This Is Your Brain on Music - Daniel Levitin
Did you ever wonder why you suffer from musical earworms like "It's a small world after all"? Mark Twain wrote a short story in 1876 called "A Literary Nightmare" imagining the sinister takeover of an entire town by a rhyming jingle.
This Is Your Brain on Music is a fascinating, scientific journey through musical phenomena. "Rhythm stirs our bodies. Tonality and melody stir our brains....this is how Ravel's Bolero, Charlie Parker's "Koko", or the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women" inspire us and move us, both metaphorically and physically, exquisite unions of time and melodic space. It is why rock, metal, and hip-hop are the most popular musical genres in the world and have been for the past twenty years."
This is a beautifully written and fun-to-read scientific journey through the world of music. Although it is carefully researched and scientifically documented (including drawings of the human mind), this is an enjoyable book and answers a lot of nagging questions about why some songs stick your head, some make you happy and some make you sad, and why music is such an important part of our lives.
Before becoming a neuroscientist, Levitin worked as a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, contributing to records by Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, and Blue Oyster Cult. So he knows what he is writing about.
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Inflation Reduction Act
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) presents a huge opportunity to build an electric future. RewiringAmerica.org has guides to sort out the opportunities. The IRA "is the largest clean energy investment America has ever made with strategic incentives to make the transition to clean energy and a de-carbonized life easy and financially smart."
There is a stampede to go all electric principally to get rid of fossil fuel combustion appliances that spew toxins into the air that are causing problems now and into the future. Resistance electric heat got a bad reputation because of the cost of electricity, but all electric houses were often built with a better attitude toward energy efficiency. But still . . .
Heat pumps, on the other hand, can be as much as five times as efficient as resistance electric heating. Natural gas heating systems have gotten increasingly more efficient - 95% or more. They are capable of extracting as much as 95% of the energy in the fuel, but they can never get more than 100%.
A heat pump, however, can transfer 300% more energy than it consumes, a bucket load more efficient than a gas furnace. That's why we're going there. But it can be expensive to switch over the house and that's the motivation behind the IRA.
So check out the savings calculator at RewiringAmerica.org I think you'll be amazed at what this bill is offering.
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