me because they have diseases on the rind and I can never tell when they are ripe. Watermelons are just gigantic. And I don't want to lug them home from the supermarket because I am a lazy human. And i will be upfront with you, I always forget that Honeydews exisit. But melons are one of my favorite fruits! So I continually kick myself in the butt because I fail to motivate myself enough via the sweet promise of ripe cantaloupe, to actually learn an adult skill. Which bodes horribly for my future life and culinary ability. End Sidebar.Then humans decided they only liked the colorful part and made watermelons do away with those silly, yet evolutionarily-evolved segments so we could eat more fruit per melon. And then we also made the seeds disappear. We are really demanding, us humans. But we also make fly-as-heck paintings, so it's really a trade off, yeah? I mean look at the wax build-up depicted on those plum-pear hybrids! And the squash (or, who am I to assume, maybe it's a pre-human-intervention cantaloupe) with a belly button on the bottom is so vivid, I swear I can almost see it cracking in front of my eyes. 

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9050469/watermelon-breeding-paintingsYou know what you need? Opera. That is what you need. So, People Reading (there should be many of you because this is only the second blurb of...um, infinite? I mean you can't see the end of this email right now...), opera is straight up spine chilling. It is a momentous thing that real live humans do every day, with fewer and fewer other real live humans giving two cents about it. That's a shame, yo. This is culture. While there are many erudite anthropologists out there in the ether who disagree with the statement I am about to make, I nevertheless believe that, at least in micro terms, just because we have cool new culture cropping up as fast as you can say "app," doesn't mean we can turn our backs on the old-hat vividness and beauty that used to be the bees' knees. Don't feel the same? That's cool! But you should read this article anyways, at the very least to inform your counterargument and to look at the eye-opening photos. 

http://magazine.good.is/features/jonathan-cebreros-opera-in-the-streets  All of my dreams have come true. The invisibility cloak exists in a functional way, kind of. And though the very knowledgeable scientists and engineers who brought this thing to fruition claim it is not magic, I barely understand how it works and frankly didn't read this in depth because I want to keep the mystery alive. But if you all want to debunk the mechanics of invisibility, dive in. 

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1772 Hey, it feels like a good time to share deep, personal anecdotes! Right? Right. Well, I wouldn’t dream of droning on loquaciously like you guys don't have things to do and places to be...maybe.

I have a pet project/underlying current of passion/possible reason for living. It is holistic recuperation. I am sure you're scolding the monitor right now, "Tori, you're doing that thing when you say words but nobody knows what you are talking about. We've talked about this. Shape up." And I hear you, but this time, I might actually make sense. Lolz jk, totally kidding, let me elucidate. Holistic recuperation, broadly speaking, is the term I use when speaking about efforts to address all collateral damages that accompany devastating (often health related) challenges. For me, this rings loudest for physically challenged children; doctors do their best to heal the body, therapists do their best to heal the mind, but people forget about healing the whole person. This whole person exists in a society, and does not merely exist, but interacts in thousands of ways, thousands of times a day. People presumably want to dive in and breathe in deeply the culture and community and friendships and love and hate and mind-tripping complexity that is human interaction. It is senseless to rob individuals of a vivid societal role just because they had to trek through the pernicious and soul-breaking terrain of an (often health related) obstacle and miraculously, defiantly came out on the other side. Unfortunately, society tends to forever frame perceptions on inabilities, or differences. Which forces these folks to navigate a label that they did not choose nor opt for, but were shackled to by fate. So beyond the struggle itself, people have to climb a second mountain of crap; social labeling and constant reminders of their limitations. To holistically heal, people need to see the possibilities and power in their lives. Okay. So that's how I feel.

This guy gets me on this. He helps young adults diagnosed with cancer to find a place in the world through kayaking, but more importantly creates communities around their skills. And find zen, and find excitement and empowerment and success and other juicy life things. 

