Blog Entry

I’m Dr. Fred, and I’m here to tell ya
‘Bout a Large Hadron Rap and some books to sell ya.
You can buy ’em online, but if you want ’em free
You can read ’em all you want at your librar-ee!

I just got my e-mail about the September Cafe Scientifique get-together in Pittsburgh.

It seems I know the speaker!

In his innovative 2006 bestseller, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Daniel J. Levitin, a path-breaking McGill University neuroscientist and former world-class music producer, led readers on a trip inside their musical brain.

Music, he argued, was more than a fortunate evolutionary by-product of language development. The book made a persuasive case that our minds and our bodies would have evolved very differently without it. And it did so in an entertaining style with excursions into autobiography, popular culture, and every imaginable musical genre.

Now in The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, Levitin extends that argument beyond individual brains to human civilization and culture. For fans of Brain on Music, this is a must-read. For other readers, this is a literary, poetic, scientific, and musical treat waiting to be discovered.

This is a well-deserved boost to my high school classmate and retired eye-surgeon David Fleishman, who has created the premier website for the collection of images and study of antique spectacles.

Read on for details of his latest exhibit: Rivet Spectacles dating back to the end of the 13th century.

With a title and subtitle like Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, Barbara Oakley’s book was sure to get attention from a reviewer like me. Read on for my review and a link to her recent appearance on BookTV videotaped in a bookstore in my home town. I got to introduce her.

Disclaimer: I didn’t know Barbara before writing the review, but we have become friends since, even though my review picks a nit or two with the book.

In Jim Arnold’s blog, we have been having an occasionally enlightening, occasionally exasperating discussion about whether gravitational waves (GWs) exist.

The evidence strongly supports the interpretation of the mathematics of general relativity that says gravitational waves do indeed exist and are, in principle if not yet in practice, observable.

That leads to a question that hasn’t come up in Jim’s blog but I’d like to raise here: What is the spectrum of gravitational radiation?

Another blogger here, who is generally so far off the mark that I don’t want to point to his earlier discussion, had some odd things to say about the “Pioneer anomaly,” the unexplained deviation of the two Pioneer spacecraft from their predicted trajectory as they pass through the outer reaches of the solar system.

A much more cogent discussion has just appeared.

Read on for my review of Avery Gilbert’s new book What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life. Who says science has to be dull?

See my latest published book review. Only a Theory is written by the scientist/author whose testimony was most critical in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case in which community members challenged a school board’s decision to include Intelligent Design in the science curriculum and won.

People who read my blog entries and comments on others know about my great concern for science education.

I’ve even posted a few blog brags about my children’s science books and my school visits. But this blog entry brags about work that my son is involved in.

Read on, please!