Education and Outreach
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.
The cover story in the August 16-22, 2008, issue of New Scientist magazine examines climate change over the next ten years. It points out that climate scientists are improving their ability to predict intermediate changes in the climate because of an increased understanding of the role of the oceans. It appears that there are fluctuations with periods of a decade or so, and that we may be in for about ten years of respite from the recent upward trend of global average temperature.
This can be good news or bad news, depending on how people and governments respond to it.
While U.S students continue to lag behind many countries academically, national statistics show that teachers have responded by assigning more homework. But according to a joint study by researchers at Binghamton University and the University of Nevada, when it comes to math, piling on the homework may not work for all students.
If you care about experiential science education, you should discover very innovative RiverQuest program in Pittsburgh, formerly Pittsburgh Voyager. They are now bringing a brand new "green" boat into service. Read on for the news release. Welcome, Explorer!
(Disclaimer: For several years, I was proud to be a board member of Pittsburgh Voyager.)
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.
There are just five regular polyhedra
In a group of 23 people, at least two have the same birthday with the probability greater than 1/2
Everything you can do with a ruler and a compass you can do with the compass alone
Start with the sequence of non-zero digits 123456789. The problem is to place plus or minus signs between them so that the result of thus described arithmetic operation will be 100.
We got one answer
12 + 3 - 4 + 5 + 67 + 8 + 9 = 100
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.
Despite perceptions that the nation is losing its competitive edge, the United States remains the dominant leader in science and technology worldwide, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.
You can only get so many degrees in college. I can't get enough of them. Can you?
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!