http://greatist.com/connect/kayak-pro-turned-his-passion-into-nonprofit-first-descents I realize I went on for a bit too much on that last one. I am sorry I'm not sorry. And I am so not sorry, here is something that is tangentially related in topic, but closely linked in sentiment. Nike is working with real-life super heros to reframe the cultural labels of the physically challenged. And given the sheer brand value and marketing prowess of Nike, it warms my heart and lights up my soul that an instituion with the power to change peoples minds has recognized its social value and is shifting the tectonic plates that make up cultural bias.  http://www.psfk.com/2015/07/blake-leeper-nike-inner-strength-series-disability.html Visual perception!! It's a big deal. And it affects us in so many incomprehensible, yet-to-be-defined, every-growing complex ways.  Brief overview, because 11th grade science was a while ago; we have different types of cells on our eyes (photoreceptors in retinas, to be more exact) that encode different colors. The basic theory is that we have "rods" and "cones." Rods come into play mainly in low-light, and help define things in your periphery vision (we have more of them on the outer sides of our retinas). Cones deal with color! Boompow! They work quickly, are concentrated in the middle of our retinas, and are a touch more accurate, though are less sensitive to light. Cone cells encode green, red, and blue and basically light comes in and fiddles with the ratios of activation and then we have color. This is where color blindness pops up. If one type of cone is faulty, or if the neuronal messages from cones to the brain are decoded in a different way, then colors look different! So there is this guy who is color blind. And his amazingly generous friend got him wicked amazing glasses that help correct colorblindness. And he videotaped the first time his friend saw color. It is beautiful. It makes you love everything in the world just because you can see it. Please watch it and send a little thank you out to whomever, whatever, or the absence of who/whatever you often thank for the great things that happen to us tiny specks. 

http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/what-happens-when-someone-sees-color-for-the-first-time Oh! Were we just talking about perception? Maybe? Yup! We were! Congrats for following along. I appreciate the attention and time and I'd like to take this chance to say that you have beautiful eyes. So, very few of you might know that I like cognition and perception and maybe possibly worked on it in college. Well I need to let you know that someone else, far cooler than I, also cares about cognition and perception. In fact there may be many people who care about the intersection or lack thereof, between the thoughts decisions, feels, and inexplicable urges we all have and the things we see all day.  

Well now. One day in the not so recent past, I was perusing National Geographic (because they have pretty pictures) and I stumbled on a blog post on a paper written by my former lab mate and my thesis advisor! They basically argue that top-down effects (cognition/thoughts/higher thinking changing perception) are nonexistent. And just as they are in real life, they are very convincing on paper. The blogger, however, narrows in on Scholl and Firestone's treatment of attention, and calls into question whether attention itself is a cognitive process. There are two sides of this (and every) coin, right? Attention is automatic when a lion pads down your office hallway and roars like it’s the beginning of a MGM movie in 1952. But attention is cognitively mediated when it is 4:42pm on Friday and your boss is asking you about the data contained in the fourth row of the third sheet of an excel workbook you haven't touched in nine business days. So what is it? It's a great question, isn't it?! Don’t you want to think about it for, I don’t know, the rest of your life?

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/07/21/cognition-and-perception-separate/#.Vbp_H_l0p5c Remember all the stuff we were going to get in the future, aka right now? Most of them were pretty damn cool and pretty useful. Guys, I am talking about living in space. Levitating. Color changing clothes that accurately reflected my mood. Holograph teachers. Cool. Stuff. But out of all of the things that I am supposed to have...ahem right now...the best by far was the robot from the Jetsons. First of all she was clearly the most pulled together one on show. Straight sagacious; that machine knew what was up. And I wanted one. I just want one so badly. SHe seemed so friendly and helpful and I just wanted to be her buddy.

I want us to defy the predictions of the first two seasons of Battlestar Gallactica and be best friends with robots from the get-go. This all relates to the actual topic I am linking insofar as a hotel in Cupertino (classic) has a robobutler!! Now all we need is the robobutlers of the world to also be 3D printers and custom print all of our needs! Like 3D printed mints on our pillows. Or 3D printed pillows. 

http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/13/aloft-starwood-hotel-california-robot-butler/ (article!)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFQw3zmTBWY (video of robot! It's cute!)

 http://cwcs.ysu.edu/sites/default/files/images/steeltown/identity-Peanuts-Cartoon.jpg

OAHN Peanut Gallery: Rejoice!

All of you all are so smart. You're really just very interesting people. And you send me great things and to spread your intellect, creativity, and awesomeness, I send them out for you. Melt the minds, all, melt those minds.  

So I think I was sent this very long article about someone's indecision about getting fit mostly because their tone is eerily similar to mine and Magic Mike is also mentioned. And Channing Tatum is extremely relevant to my daily life. Clearly. However, it very well could have been a veiled suggestion that, I too, should turn towards the light and start getting swole, or at least elliptical more. I opted for the former explanation to absolve myself of guilt, but I recognize both sides of the coin on this toss up. ​