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October 29, 2004 Radar Images Suggest a Saturn Moon's Landscape Contains Basins of Ice By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD/NYTimes PASADENA, Calif., Oct. 28 - The Cassini spacecraft's first radar images of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, have revealed a diverse frozen landscape of bright streaks that may be ice ridges or wind-driven deposits, and dark regions that are probably smooth basins filled with dirty ice - or, in some places, lakes of exotic liquid, perhaps methane. If they did not dispel the mystery of Titan, the black-and-white radar images gave scientists tantalizing clues to challenge or revise some hypotheses about the nature of the Titanian surface, long hidden beneath a dense atmosphere. It is the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere and evidence of a complex organic, or carbon-based, chemistry that could yield insights into processes that led to life on the early Earth. In its encounter with Titan on Tuesday, the Cassini spacecraft penetrated the opaque atmosphere with cameras, infrared sensors and a radar system designed to map hidden landscapes. The first processed radar images were made public Thursday by scientists here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They appeared to show more features than could be seen in the regular photographs, released soon after the flyby. At a news conference, Dr. Charles Elachi, director of the laboratory, who is also leader of the radar investigation, said the radar survey covered a strip 75 miles wide and 1,200 miles long, about 1 percent of the planet-size moon's surface. Bright regions in the images represented rough terrain, and darker areas were interpreted as smooth, flat surfaces. Dr. Elachi noted a 150-mile-wide dark region that looked (as a researcher's daughter put it) like a Halloween cat. The region, he said, was probably a smooth basin with icy surfaces and possibly lakes of liquids. On Wednesday, scientists examining conventional photographs and other data said they saw no evidence of bodies of liquids on Titan. Some members of the radar imaging team said they thought it more likely that the smooth surfaces were expanses of dirty ice, frozen water mixed with tarlike hydrocarbons related to methane. Dr. Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona reported that measurements of Titan's surface heat "were consistent with a surface covered in organic material" and that the dark regions were richer in organics than the brighter areas. Even though Titan's mass is estimated to be half water and half rock, any lake would not be liquid water. It would be frozen solid on a surface with temperatures as low as minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. Any liquid is more likely to be a hydrocarbon like methane. Titan's atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen, with a significant amount of methane. Dr. Elachi said the Halloween cat in the radar image looked "similar to a lake on Earth, except you can't drink the liquid." Dr. Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, noted, "How much of the surface is liquid and how much solid is still unclear." The landscape surveyed in the close approach was definitely flat, scientists said, with variations in elevation of little more than 150 feet. No craters were detected, though such a large moon would have been struck by asteroids many times. Scientists suggested that the craters might have been filled with glacial movements of water ice and a steady rain of hydrocarbons from the sky. "Titan is really covered in organics," Dr. Lorenz said. Nor were any mountains or deep valleys detected by the radar. But it revealed many surface streaks, particularly in the equatorial region. Scientists said these could be ridges of ice or deposits of windblown material. Similar streaks were seen in conventional photographs taken by the Cassini craft. Other measurements indicated that on Titan the average winds blow at speeds comparable to those on Earth. Dr. Alfred McEwen, another Arizona scientist and a member of the imaging team, said the winds appeared to be the primary cause of most of the observed streakiness. Winds may be moving solid material around, possibly even moving liquids around, Dr. McEwen said. In other radar images, scientists found many signs of fractures in the frozen surface, in places giving the appearance of a cracked eggshell. It is one more of the puzzles that confront Cassini scientists now that the spacecraft, which reached an orbit of Saturn on June 30, has completed the first close-up reconnaissance of Titan. Before that, Dr. Lunine said, more distant observations showed that methane was chemically active in Titan's atmosphere and that it was probably recombining to make more complex organic molecules. But for all scientists knew, Titan's surface was geologically dead. Now, Dr. Lunine said, scientists "can see that Titan is an extremely dynamic place not only in its atmosphere but on the surface itself."

