Christmas day 2006

Christopher, who is 12, wanted to get me a Christmas present of his own choosing this year. We both agreed that the best bet would be a book, so Ed took him to Barnes and Noble, where he found just the thing.

"It will make you laugh," he kept saying. "It's funny. It will be funny to you."

He was right.

back in business

I've done it!

kitchen table math, the sequel

I'm thinking group blog this time around, so I'll start sending out invitations shortly.

In the meantime, since it's the week between Christmas and New Year's, a period for which I have declared, but failed to observe, a moratorium on "talking about education" as Christopher puts it, I'm drawing my inaugural post from a Times article on music & the brain ($):

Dr. Levitin dragged me over to a lab computer to show me what he was talking about. “Listen to this,” he said, and played an MP3. It was pretty awful: a poorly recorded, nasal-sounding British band performing, for some reason, a Spanish-themed ballad.

Dr. Levitin grinned. “That,” he said, “is the original demo tape of the Beatles. It was rejected by every record company. And you can see why. To you and me it sounds terrible. But George Martin heard this and thought, ‘Oh yeah, I can imagine a multibillion-dollar industry built on this.’

“Now that’s musical genius.”

Music of the Hemispheres
By CLIVE THOMPSON

Damn straight.