Art
Category archives for Art
What’s Missing From This Art Project?
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 22, 2009 Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here’s what you get if you put my name in: You can click on it for a bigger image, that…
Make the Hugos Better
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 22, 2009 Worldcon is less than two weeks off, which means that it’s time once again for the SF part of blogdom to explode with complaints about the quality of the nominees. There are some reasonable reactions, but it’s mostly slightly over-the-top broadsides. It’s worth emphasizing again that the source of the problem is also the solution…
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Contest Winners
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 3, 2009 After a long baby-induced delay, we are finally ready to announce the winners of the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Caption Contest and Poetry Contest. I’ve obtained a few more copies of the bound galleys from the publisher, so we’ll be giving two awards in each contest category: one for each photo, one…
Reminder: Enter to Win My Book
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 25, 2009 Just a quick reminder post to note that you can win an advance proof copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in one of two ways: By captioning pictures of the dog with physics apparatus By writing short poems about dogs and physics Regarding the last one, I’m thinking of adding a second…
Understanding and Enjoyment are Orthogonal
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 22, 2009 In a comment to Friday’s classical music post, Chris Evo recommended a TED talk by Benjamin Zander that has the goal of convincing his audience that they love classical music: If you’re not able or inclined to watch it, he goes through a Chopin piano piece in detail, and explains how it plays off our…
If It’s Not Boring, It’s Not Art
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 17, 2009 One of the PDF-only studies that I complained about earlier is a hand-wringing report from the NEA on how public appreciation of art is on the decline. As summarized by Inside Higher Ed: Compared to the NEA’s 1982 survey, the steepest decline was in ballet, which that year was seen by 11.0 percent of college-educated…
The PDF Plague
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 17, 2009 There have been a half-dozen stories in the past few weeks that looked interesting, but didn’t even make it into the Links Dump for the day. Why not? Because the stories or studies were only available as PDF files. I have no idea if this is actually getting worse, but I’m finding this more irritating…
Festive Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 12, 2009 There’s a nice write-up about the World Science Festival in the New York Times today: The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at…
Hugo Nominations Announced
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 20, 2009 The nominees for this year’s Hugo Awards were announced last night. The most important category is, as always, Best Novel: Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK) — Free download Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit…
(Wis)Con or Bust
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 18, 2009 In an effort to wrest something positive from the smoking ruins of the fannish precincts of LiveJournal, a number of people (Kate included) have put together a community to raise money to provide financial assistance to fans of color who want to attend Wiscon or some other convention. They’re auctioning off a lot of interesting…
