Bees

I have a new friend.

He is a valley carpenter bee Xylocopa varipuncta.  Xylocopa means carpenter, and varipuncta means very punctual.  He visits every day before dusk, hovering around the tulsi trying to steal some pollen.  He is a big bee, about as big as my thumb.  One of the biggest bees in California!  I wonder if he is displaced from Holy Jim Canyon.  Or maybe a neighboring human installed a passionflower.

He is very fast so my photos are not very clear.  Luckily, better entomologists have closeup shots of this adorable insect.

Dare I say, this may be the best bee?

Unlike bumblebeetles, bees have amazing flight capability.  This massive carpenter bee is no exception.  My bee friend rarely stops to rest on the plant when he visits.  He just hovers and zips, hovers and zips.  Like a hummingbird!  It’s hard to believe such a large insect can get so much metabolic energy from pollen.  Who knew plant jizz was so nutritious?  This bee is about as big as a fig beetle yet much more precise in his movement.  A breeze or a passing human barely perturbs his work.  Beautiful busy bee.

 

There were other bees at the tulsi in the morning.

I think these are leafcutter bees of the genus Megachile.

I think this is a small carpenter bee, like 100 times smaller than the valley carpenter bee.  The tiny tulsi flowers attracts all kinds.  I thought these tiny bees were flies!

This should be common knowledge, but I had no idea bees were so diverse.  Usually when you think of a bee, you think of a European honey bee.  But flowering plants and pollinators evolved almost everywhere on the planet.  And holy basil brings in many varieties.  I wonder if that has something to do with how the plant became holy.

Carpenter bees and fig beetles, both large buzzing, flying insects mistaken for bumblebees.  The beetle has elytra which are certainly tougher than the bee’s exoskeleton, but this also hampers mobility.  The beetle can fly but rarely in a direct path.  Its vision cannot keep up with the bees.

A bee’s vision is insane.  It has three tiny eyes in its forehead.  These are light-sensitive dots, and maybe the bee uses them to visually sense its direction and orientation.  Then you have the two massive compound eyes with thousands of facets, each containing a cluster of photoreceptors to differentiate between colors.  They can’t see as many reds as humans can, but bees can see further into the violet and ultraviolet.

One more amazing thing about bees is their memory.  Everybody knows that honey bees are amazingly social.  Eusocial insects, which form organized societies with class structure, include ants, bees, and wasps.  But not all bees and wasps are eusocial!  In fact, none of the bees in these photos are eusocial.

To close it off, here are a couple bumblebee pics from Colorado:

Bumbling Beetles

For many in the world, early August is a time for heat waves, monsoons, and torrid humidity.  In my neighborhood, late summer is a time for wildfires and the big bumbling beetles Cotinis mutabilis, the figeater beetle.  Two days prior, I set out some old oranges to help hydrate thirsty birds while the Holy Fire raged on some 20 miles to the east.  Today, I noticed the orange was still there.  Not only that, it had a bunch of visitors!

These are the infamous fig beetles, named for how they grossly glom the ficus.

These big green bumbling beetles can never seem to fly in a straight trajectory.  Generally pretty harmless, they have smacked into people before.  Apparently their rearwings, which do all the work in this case, don’t offer the beetle enough control.  It doesn’t help that the forewings are heavy, armored plates that don’t completely move out of the way.  The crazy thing is beetles have existed for millions of years.  Why are they such terrible fliers?

I’ll explain as a follow-up to a previous post.  As described before, dragonflies earn their fearsome name.  Among insects, they are the masters of the sky and have held that title for over a hundred million years.  They use their four wings directly anchored to muscle fibers to maneuver with precision and agility.  The more advanced Neopteran insects, in most cases, have only two wings.  If a more primitive flying insect had four wings, what happened?

Beetles and flies evolved divergently, each lineage of flying insect re-purposing a different pair of wings.  In flies, the back wings shrank over time to form halteres.  These look almost like stirrups and they help with balance during flight.

