Books
drorzel | April 9, 2011Over in LiveJournal land, nwhyte just finished reading all the Hugo-winning novels, and provides a list of them with links to reviews or at least short comments. He also gives a summary list of his take on the best and worst books of the lot.
The obvious thing to do with such a list, particularly in LiveJournal land, is to take the list and mark which ones you've read, and so on. In th interest of a little variety, though, let me suggest an alternate game: the academic parlor game "Humilation," invented by David Lodge, in which literary academics admit to not reading various classic works,…
drorzel | April 7, 2011A few weeks ago, I gave a talk based on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the University of Toledo's Saturday Morning Science program. At that time, their local PBS affiliate recorded the talk, for use on their very nice streaming video site, Knowledgestream.org. My talk is now up, and the video is hopefully embedded below:
I haven't listened to the entire thing, but I watched the first 10-15 minutes, and it's pretty good. the sound is coming from a microphone on my shirt, so you can't really hear any of the audience reaction (I got some good laughs in appropriate places), and in places…
drorzel | March 18, 2011Just a quick reminder that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk (same basic one from Tuesday night) as part of the Saturday Morning Science program (pdf) at the University of Toledo tomorrow, Saturday the 19th. The talk will be at 9:30, with breakfast beforehand. If you're in the vicinity, stop by and hear about some cool physics. My cold is starting to improve slightly, so I should be audible, and I've added at least one Ohio-related joke to the talk, so you don't want to miss that.
In only vaguely related news-- indeed, it's probably only of active…
drorzel | March 13, 2011OK, having spoken vaguely about The Crippled God, here's a post for spoiler-y comments about the book and the series as a whole. If you haven't read it, but think you might, save this post for reading after you're done.
SPOILERS:
There's a bit early in the book (too far back for me to find now) where somebody says of Shadowthrone and Cotillion that they became gods because it seemed like the next logical step after conquering a vast empire. Once they were gods, though, and saw how the world worked, they decided they didn't like it, and set out to fix things.
That's kind of the core of the…
drorzel | March 13, 2011(This is a post about the concluding volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, so if you clicked through here because the title made you expect a rant about religion, you're at the wrong blog.)
It's hard to say anything coherent about this other than "Wow." I mean, this is the tenth thousand-page book in an epic fantasy series, and it actually ended! He took all the myriad storylines of the previous nine books, and brought most of them together in a way that made them fit! Most of all, it didn't suck!.
It's also sort of hard to write a blog review of the book, because it's the tenth in a…
drorzel | March 4, 2011As has been mentioned numerous other places, ESPN is backing a new Bill Simmons project, which basically sounds like a pop-culture blog network kind of thing, headlined by Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. I saw this a while ago (I think I may have tagged a press release for a Links Dump), but was reminded of it yesterday when listening to Simmons's podcast fro ESPN, which was a monster two-part thing with Klosterman as the guest (part 1, part 2).
I'm not much of a podcast guy-- I listen to Simmons and Klosterman, and that's about it-- but this is right in my wheelhouse. It's two guys, both of…
drorzel | March 2, 2011Another shameless self-promotion post, but since I was confirming some arrangements this morning, I thought I'd throw up a post, so:
- On March 15, two weeks from yesterday, I will be giving a talk for the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association at 8pm on the campus of SUNY-New Paltz. If you're in the downstate NY sort of area, and want to know what your dog should know about quantum physics, stop on by.
- On March 19th, two weeks from this Saturday, I will be doing the same presentation at 9:30 am at the University of Toledo, as part of their Saturday Morning Science program (warning: PDF). If…
drorzel | February 28, 2011Every year, Kate runs a fundraiser to help support SF fans who want to attend Wiscon, which takes the form of an auction of various cool items, such as a signed book about quantum physics. You can find a big listing of everything at the Con or Bust community on LiveJournal, but some items of possible interest to readers of this blog include:
A sixpack of books from Small Beer Press
Homemade cookies
Math and/or science tutoring from an EE PhD student
Hand-spun yarn
Homeade truffles
A slightly used Sony Reader
One photo a week for a year
John M. Ford books
A signed set of Rosemary Kirstein's…
drorzel | February 18, 2011I'm leaving today for the AAAS meeting in DC, where I'll be through the weekend. The AAAS works much differently than the physics conferences I'm used to, most notably requiring speakers to upload their presentation several days ahead of time. This means that my usual night-before-a-talk process of fiddling with my slides is right out. I mean, I could fiddle with my slides, but any changes won't be reflected in the pre-uploaded ones I'll get to do the actual talk, so what would be the point?
This puts me in the unusual (recently) position of having some time available to read fiction. I'm 50-…
drorzel | February 9, 2011I haven't been as relentless about flogging How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now available in paperback!) as I was last year, because it gets kind of exhausting. I do have a vanity search set up on Google Reader that points me to the occasional review-- this one, for example, so I still see the occasional positive comment, which is good for a boost in a difficult week at work.
