Here are some books I finished reading recently.

This is Your Brain on Music -- The Science of a Musical Obsession
by Daniel Levitin, Ph.D.

A fine book on how our sense of hearing works, especially with respect to music, written by a McGill psychology professor who is also an accomplished musician.  I'm reading this as source material for an article I've been writing for way too long.  Some bits are very insightful, and others I disagree with.  But it's certainly a good read.

YourBrainOnMusic.com web site
Daniel Levitin's web page at McGill
Daniel Levitin Wikipedia Entry

Improvising: My Life in Music
by Larry Coryell

This is Larry Coryell's autobiography, just released.  And I'm a huge fan, so I lapped it up.  There's something about his joyful fusion of musical genres, his skill and his originality that have had a huge influency on my own guitar playing.

On the downside I gotta say that Coryell is not the best author in the world, and it's a little weird that he mentions drugs on almost every page.  But hey, it's from the heart, and the stories he tells are wonderful.  He's also included copies of many of his Guitar Player Magazine columns in the appendix, with extra commentary, and a companion CD with demonstrations.

Larry Coryell's Web Site

America Alone, The End of the World as We Know It
by Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn is brilliant and a remarkable writer. In this book he describes how western civilization is, well, basically in a suicidal tailspin.  This is an important work.

Mark Steyn's Website

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Economist Steven Levitt sure has a unique way of looking at things.  Fascinating and fun.   Hey, any economics book with a chapter called, "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with their Moms?" is surely a blast.

The Freakonomics Blog (Which, itself, is pretty cool.)

Here's a solitaire game in a web browser:

Solitaire
http://worldofsolitaire.com

Yeah, it's a solitaire game.  But Web2.0 fans will want to be sure to note that the game is written entirely in HTML, JavaScript and StyleSheets.  Cool, eh?

It's also the latest step in the grand march from binary executable apps to web browser apps.  Google's got their web versions of Word and Excel, but now this guy goes and ports the single most popular Windows app to Web 2.0.  ('Ironic how an insignificant game might be considered a significant milestone, eh?)

Earlier this year, writer and comedian Evan Sayet gave a powerful talk at the Heritage Foundation called Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals Think.  The entire lecture is readily available on YouTube:

YouTube: Evan Sayet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

It's lengthy as video clips go, but the man is so engaging and insightful that you may be hooked within the first five minutes.  And here is the transcript.

I don't agree with him completely, or rather, I think there's more to the issue than he describes.  And some of his examples might suffer from misinterpretation.  But nonetheless, Evan Sayet has nailed some fundamental issues in ways nobody else has, and this may be one of the most important speeches of our time.  Seriously.  If you know intelligent, well meaning folks, whose logical reasoning leads them deep into Orwellian territory, and tells them that George Bush is Hitler and that terrorists are freedom fighters, then this guy has a plausable explanation.

(And doesn't it strike anybody as being just a little weird that capital-L-Liberal is pretty much opposite lowercase-L-liberal?)

As I'm writing this, the YouTube clip is approaching 300,000 views, so the word is clearly getting out there.  Congratulations Evan, this is a remarkable work.

An update to my ARP Sythesizer Patents article.  Leroy Young, one of the developers of the ARP Avatar Guitar Synthesizer got in touch with me a while ago and clued me into his patent which became the core of the pitch extractor system.  So that's two patents for the Avatar that don't mention ARP Instruments.  Weird.