A crane fly a.k.a. artichoke-fly. Notice the haltreses behind its wings (photo, Andre Vrijens)

Beetles turned their front wings into armor.  The hardened shell called an elytron–by the way, Coleoptera means sheathed wing–helped beetles proliferate into the most diverse group of insects.

Oh wait…  That’s right, the parasitoid wasps might actually be more diverse.  This is crazy to think about, but that category of insect is so diverse with specialists.  Anyways…

In RPG terms, beetles boast outrageous defense at the cost of mobility, yet retain the flight ability in many builds.  Among insects, beetles make the best tanks.  Some are large enough to stay safe from mantises, dragonflies, and other insect predators.  They’re not the best at escaping, but they can get some distance quickly if need be.  Beetles don’t usually offer much in offense, but some get really creative with defense.  Beetles are, however, outclassed by larger vertebrate insectivores.

Still, trading mobility for defense paid off.  Beetles have persisted for over 300 million years.  And the fig beetles in my neighborhood don’t seem to have many predators.  Sad.

I met a bug in the same weight class with maxed mobility.  Bee careful around parasitoids.

Summer Magic (a Review)

Summer heat is in full swing, and then some in certain parts of the world.  One nice thing about the season–apart from skimpy outfits, summer bodies, and scorching heat and humidity is a surge of upbeat feel-good, often synthesized, music.  After all, it is festival season!  But this is not a post about a festival.  It is about a summer kpop release!

Red Velvet consists of 5 members: Irene, Seulgi, Wendy, Joy, and Yeri.  Produced by SM Entertainment, one of Korea’s largest entertainment companies, their music often features production from overseas artists like the Stereotypes.  A unique characteristic about this group is they are two-faced: the bright Red and the dark Velvet.  “Bad Boy” was a smash hit from their Velvet side, following last year’s “Red Flavor.”  In August 2018, they released Summer Magic, an anticipated EP bringing a new Red single: “Power Up.”  Let’s get into this

Tracklist:

1. Power Up
2. With You
3. Mr. E
4. Mosquito
5. Blue Lemonade
6. Bad Boy (English ver.)

Right away, you can tell they’re conjuring the 8-/16-bit vibes from “Russian Roulette.”  This summer pop theme reminds me of AOA’s release from earlier this season, “Bingle Bangle.”  Wendy’s prechorus line is a nice hook, though, and it segues nicely into the catchy pop chorus the fans adore.  In many ways this song is a sequel to last year’s “Red Flavor,” and even features a shoutout for Red Velvet fans or Reveluvs.  Go, go, airplane, Kauai is where we’re going!  As with any of the Red-themed single, this features mostly major chords, although a minor 3rd shows up here and there, keeping my listener ears engaged.  The bridge is pretty refreshing, a bouncy half-time boogie with a more low-key vibe.  I don’t like Joy’s soprano note, but then the chorus kicks off again, brighter than ever.  A lot of coin sounds though… Let’s power up!

Next is the anachronistic “With You,” an uptempo ballad with steel drum instrumentals and Christmas-themed lyrics.  “When I’m with you, it feels so good like Christmas,” is essentially what this song is about.  The tropical sound is welcome, evoking a Caribbean island getaway.  The brass hits punctuate the saccharine love message.  What makes this fun is the many layers.  The only thing I don’t like are a few vocal lines that are pitched down or up obscenely, like a distortion effect.  Anyways, it’s too hot for Christmas!

“Mr. E.”  Mystery.  This track starts with flutes and birdcalls, another jungle-themed song reminiscent of last year’s “Zoo.”  That track was fire, and so is this one!  The halftime-feel pre-chorus has sixteenth-note responses to main vocals’ calls, of which I’m not a fan.  But then the chorus kicks off with a catchy melody with a mix of minor and major intervals.  It’s really worth the wait.  The bridge is syncopated and engaging, hip-swaying.  The final chorus is a real gem, as the girls belt out with overhead ad-libs.

