AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: In the midst of all this mess, I got an email from one of the folks at Wolfram telling me about their lovely new Internet widget WolframTones, which is essentially the aesthetics of A New Kind of Science rendered as sound. One of the potentially revolutionary strengths of Mathematica is it's ability to render mathematics as sound, allowing us to gain greater understanding of math using our faculties for appreciating and understanding music. I've been looking into this myself, reading up on the neurology of math. One interesting book on this subject I have in hand is Functional Melodies: Finding Mathematical Relationships in Music by Scott Beall.

But what is special about the Wolfram version, and sets it apart from other attempts to integrate mathematics and music, is that it takes on the gnarly natural mathematics derived from Wolfram's attempt to parse the complexity of the geometry of nature. The piano selections remind me of Philip Glass's "Closing," which I think of as the best Thinking Music I have in my iTunes.