Of course, the vanity search is world wide, which means it also picks up mentions of the international editions, such as this Italian blog (oddly, it gets my employer wrong-- I should check the Italian edition and see…
drorzel | February 6, 2011I'm taking some flak in the comments to yesterday's book recommendation request post, so let me illustrate what I meant with an example. Lots of people recommended the Andrew Lang Fairy books, which are freely available online. I looked at the first story in the first book, which is plenty entertaining, but also has this bit that stopped me short:
Hardly had [an evil sorceror] reached his own house when, taking the ring, he said, "Bronze ring, obey thy master. I desire that the golden ship shall turn to black wood, and the crew to hideous negroes; that St. Nicholas shall leave the helm and…
drorzel | February 5, 2011One of the books in SteelyKid's regular rotation of books to read at naptime and bedtime is this book about a girl visiting characters from fairy tales to ask them what makes somebody happy ever after. It's not the greatest, but she enjoys it.
It occurs to me, though, that while the book references a couple of classic fairy tales-- the girl in the story visits the princess from "The Princess and the Pea" and the frog prince, and also a fairy godmother-- SteelyKid has never heard any of the original stories, and thus is unlikely to appreciate the references (even accounting for the fact that…
drorzel | February 3, 2011I make an effort to say nice things about pop-science books that I read, whether for book research or blog reviews. Every now and then, though, I hit a book that has enough problems that I have a hard time taking anything positive from it.
I got David Bodanis's E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation from Union's library because I like the subtitle, and plan to reference it in the relevant chapter of the book-in-progress. I figured that, if I'm going to swipe his subtitle, I should at least be able to say something substantive about the book.
Bodanis takes pains to say that…
drorzel | January 31, 2011This is a difficult book to review, which is probably fitting, because it's a very personal book. My reaction to it is largely personal as well, and may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Given the surprising number of people who had Opinions regarding my recollections of telecommunications, I almost think I might be better off not saying anything, but it's going to nag at me unless I write something about it, so what the hell...
So. Among Others is the story of Morwenna "Mori" Markova (previously Phelps), a girl from Wales who sees fairies and whose mother is an evil witch. Literally.…
drorzel | January 27, 2011Subtitled "Understanding Einstein's Relativity," David Mermin's It's About Time is another book (like An Illustrated Guide to Relativity) that grew out of a non-majors course on physics that Mermin offers at Cornell. It's also an almost-forty-years-later update of an earlier book he wrote on the same subject. And it's been a really good resource for writing the book-in-progress, which I ought to repay by reviewing it here.
Like the Illustrated Guide, this is a book that aims to teach students something about how relativistic kinematics actually works. Unlike the Illustrated Guide though, this…
drorzel | January 26, 2011I'm about halfway through Jo Walton's Among Others, a fantasy novel set in Britain in 1979, featuring an unhappy teenage girl who finds relief in reading science fiction and fantasy, and becoming involved with SF fandom. It's getting rave reviews from a lot of the usual sources, and the concept sounded interesting, so I grabbed it right after it came out.
It's an easy read in a lot of ways, but also an odd one. In particular, I keep having trouble remembering when it's set. Despite the frequent reminders that it's set in an era I lived through (it's written as a diary, and every entry…
drorzel | January 22, 2011Last year, Kate was one of the people who helped organize a fundraising auction to send a few people to Wiscon. It's that time again, and she's seeking donations for the auction:
Last year, Con or Bust raised $6,183.89 and helped thirteen people of color attend WisCon. We weren't able to meet all the requests for assistance, however, so I'm tentatively setting this year's auction goal at $7,000. Bidding on the auction will start Monday, February 21, 2011, at 12:01 a.m. EST (GMT -5) and end Sunday, March 6, 2011, at 11:59 p.m. EST. You may post auction offers and make donations now.
If you're…
drorzel | January 14, 2011The physics book generating the most bloggy buzz in the latter part of 2010 would have to be Ian Sample's Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science, about the as yet undetected particle known as the Higgs boson. Detecting the Hiigs is the most immediate goal of the Large Hadron Collider, so it's a topic that's in the air at the moment, so this book was inevitable-- in fact, the publisher sent me not one but two review copies. I gave one away, but that makes me feel even more guilty for taking months to get around to reviewing it.
This is, basically, a concise…
drorzel | January 10, 2011I'm always a little hesitant to post reviews of books that I'm using as reference sources when I'm writing something, because it feels a little like recommending that you skip past my book and go to my sources instead. This is, of course, completely irrational, because however much I my use a given book as a resource, what I'm writing is going to cover a different set of topics, with a slightly different slant. And since the folks at Cambridge University Press were kind enough to send me a review copy of Tatsu Takeuchi's An Illustrated Guide to Relativity, I really kind of owe it to them to,…
drorzel | January 9, 2011A reader from the UK, James Cownie, was kind enough to send this picture of the "New and Bestselling" shelf at a WH Smiths " at one of the service stations on the M20." You might not recognize the cover immediately, but in the #11 spot on that list is occupied by How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK version of my book. Or, given how well it's doing there, perhaps I should start referring to the cover pictured in the left column of the blog as "the American edition..."
Anyway: Woo-hoo!