October 29, 2004 EDITORIAL/NYTimes Homo TomThumbus The discovery of the skeletal remains of hobbit-size humans on a remote island in Indonesia has set anthropologists atwitter. The bones appear to belong to a new and unexpected species of humans, little more than three feet high, who lived among giant rats and pygmy elephants on the island of Flores until at least 13,000 years ago. That would make these miniature people contemporaries of our own human ancestors for tens of thousands of years, though no one knows if they ever met. If the findings hold up, the partial skeleton of a 30-year-old woman and bone fragments from six other individuals suggest that Homo floresiensis, or Flores man, is a descendant of the Homo erectus line that left Africa some 1.8 million years ago. Scientists speculate that full-size members of the line reached Flores more than 800,000 years ago, were marooned and evolved in isolation. With scant food and few predators, large size became a disadvantage. That favored the evolution of smaller humans and smaller elephants, which needed far fewer calories to live. A surprising byproduct of this downsizing was that the brain of Flores man shrank to become smaller than a chimpanzee's. Even so, these humans were no dummies, given the evidence that they used fire, made stone tools and hunted cooperatively. The Floresians may have been wiped out, along with the pygmy elephants, by volcanic eruptions some 12,000 years ago, although local lore speaks of "little people" living in remote caves on the island right up to the 1500's, when Dutch traders arrived. Speculative minds raise the possibility that even today, in some remote corner of Earth, a primitive line of humans remains to be discovered. That's probably pushing it. But the new discovery chips away at our smug notion that human evolution is a steady march toward bigger and brainier. In a tough environment, smaller may fare better. Meanwhile, our long reign as the sole human species on Earth appears to be shorter than we thought.

October 28, 2004 New Species Revealed: Tiny Cousins of Humans By NICHOLAS WADE/NYTimes Once upon a time, but not so long ago, on a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world. Strangest of all, this is no fable. Skeletons of these miniature people have been excavated from a limestone cave on Flores, an island 370 miles east of Bali, by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists. Reporting their find in today's issue of Nature, they assign the people to a new human species, Homo floresiensis. The new finding is "among the most outstanding discoveries in paleoanthropology for half a century," say two anthropologists not associated with the study, Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr and Dr. Robert Foley of the University of Cambridge, in a written commentary in the same issue. The little Floresians lived on the island until at least 13,000 years ago, and possibly to historic times. But they were not a pygmy form of modern humans. They were a downsized version of Homo erectus, the eastern cousin of the Neanderthals of Europe, who disappeared 33,000 years ago. Their discovery means that archaic humans, who left Africa 1.5 million years earlier than modern people, survived far longer into recent times than was previously supposed. The Indonesian island of Flores is very isolated and, before modern times, was inhabited only by a select group of animals that managed to reach it. These then became subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some toward giantism and reduced the size of others. The carnivorous lizards that reached Flores, perhaps on natural rafts, became giant-size and still survive, though now they are confined mostly to the nearby island of Komodo; they are called Komodo dragons. Elephants, because of their buoyancy, are surprisingly good swimmers; those that reached Flores evolved to a dwarf form the size of an ox. Previous excavations by Dr. Michael J. Morwood, a member of the team that found the little Floresians, showed that Homo erectus had arrived on Flores by 840,000 years ago, to judge from the evidence of crude stone tools. Presumably the descendants of these Homo erectus became subject to the same evolutionary forces that reduced the size of the elephants. The first little Floresian, an adult female, was found in September last year, buried under 20 feet of silt that coats of the floor of the Liang Bua cave in Flores. A team of paleoanthropologists headed by Dr. Peter Brown, of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, identified the skeleton, which is not fossilized, as a very small but otherwise normal individual, similar to Homo erectus. Because the downsizing is so extreme, smaller than that in modern human pygmies, they assign it to a new species. In a companion report Dr. Morwood, an archaeologist who is also at the University of New England, estimates that the skeleton is 18,000 years old. He has since found the remains of six more individuals in the cave, with dates ranging from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago, he said in an interview. Also buried in the cave are a number of objects that illustrate how the little Floresians lived. There are bones of Komodo dragons, beasts 10 feet in length, and of an even larger lizard. The dragons can eat animals the size of deer, but being cold-blooded, they are sluggish at low temperatures and not so hard to kill. There are bones of the pygmy elephant, giant rat, fish and birds. There is evidence that the Floresians knew the use of fire. And there is a suite of stone tools, considerably more sophisticated than any yet known to have been made by Homo erectus. The tools include small blades that might have been mounted on wooden shafts. If the stone tools were made by the little Floresians, as Dr. Morwood believes, that is striking evidence of their cognitive abilities. Dr. Morwood says they must have hunted cooperatively to bring down the pygmy elephants. To conduct such hunts, and to fabricate such complex stone tools, they almost certainly had some form of language, he said. This will be a surprising finding, if true, because the little people have brains slightly smaller than a chimpanzee and similar in size to Australopithecenes, the ape-like ancestors of the human line. Dr. Foley said he would not rule out Dr. Morwood's suggestion but noted that chimpanzees hunt cooperatively without using language. Modern humans are known to have reached Australia by at least 40,000 years ago and were probably in the general neighborhood of Flores at the same time, so it is a plausible alternative that they could have been the makers of the stone tools. "I think it's a big jump" to assume the Floresians had language, Dr. Foley said. He also noted the danger of assuming the Floresians behaved like diminutive people when their nature might in fact have been quite different. Dr. Morwood said he had found no sign of modern humans in Flores until 11,000 years ago, so he had no basis for associating them with the tools in the Liang Bua cave. Dr. G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said he was persuaded that the tools were made by the little Floresians. "It's a wonderful demonstration of apparently 'archaic' humans adapting to the special conditions on Flores," Dr. Rightmire said. "I wouldn't have supposed that such small-brained people descended directly from Homo erectus would be capable of producing these artifacts, but the evidence is pretty compelling." The new findings add to the rapidly emerging picture of Homo erectus, which has long been overshadowed by the better known Neanderthals of Europe. Like the Neanderthals, Homo erectus generally disappeared from the scene just before modern humans arrived in their territory. The little Floresians not only survived long into the modern period but unlike most of the other archaic human populations managed to coexist with modern humans. They also demonstrate the adaptability of the human form and how readily humans conformed to the same pressures toward dwarfism that affected other island species. Most of the extraordinary finds in paleontology have been surprising because they were so old. "What's exciting about this one is that it's so late, telling us about the processes and patterns of evolution in a way that's deeply informative," Dr. Foley said. The Floresians of the Liang Bua region seem to have perished after an eruption from one of the island's many volcanoes about 12,000 years ago. But they may have survived until much later elsewhere on Flores, Dr. Morwood believes. Among today's Ngadha people of central Flores and the Manggarai of West Flores there are local stories of little people who lived in caves until the arrival of the Dutch traders in the 16th century.

