I've just prepared a new minor release of the app - version 1.01. This will have a new "Medical Trial" Setting to enable users to automatically email their heart audio to the Medical School of the University of Minnesota Duluth. There a research group led by Glenn Nordehn will gather the audio and use machine learning to analyze the data, with the eventual aim of predicting heart conditions using software. In the meantime I'll be working on a related iphone app, designed to train users to auscultate and understand how to listen and read the spectrogram produced by iStethoscope Pro.

It was a nice discussion, the journalists arguing that accuracy of reporting was the only way to maintain a reputation and hence sales. But it was revealed that, as in politics, the number of science degrees was exceedingly low in journalism. I'm biassed of course, but wouldn't it be nice if those who set policy or communicated on a topic actually had some background in the area?

I just finished reading your wonderful book. I wish I had a copy of this book before I started teaching HS math 12 years ago! Among the many great stories of the greats in the book, I also found countless facts which clarified and improved my own approach to teaching math. I have been telling my algebra and geometry kids for years, for example, that the word "tangent" has different meanings in math (sometimes a line touching a circle, sometimes a trig function), but now I know they're one and the same! I have also been telling my kids that one day we will be able to divide by zero, and when that happens we will develop new technologies just as the knowledge of complex numbers laid the foundation for electric power; well, your demonstration of the division algorithm regarding the issue made it clear that a division by zero is meaningless in any math like ours since if a/0 = b then a must be zero, which is normally not true; also the discussion of indeterminate forms was very enlightening and now, believe it or not, I'm skeptical about the use of the infinity symbol at all, even in calculus--but that's another story...

I would like to purchase a copy of your book for all my most promising students to read. Thanks again and yours truly,