The next song is weird.  “Mosquito” evokes “Huff, Puff” if I have to compare to an earlier Red Velvet track.  It kind of reminds of miss A.  It’s mostly hip-hop feel with minor chords, but the chorus is strangely major.  There are a lot of “Oohs,” “Aahs,” “Ooah,” “Nana,” and “Zeze,” so this is a fun track for noraebang.

Following up that is the appropriately titled, “Hit That Drum.”  It’s a pretty straight-ahead afrobeat electronic pop song.  Of course, they say “Boom,” like eighty times.  Still, the production is pretty slick.  Each vocalist shows off in kind with a couple of doubled-up parts.  Pretty standard for Red Velvet, which is a good thing.  The bridge is another slow break launching into a brighter chorus.

Next is “Blue Lemonade,” an upbeat major pop song.  This offers the most sugar content of all the songs on the album.  You can kind of guess this from the title, which suggests lemonade artificially colored and sweetened.  Still, the layers make a bubbly, ethereal sound.  This is the song that plays when you dream of confessing to your crush on a warm summer day, but you wake up before they can respond.  Oh wait, no, you’ve just the hit the bridge!  Just wait through a few seconds of downtempo and–oh no, they still haven’t answered but they look deep in thought… It’s a rejection!  The song ends softly.

Finally as a bonus track, the English version of “Bad Boy,” a re-release of their smash hit from January.  Unfortunately, the members’ English skills are pretty mismatched.  The production of this song is fire, indistinguishable from the original.  The English lyrics are simple, understandable to English-learners, and easy to sing for non-English singers.  Sometimes that means they get cheesy (“You’re going to know what it feels like to be free and open your mind”) or repetitive (“The more you want to fight that [you fight that] you fight that [fight that]”), but sometimes they get pretty creative (“I know how to make the devil cry”).  The biggest weakness is just the difference in fluency.  To be fair, Wendy is famous for speaking Korean English to be understood on Korean variety shows.  Joy and Yeri enunciate surprisingly well.  But when Irene says “baby, my apologies,” I heard “baby mama politics,” so I think Irene needs to hang out more with Wendy.

Overall, this is a solid album and a worthy addition to Red Velvet’s discography.  Initially, I worried that “Power Up” was too gimmicky, rehashing the retro video game concept mere months after “Bingle Bangle.”  Maybe the retro game concept is a fad and will fade.  Still, the single is nice as a sort of sequel to “Red Flavor” with bits from “Russian Roulette.”  The B-sides are all solid, my favorite being “Mr. E,” but none of them are outstanding or game-changing.  It’s just more of the top quality that fans have come to expect from Red Velvet.  But it is clear that SM is investing more into Red Velvet than f(x) or even SNSD, two of the agency’s most successful girl groups.  I’m sure f(x) fans are pissed at that, but every group needs its shot at the limelight and this is Red Velvet’s.  I would advise f(x) fans to remain hopeful.  Maybe Amber and Wendy will collaborate on an English-language Asian pop album.  It could happen!

This album is great, but I will dock it twice from The Red Summer for a) no flagrant EDM like “You Better Know” and b) no jazzy track like “Hear the Sea.”  But it makes up for the former with solid electronic undertones throughout that complete the summer feeling.  Specifically, I mean the vacation gaming of “Power Up,” a Caribbean getaway “With You,” jungle-raving with “Mr. E,” stinging insects in “Mosquito,” and the sugar rush of “Blue Lemonade.”  It’s a hot record, overall!

Arbitrary rating: 8888

 

Profile: Keiichiro Shibuya

I sat around at home watching NHK World, Japan’s English-language international propaganda channel, mostly because it offers some interesting programs and news stories that don’t reach American news media.  One such story is that of an A.I. conductor.  The more I watched this story, the more I wanted to learn more.

