Thursday, September 25, 2008

Rip Van Winkle

It's been exactly a month since my last posting. During this time I had a lovely nap, started the school year, enrolled my son in karate, started my daughter in piano lessons, purchased an iPhone, took another nap, remodeled my kitchen, got my puppy partially housebroken, attended countless meetings, knocked on some doors for a presidential candidate, played Mario Kart Wii, played in the DePauw Tigers pep band for the opening football game, started revising my article on phenomenology, ran a 5k, and took one more nap. I feel rested, and ready to blog again.

I'll cheat by pointing out some good musical things others have written about recently(ish):

John Scalzi and his readers discuss good film scores for Science Fiction movies. I don't know if the person who suggested Flash Gordon should be stoned or awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Speaking of MacArthur, congratulations to Alex Ross, Leila Josefowicz, and Miguel Zenon. I expect Alex to next be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the New Complexity riots.

Dave Munger has written about five music cognition topics during my nap. 1) What aspects of conducting are most important for synchronizing beats? 2) The ability of music to evoke memory. 3) Tone deafness is very rare. Bad singing is not (alas). 4) The higher prevalence of absolute pitch among Asian populations is not related to genetics. 5) Music helps learn new words.

Mind Hacks also has three music-n-psychology posts: 1) songs about anesthesia. 2) a review of a review of Daniel Levitin's latest book. 3) binaural beats and digital drugs.

Peter Sagel runs for some of the same reasons I do. I don't think I'll be able to run my upcoming half marathon in 1:30 though. I'll be ecstatic if I'm around 2 hours.