Mary Anning

Happy Birthday, Mary Anning! To celebrate, here's a song by Artichoke about the renowned Lyme Regis fossilist.

The Radium Dance

From the 1904 Broadway Musical, 'Piff! Paff! Pouff!' Find out more information and hear a recording here.

xkcd - Every Major's Terrible

Einstein on the Beach

A review in the Guardian of the new production of Einstein on the Beach at the Barbican.

Horrible Histories - Ch-ch-ch-ch-Charles Darwin

Here.

OMDee

Article about the John Dee Opera here.

Friends/Freud

Here.

Piccard in Space

Some reviews of 'Piccard in Space', a history of science opera by Will Gregory, can be found here, here, and here.

It's also on Radio 3 on 13th April, apparently.

Happy Pi Day!

In honour of Pi Day, here's a selection of the (many) musical tributes that have been written:

Lose Yourself (In the Digits) (lyrics here)

Mathematical Pi

Pi Day Carols

As well as attempts to play the music of Pi itself:

What Pi sounds like

A piece of Pi (violin)

Pi-ano

And, of course:

Kate Bush, 'Pi'

The Three-Foot Rule

A video of Professor Graeme Gooday (singing) and Dr Ben Marsden (on the piano) performing Rakine's metrical ode at the BSHS Conference in Aberdeen is now available online here.

ODE, for Musick. On the LONGITUDE.

See here.

The Sound of Science

Online here.

CultureLab: Music archive

Musical posts from the New Scientists' 'CultureLab' blog are archived here.

Mathematics Songs

Written by Kenneth Falconer

http://www-maths.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~kenneth/poems.html

http://www.lms.ac.uk/newsletter/384/384_10.html

http://www.springerlink.com/content/w8nr140tq484j6t6/fulltext.pdf

http://www.sultanik.com/Blog:Modern_Mathematician

http://www.math.wisc.edu/~robbin/funnysongs.html

Musical events at the British Science Festival

Several musical events are planned for the upcoming British Science Festival, which takes place from 14th-19th September in Birmingham:

• Powers of Ten: A Musical Journey from Quark to Cosmos (presented by Singtastic)
• Amoeba to Zebra (presented by Being 747)
  
• The Rap Guide to Evolution (presented by Baba Brinkman)

Click on the links for further information or to book tickets.

Songs of Science @ BSHS Aberdeen

A 'Songs of Science' session was held on Saturday 24th July as part of the British Society for the History of Science Annual Conference at the University of Aberdeen. Recordings of the 9 performances will soon be made available on the Society website; until then, here are a few images...

They Might be Giants

The Mathematician in Love

From William J. Macquorn Rankine, Songs and Fables (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1874): 3-6. Online here.

"Singing His Praises"

'Singing His Praises: Darwin and His Theory in Song and Musical Production'
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Isis, 2009, 100: 590–614

Available here.

Scientific Lessons in Modesty

By Julie Walsh and Barry Sheils. Runner-up in the History of Science Songs Competition!

Tune - Yankee Doodle Dandy

In days gone by man stood in all his narcissistic glory,
Then he was dealt three wounding blows by scientific theory.
The first came with Copernicus,
The second from our mate Darwin,
Then came Freud’s Unconsciousness,
To stick the final nail in.

In the sixteenth century, just with his naked eye,
Nicolas Copernicus did turn towards the sky, (he)
considered the Celestial Spheres; their majesty, their wonder,
But what he saw revealed for sure old Aristotle’s blunder.
Copernicus did knock us from
The top of the cosmic hierarchy
In fact the earth goes round the sun
That’s heliocentricity!

Charles Darwin saw inheritance, variation and selection,
As making up the golden rule of species adaptation.
In 1859 he wrote the Origin of the Species,
Man’s descent from animals was the underlying thesis.
All life shares a common source
Mankind is no exception
Since Darwin we cannot divorce
Ourselves from natural selection

Finally Freud came along and undermined man’s ego,
He took it on himself to prove the force of our libido.
He looked into our dreams and saw our unconscious desires,
He laid us down upon his couch and showed that we are liars
Now we’ve seen the fall of man
Into his modern paralysis
Science brings its own demands
(Thank God) for psychoanalysis!