Keiichiro Shibuya is a pioneer of electronic fusion.  At 29, he started his record label ATAK, releasing electro-acoustic music.  His whole style seems to be mixing seemingly contrarian elements.  Sounds familiar?

In 2012, Shibuya released the first Vocaloid opera.  If you have seen me geek out IRL, you know that Vocaloid is the future.  This opera, The End, features neither orchestra nor human singer.  Instead, Hatsune Miku takes the stage and belts her Vocaloid drums out, lamenting of feelings of conflict over life and death.  Fundamental to this is her initial question: will I die?  I am overjoyed that someone would take a Vocaloid idol, throw her into an electronic opera, and make her sing about whether she–a software singer–will die.  If you consider the life-and-death cycle of human pop stars, few make it to their 30s, let alone through them.  Human bodies age, and human perception is fickle.  Software only gets better with time, especially when connected to a crowdsourced cultural entity like Miku.  So for her, this is a really deep question.   Of course, no Vocaloid stage production is complete without stellar visual arts, in this case directed by YKBX.  Novelist Toshiki Okada developed the narrative, and producer Pinnochio P helped program Miku.

Up until now opera always dealt with human death, creating a situation where the abnormal exertion of life’s greatest energy by a person about to die was essentially linked to sound and acoustics. “THE END” takes note of this habitual format and treats opera as an anthropological mechanism of critique where the distortion of life and death unfolds. A new world emerges from “THE END”, one that escapes from the European anthropocentrism that was conventionally bound to civilization and art, a world that dissolves the boundaries between life and death, public and private, parts and the whole, layer and delineated, human and animal, existence and production. –ATAK on The End

The End can be viewed on Youtube with English subtitles (not my video).  If you want to read a rant about Vocaloid, stay tuned.

That production in itself is enough to warrant my attention, but Shibuya’s “Scary Beauty” is next-level.  Instead of a non-human singer and an electronic orchestra,  the music comes from a human orchestra and a non-human conductor.  He found a crucial collaborator for this work in Osaka University’s Hiroshi Ishiguro.  As director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, Ishiguro leads cutting edge research on human-like robots, facial features and all.  Takashi Ikegami of Tokyo University also brings in his expertise on artificial life to enhance the realism.  This comes in handy when–speaking from experience–you play a piece and need to read the intent of the conductor.  Should I play softer?  Attack harder?  Build gradually?  Ritardando?  I forgot what bar of rest we’re in, please give me a signal when I need to come in!  In “Scary Beauty,” the machine takes care of all that thanks to a neural network.  As Professor Ikegami described in an interview with Billboard:

The android in this project moves while singing, and the movement isn’t programmed in advance. –Takashi Ikegami on “Scary Beauty”

Like in a human brain, the software learns to identify patterns during practice or training.  Then, when it’s showtime, the software picks up on patterns from the sheet music and the audio feedback from the orchestra.  On July 22, 2018, “Scary Beauty” premiered in Japan, in which the robot sang and directed the 30-piece orchestra.  And no metronome!

Machines can sing, machines can conduct, machines can compose.  Will we ever pass the torch completely?  What will our role be in the future of music?

Shibuya said two things I want to highlight.

First:

Our show could be seen as a metaphor for the transitional relationship between technology and humans in that people are becoming more and more enslaved by technology. –Keiichiro Shibuya on “Scary Beauty”

Second:

We’re aiming to show that when people forcibly comply with an android that conducts according to its own logic and system, a world that couldn’t be seen with a human conductor and performers emerges. –Keiichiro Shibuya on “Scary Beauty”

This guy gets it.  Technology is cause for concern but also cause for hope.  This applies towards humanity’s future in creative arts, as in this example with opera.  I am excited to see what else can happen as machines continue to experiment with arts.

Keiichiro Shibuya is an artist to watch out for.

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On August 1, 2018August 1, 2018 By meIn opinion, Science