Alex Ross points out a letter in Science magazine that describes two past studies on the musical preferences of Java sparrows. Birds were given a choice of different perches and picked Bach over the modern composer Schoenberg and silence. Perhaps the birds just weren’t in the mood for dissonance.

It’s October, which means Christmas catalogs are arriving, heralding the holidays right around the corner. And right after that comes the New Year with the famous ball dropping in Times Square. That ball has been through various incarnations throughout the years. To celebrate 2008 and the 100th anniversary of the yearly tradition, the ball has gone green. In an upgrade close to my LED-loving heart, the ball is now lit with 9,576 light-emitting diodes. Last year’s ball had 600 halogen and colored bulbs giving off 291,541 lumens and using 30,000 watts. The LEDs will shine brightly at 625,033 lumens and use about 15,000 watts. Waterford crystal panels are still being used to reflect and sparkle the light out to the millions who watch each year in person and on television.

The Sankaty Head Lighthouse, a symbol of Nantucket, was in danger of falling into the Atlantic Ocean as the cliff eroded. The Sconset Trust, a local preservation group, has raised $3.5 million to move and restore it. The lighthouse, weighing 450 tons, was lifted off its foundation and is being pushed along on steel beams. At 62 inches every ten minutes it’s slow going, but it should reach its new home at the end of the week. The Coast Guard will then put the beacon back into service.

Why settle for fake, crystal bling when you can purchase a cell phone with 3.30 carats of geniune diamonds? Only 10 will be made of that model, but there are others available, and that very shiny 24 carat gold iPod too.

A round-up of interesting elevators from deputydog. I’m scared of heights or I would’ve watched all the illustrative Youtube videos.

Tutus, clean bathrooms, juice boxes, and bubbles ruled the day at another Baby Loves Disco event in Seattle. (website)

“ChefDb is an ongoing project aimed at documenting the work history of chefs and restaurateurs from around the world.” It’s not a restaurant review site or yet another food blog, it’s a ongoing documentation project that grew out of its creator’s interest in cataloging all the establishments he had visited.

I love finding news stories about goats being hired out as landscapers. Here’s a bit from the NY Times. The National Park Service sent out a mass email in search of a “New York City Goat Herder” to clear brush at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. Larry Cihanek, who laughed when he saw the email, has provided goats from his family farm. They’ve been munching away at the fort’s vegetation for a month, and Cihanek hopes to bring them back next year for more.

From the depths of my ancient browser bookmark folders: “the vital statistics of the perfect chopstick.” After testing a dozen pair of chopsticks with experienced users, Swei-Pi Wu of the Hua Fan College of Humanities and Technology in Taipei, Taiwan, determined that “the most efficient chopsticks for general use would have handles of 6 millimetres diameter, tips of 4 millimetres diameter, and a 2 degree tip angle.” An earlier study on length, led Wu to recommend that 240 millimetre chopsticks were best for adults and 180 millimetre ones for children. (printed in 1996)

After a three year search for a new concertmaster, the Seattle Symphony hired four violinists for the job last month. It’s a perhaps innovative, certainly unusual, arrangement where three of the concertmasters are actually out-of-towners who have full-time jobs elsewhere. Two are concertmasters of other orchestras. One is a professor at Yale. The fourth is Maria Larionoff, the Seattle Symphony violinist who was acting concertmaster during the search. She originally refused to be considered for the position but has obviously reconsidered now that she has the opportunity to share it with others, giving her a break from the added stress. Some insiders, who would not go on record, believe the shared situation was created to eventually place Larionoff into the role full-time.