October 28, 2004 Elton John Ready to Apologize to Madonna By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 8:24 p.m. ET NEW YORK (AP) -- Elton John is ready to apologize to Madonna after recently accusing the pop star of lip-synching. ``I don't want to escalate it because I like Madonna,'' the 57-year-old singer-songwriter tells Entertainment Weekly. ``She's been to my house for dinner. It was something that was said in the heat of the moment, and probably should not have been said.'' ``Would I apologize to her if I saw her?'' said John. ``Yeah, because I don't want to hurt any artist's feelings. It was my fault. I instigated the whole thing. But it applies to all those bloody teenage singers.'' John made the comment when presenting the Best Live Act award during the Q awards in London earlier this month. In EW's Nov. 6 issue, John described the event as ``a very drunken lunch.'' ``The reaction to it was so hysterical,'' he said. ``It was like I said, `I think all gays should be killed or I think Hitler was right.' I just said someone was lip-synching. I'm not afraid to speak my mind. I'm not going to mellow with age. I get more enraged about things as I get older because you see that these injustices go on.'' (Madonna's spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg, has said the singer doesn't lip-synch and indicated that she hadn't taken John's remarks too seriously.) John, whose new CD, ``Peachtree Road,'' hits stores Nov. 9, wasn't remiss about recently calling photographers in Taipei, Taiwan, ``rude, vile pigs.'' ``The thing in Taiwan was unfortunate,'' he told the magazine. ``We arrived at 12:15 at night, we were going through the terminal, and we were just ambushed. (The photographers) were pretty hostile. They were allowed to stay in immigration and photograph us.'' In the article, John also revealed he loves Eminem's new album, ``Encore''; might collaborate with the Scissor Sisters; doesn't see himself stopping recording; and wouldn't have a ``Jennifer Lopez wedding.''

