Journal of No. 118

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

2023-06-04T15:07:16Z

The Science of Human Obsession

The book won a number of awards when it came out in 2006, and has been incorporated into some college classes. It relates what is (or was then) known about the neuroscience of musical perception.
I really enjoyed the earlier parts of the book that focused very tightly on the perception of sound and music, probably because it bridged the physics of sounds and music (that I know to some degree) with the neuroscience. Like, you may know that a plucked string or an organ pipe has many resonant frequencies other than the fundamental -- the one we think of as 'the' note it's playing. But we don't experience it as a group of separate frequencies, but as a unified note. And if a guitar and an oboe are playing the same note simultaneously, we don't experience it as a guiboe, but we hear the two instruments more or less distinctly.
As the book goes on, it moves from tones and notes to chords and songs and harmony and genres and musical tastes, and at each step along the way, it seems the connection neuroscience gets more diffuse. I can't fault the science for being what it is, but for me it was less compelling and interesting.

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The Making of Incarnation ; The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

2022-08-08T15:30:19Z

The Making of Incarnation

by Tom McCarthy

All bells and whistles

But very little substance to latch onto. While it has a soupçon of Borges, Neal Stephenson and Cheaper by the Dozen, it only reminded me of how much more enjoyable those would be.

Ostensibly a sort of deconstructed look at elements coming together in a science fiction blockbuster film, there's not much of a plot, just details that spin themselves out into disquisitions.

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The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
by Richard P. Feynman

A motley collection of shorter works by Feynman on vastly different subjects from different points in his career. Generally interesting, but no real blockbusters. His essay on 'cargo cult science' has a great theme of scientific skepticism.

Feynman also reads much better when he's been filtered through Ralph Leighton. His own writing is a bit rough. It's funny because he was such an engaging speaker, but I guess he needs that animating live touch.

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The Glass Universe, by Dava Sobel

2019-01-30T01:28:48Z

I really like Sobel's book on Galileo's Daughter, so I was definitely curious to read this one. It tells the history of the female calculators at Harvard University. How their role changed from the late 19th century into the mid-20th. First as (very modestly paid) numerical calculators, and then examiners of photographic plates, and on into become some of the main organizers of early stellar spectroscopic data, and early studies of variable stars to the first Ph.D. students and dissertations, and on into everything from Oh Be A Fine Girl to spectroscopic binaries, to the discovery that stars are mostly hydrogen and helium, to the law between variable star periods and their intrinsic brightness, one of our first and best rulers for measuring the distance to distant stars.

Just some other details that caught my eye:

The story focuses on the women, but also goes into other activities of the broader Harvard Observatory, including setting up a telescope in Peru near Arequipa, which got involved in some civil unrest "[Bailey] recorded daily events, the din of nearby rifle fire, and his relief that the battle coincided with the cloudy season, 'as otherwise it would sadly interfere with our night work.'" Or Shapley's work on globular clusters showing that we are not in the center of the galaxy. In Shapley's words, "the solar system is off center and consequently man is too, which is a rather nice idea because it means that man is not such a big chicken."

Just after WWII, Cecilia Payne and her husband Sergei Gaposchkin took in the family of Reverend Casper Horikoshi -- a Japanese born missionary whose family had recently been interned at one Heart Mountain camp before now coming to Massachusetts for Divinity school. He and his wife probably had some stories of their own to tell.

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