New Coat Of Paint: Faithful readers will notice that I’ve spiffed up Cover Freak with a new theme. There are also handy new buttons at the bottom of each post so you can easily share the posts on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Google+, and Twitter. I’ll probably be tweaking things over the next couple of weeks, so feel free leave comments to let me know what you think of the new look.

…

Once again we have a Republican presidential candidate who doesn’t believe in science. It probably won’t be long before all the other Republican candidates will feel compelled to to agree with him. I don’t understand the aversion to science that seems to be common among the religious fundamentalists the Republicans have been pandering to over the last few elections. In Catholic school they taught us about evolution and told us that it was just the way God decided to do things. A pretty nifty way of resolving faith and science if you ask me.

At any rate, it seems like a good time to celebrate science in song.

They Might Be Giants “Why Does The Sun Shine?” (Tom Glazer)
TMBG’s first hit was this cover song that they learned from a children’s album. The guy who wrote it was not a scientist, he was a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith who cowrote “Unchained Melody.” So there are some factual errors, for instance the Sun is actually a mass of incandescent plasma. Eventually TMBG wrote a song called “Why Does The Sun Really Shine” to get all the facts straight.

The Bobs “Particle Man” (They Might Be Giants)
Of course TMBG have written many original songs about science. This song definitely has scientific themes (subatomic physics, the nature of time, the size of the universe), but how they fit together is a little obscure. The Bobs do a wonderful, weird a capella version.

Bill Parsons “She Blinded Me With Science” (Thomas Dolby)
The original version of this song famously featured Magnus Pyke (sort of the British version of Bill Nye the Science Guy) shouting “Science!” I heard Thomas Dolby tell the story that when they started recording the song Mr. Pyke told Mr. Dolby that he didn’t think that the woman in the song could blind him with science. At which point Mr. Dolby had to explain to him that that was exactly the joke.

I just love what Bill Parsons does with his cover. The acoustic guitar and bongos give it a much more organic feel than the original. Then he whips out the Peter Frampton-style talk box.

The Chemistry Set “See Emily Play” (Pink Floyd)
Do they even still sell chemistry sets anymore? I would think not, what with the companies selling them being open to lawsuits if little Johnny poisons little Susie or himself. And then there’s the problem of disposing of the toxic waste. I had a small one as a kid but I didn’t follow the experiments that came with it. I just mixed stuff together at random to see what would happen. Hard as I tried I never came up with anything explosive or interesting in any other way. If only my parents had gotten me the big honkin’ version.

This is one of those covers you have to stick with. At first it sounds pretty much like the original but it starts getting weird around the middle.

The Easy Star All-Stars “Paranoid Android” (Radiohead)
I know that androids are really more the domain of science fiction than real-world science. But robotics is a growing scientific discipline that will ultimately lead to all of us working in the titanium mines for our android masters.

But in the meantime enjoy this reggae-fied version of the Radiohead hit. The horns are very nice.