October 29, 2004 Brazilian Jazz Master Begins U.S. Tour By LARRY ROHTER/NYTimes RIO DE JANEIRO - Miles Davis used to call him "that crazy albino," but the composer and versatile instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal never took offense. Here at home he was already known as "the mad genius of Brazilian popular music" and "the sorcerer," so one more gruffly affectionate nickname could only burnish his reputation as an eccentric prodigy. Describing Mr. Pascoal's music, on the other hand, has always proved a much harder task. Though Mr. Pascoal and his quintet are scheduled to perform in the Jazz at Lincoln Center series tonight and tomorrow, the start of a rare United States tour that will continue into next month, he admits that he would feel just as comfortable playing with a symphony orchestra or at a backwoods hillbilly dance. "I'm 68 years old, and to this day, even I have never been able to define the type of music that I play," said Mr. Pascoal, who favors the piano but is conversant in a dazzling variety of instruments, in an interview before a performance here this month. "I'm a jazz musician when I play jazz. It's part, a strong part, of my music. But it's just one of the things I do, not the only thing." To the jazz luminaries Mr. Pascoal has worked with over the years, ranging from Davis to Ron Carter and Cannonball Adderley, it scarcely matters how his music is labeled. These days Mr. Pascoal's influence is especially strong among younger players, who search out vinyl pressings of his old albums and admire the complexity of the harmonies in his orchestral arrangements and the playful unpredictability of his compositions. "He's one of my all-time favorite composers, and I've turned a lot of cats onto him," the trumpet player Nicholas Payton said in a telephone interview from his home in New Orleans. "He is so far ahead that it has taken this long for people to catch up with him and for him to get the exposure he deserves." One of the things that make Mr. Pascoal so compelling, Mr. Payton added, is that "he's very contemporary, yet very rooted." As Mr. Payton put it, "he's not afraid to take chances, he's wild, he'll do anything, yet what inspires me is that even when he is at is his most abstract, you can feel those Brazilian rhythms, that connection to the core of his culture, in his music." But increasingly, Mr. Pascoal's appeal also extends beyond the jazz world. Orchestral pieces he composed have been performed in Europe and Latin America, and the Kronos Quartet commissioned and has long played a high-energy composition of Mr. Pascoal's, "Marcando Tempo," after being impressed by one of his United States performances in the 1980's. "I don't know if it's a fair comparison, but someone similar in American music might be Charles Ives," said the violinist David Harrington, a founder of the quartet. "Hermeto is creative in the most fundamental and invigorating kind of way, with an expansive imagination like a child's, a hugeness about his sources of inspiration and a vibrant curiosity about sound, a feeling that anywhere we are, there are sounds going on that can become part of musical experiences." Born in the poor northeast Brazilian state of Alagoas, Mr. Pascoal was drawn to what he calls "the sacred beauty and openness of music" at an early age. But because of the visual problems associated with being an albino, he found that music teachers were unwilling to take him on as a pupil, telling him that he would not be able to read or write scores. As a result, he had to learn to play instruments on his own and is, in his own words, "completely self-taught." He started at age 7 with the accordion, which he played at back-country dances and then, after moving to the urban hub of Recife as a teenager, on radio programs. "We had nothing out there in the bush, not a radio or a piano or anything else, so I felt like an orphan," he recalled. "Until I was 14, I played mostly for the animals, and that experience is part of my essence." By the start of the bossa nova era, however, Mr. Pascoal had made his way here and found work both as a player and arranger. He spent much of the 1960's in a band with the percussionist Airto Moreira, playing a mixture of samba, bossa nova and jazz. It was around 1970, on his first trip to the United States, that Mr. Pascoal met Davis. Mr. Moreira, by then a member of the Davis group, had asked his former bandmate to write songs and arrangements for an album that he planned to record, but when Mr. Davis heard the songs that Mr. Pascoal had written, he wanted not only to go into the studio and record them with Mr. Pascoal but also have "the crazy albino" join his touring band as a pianist. Mr. Pascoal turned down the offer to go on the road with Davis, but two of his compositions, "Igrejinha" and "Nem Um Talvez," ended up being included on Davis's groundbreaking "Live Evil" album. Originally credited to