Books
Category archives for Books
The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 17, 2012 This has been out for a little while now, and Chris has been promoting it very heavily, and it’s sort of interesting to see the reactions. It’s really something of a Rorschach blot of a book, with a lot of what’s been written about it telling you more about what the writer wants to be…
Genre Fiction and the Real Problem With Philosophy of Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 10, 2012 There’s been a bunch of discussion recently about philosophy of science and whether it adds anything to science. Most of this was prompted by Lawrence Krauss’s decision to become the Nth case study for “Why authors should never respond directly to bad reviews,” with some snide comments in an interview in response to a negative…
Exploring Space: Don’t Sell Robots Short
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 9, 2012 One final thought on the Big Science/ Space Chronicles stuff from last week. One of the things I found really frustrating about the book, and the whole argument that we ought to be sinking lots of money into manned space missions is that the terms of the argument are so nebulous. This is most obvious…
For Extra Credit, Estimate Your Chances of Winning: Ballparking Giveaway
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 7, 2012 Some time back, I reviewed a cool book about Fermi problems by Aaron Santos, then a post-doc at Michigan. In the interim, he’s taken a faculty job at Oberlin, written a second book on sports-related Fermi problems, and started a blog, none of which I had noticed until he emailed me. Shame on me. Anyway,…
Dog Physics: Obsessive Update
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 3, 2012 A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because “it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex…
Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 26, 2012 I’ve been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I’m too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant,…
My New Favorite Review of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 16, 2012 My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn’t get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children’s book section: I am a ten year old who…
EBooks and Agencies
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 12, 2012 The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the “agency model” of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links dumped an article about the detailed charges,…
Why So Many Books About Quanta?
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 12, 2012 I’m re-instituting the quota system for the moment– no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress– but I’ll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books on quantum physics up today: Since its inception in the early part of the 20th…
The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 11, 2012 A passing mention in last week’s post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn’t find any in electronic form, probably because the Sony Reader store has a lousy selection. I got a Nook for Christmas,…