Davis, their authorship was restored to Mr. Pascoal after a long struggle, but nowadays they once again appear as Davis's compositions, which means Mr. Pascoal is no longer getting the publishing royalties on his compositions. "That's the fault of the record company, not Miles," he said. "He and I had a very spiritual friendship, and he always looked out for me. Once he even took me to see his doctor and told him in that hoarse voice of his to 'take good care of this guy, he's a genius.' '' Critics here and in the United States have also likened Mr. Pascoal to Frank Zappa. Both men show a fondness for triplet figures, dense orchestrations and rapidly shifting melodic lines in their work, though Mr. Pascoal, who for many years did not even own a record player, said he had never heard any of Zappa's music. "Everybody makes that comparison, but I always take care not to listen too much to music, so as not to be influenced by others," he said. "I don't even listen to my own music that much, because if I did I would repeat myself." Like Mr. Zappa, Mr. Pascoal is famous for his long and demanding rehearsals. Often, he requires band members to switch instruments, so that they acquire more versatility and a greater appreciation for the structure of the pieces they are playing. "We had to learn these extremely intricate, harmonically challenging parts, so we would practice five days a week, rain or shine, for six hours a day," said Jovino Santos Neto, a Brazilian pianist who played in Mr. Pascoal's band for 15 years and now lives and works in Seattle. "He knows how to dish out the challenges to each player, a little beyond what you can do, but not so far that you can't eventually reach it." Mr. Pascoal himself sets a high standard as an instrumentalist. He plays piano, saxophone, guitar, flute, accordion and an assortment of percussion instruments, some of which he has invented himself. "The instrument I like most is whatever instrument I happen to be playing at the moment," he said. "But if God said you could choose only one to play, I'd take the piano, because it contains everything within it, melody, harmony and rhythm, and is the father of all instruments." Deeply spiritual, believing that "music is prayer," Mr. Pascoal is also a prolific composer who sometimes "writes songs down on napkins" when he doesn't have sheet music at hand. In one memorable exercise, published in book form as "Calendario do Som," he wrote a song every day for a year, finishing shortly after a performance at Central Park on June 21, 1997, the last time he recalls playing in New York City. "The key to being able to compose is never to do anything in a premeditated fashion but to give yourself up to the moment, to intuition and the energy that is out there," he said. "You don't have to believe this if you don't want, but when I'm composing, I feel other composers who have already gone to heaven approaching me," from Chopin and Mozart to Thelonious Monk and Davis. Among musicians, stories about Mr. Pascoal's ability to discern music in everything are legion. Once, while recording the album "Slaves Mass" in the 1970's, he took a pair of pigs into the studio and "played" them as if they were bagpipes, while on another occasion he taped a radio soccer announcer narrating a goal being scored and wrote a song based on the rhythms and tone of his speech. "Music is the expression of something that flows through Hermeto 24/7," Mr. Santos said. "Being around him is like being near a waterfall. Whether he is talking, composing or performing, something is going on all the time."

cool story.

I'm looking forward to checking out 23 Standards soon. CD Universe finally shipped it on Wed., and it should be in my PO Box today or tommorow.

party on Garth!

Speedy!

And that's when you hit them with the champagne bottle! great timing...

Just saw the video...my, that looked pretty fucking silly.

Whatta pro.

I totally understand. For me...I have too much other shit to worry about. I'm getting older, my parents are too (Mom's 81, Dad's 76), the day job, the women problems...

I wouldn't worry 'bout it Jim. It's dumb pop music performed by dumb people. I'm past the point of giving a fork, but it is nice to see them make an ass of themselves.

Well...some of my friends get the freeer jazz, the other ones don't. I listen to both.

You beat me to this by about 60 seconds! Happy birthday maren!

Off the net, I am Dr. Funkenstein. They are not. Seriously, most the friends I have outside of my day job are some kind of musican or artist or record store hound. We all love music and at least some kind of jazz.

That's a pretty compact looking Sarode.

Crouch made one post at Jazz Corner, too scared to make another. Wimp.

cool photo!

My sez: "printed in the USA"

My copy of ECM 1125 doesn't have it. They must have run out of blank stock on a deadline.

Windows ME, Mistake Edition. A version I missed...fortunately!