Jason Sanford: Why science fiction predictions hold back the genre "In many ways, the idea that science fiction is about predicting the future is a remnant of the genre's past. During the 1940s and '50s, genre promoters pitched SF as a way to inspire and teach people about science and technology. And during the era of Sputnik and atomic bomb beauty pageants, perhaps this was the correct thing to do. But that time is long past. And while few writers and readers within the genre give more than lip service to science fiction being solely about predicting the future, the problem is that outside…

As I was heading out with SteelyKid to do some shopping, I noticed that the mail had arrived, including a large book mailer from my agent. I was a little puzzled as to what that could be, but left it for my return. Where I was pleased to open the envelope and find: That's a copy of Como Ensinar FÃsica ao Seu Cachorro, that is, the Portuguese translation of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I can't directly read a word of it, of course, but having written the original, I can identify some key amusing phrases, such as "Coelhos feitos de queijo" and "Cuidado com os esquilos perversos," which is…

Friday was the last day of the school year hereabouts, so SteelyKid's day care had an end-of-year ceremony for all the preschool classes, which included her group ("Waddlers," which are between "Infants" and "Toddlers"). They gave certificates to all the kids, for a variety of different things. Here's a picture of SteelyKid's certificate: I have no idea where she gets that from. No idea at all.

Today is my birthday-- my age in dog years is now equal to the freezing point of water in Kelvin (to three significant figures). I'm celebrating by not reading anything that might piss me off, and by spending the day at home watching soccer (about which more later) and getting some stuff done around the house. I'm working on a nice surprise for SteelyKid, which should be finished this weekend, if the weather cooperates. I do want to remind those of you within striking distance of Schenectady, though, that I will be signing How to Teach Physics to Your Dog tomorrow, Saturday the 19th, from 1-2…

When the Hugo nominees were announced, Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest was the only one of the three Best Novel nominees I hadn't already read that I was pretty sure I would read. I have very little interest in Robert Sawyer's work, and I've read just enough of Paolo Bacigalupi's short fiction to dread the thought of reading something of his at novel length. I may yet read The Wind-Up Girl out of a sense of obligation, because people keep saying it's brilliant, but his previous Hugo-nominated short fiction was so crushingly depressing that I'm not excited by the prospect. I wanted very badly…

www.dumpert.nl - Hoe amerikanen voetbal kijken A good spoof of American sports television, applied to soccer. the titles are Dutch, but the video is in English. (tags: soccer sports world television silly) World Cup 2010: Brick-by-brick fussball - England 1-1 USA | Video | Football | guardian.co.uk "An animated recreation of England's first match against the USA. " (tags: soccer video world games toys silly) Luis von Blog: Outsourcing My Research Group "A PhD student at Carnegie Mellon costs approximately $80,000 per year. (Research programmers and post-docs cost about the same.) Given…

No elaborate pose this week, just simple, classic Baby Blogging: A few months back, her weight had failed to increase as quickly as expected, so she had a couple of weight-check appointments scheduled. The latest was this week, when it was discovered that she had gained about three pounds since the last check-up (the proportional equivalent of me gaining 25-30 pounds) two months ago. She's now right back on track at the weight expected for a Great Big Baby. And she's still the cutest thing in the world. She has recently become fascinated with cars and trucks, pointing them out all the time,…

Over at the Cocktail Party, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky has a post about the image of scientists that spins off this Nature article on the NSF's "broader impact" requirement (which I think is freely readable, but it's hard to tell with Nature). Leslie-Pelecky's post is well worth reading, and provides a good deal more detail on the anecdote reported in the article. While Leslie-Pelecky's concern is about whether the outreach programs falling under the "broader impact" section of grants are having the desired effect, I'd like to comment on a different aspect of the article, namely the whole…

There's a paper in the Journal of Political Economy that has sparked a bunch of discussion. The article, bearing the snappy title "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors," looks at the scores of over 10,000 students at the US Air Force Academy over a period of several years, and finds a small negative correlation between the faculty effect on performance in an introductory course and performance in a follow-on course. In other words, as they explain in the Introduction, [O]ur results indicate that professors who excel at promoting…

The Virtuosi: How Long Can You Balance A (Quantum) Pencil "In this post I'd like to address a fun physics problem. How long can you balance a pencil on its tip? I mean in a perfect world, how long? No really. Think about it a second. Try and come up with an answer before your proceed. What this question will become by the end of this post is something like the following: Given that Quantum Mechanics exists, what is the longest time you could conceivably balance a pencil, even in principle? I will walk you through my approach to answering this question. I think it is a good problem…

So, how do things stand with the Uncertain Principles World Cup Contest at the end of the first round? We have completed the first set of 16 group play games, and to this point, we have 6 ties. Extrapolating from that to the final result (because, of course, you always start with a linear extrapolation) you would expect a total of 24 tie games. The contest also asked for the total number of goals in the tournament, for use as a tiebreaker (since we can't make commenters do penalty kicks), and there have been 25 goals scored to date, which extrapolates to 100 for the final total. In the naive…

Inside Higher Ed featured one of those every-so-often articles about the awesomeness of the demographic subgroup of the moment, this time Athur Levine's panegyric about "digital natives", who "grew up in a world of computers, Internet, cell phones, MP3 players, and social networking," and how they're too cool and tech-savvy for current universities: They differ from their colleges on matters as fundamental as how they conceive of and utilize physical plant and time. For the most part, universities operate in fixed locales, campuses, and on fixed calendars, semesters and quarters with classes…

The A-Team steers clear of Hill Street and avoids St Elsewhere and Cheers "The A-Team premiered in 1983, a year after Cheers and St Elsewhere, two years after Hill Street Blues, a year ahead of Miami Vice, the fall after M*A*S*H said goodbye, farewell, and amen. There had always been well-written, well-directed, and well-acted television shows. What made these shows different was that all at once TV audiences were presented with a group of shows that were more like movies in a particular and significant way. The characters and their situations changed. Not just from season to season either…

Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don't expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their lifetime, then cites a commenter saying "Why the f*** are you working on it, then?" Tommaso offers a semi-quantitative way to determine whether some long-term project is worth the risk, which is amusing. I was reminded of this when I looked at the Dennis…

We're several days into the World Cup now, and I have just about settled on my rooting strategy for countries I have no personal connection to: I'm going to root for countries where we've sold the rights for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog over countries where the rights haven't been sold yet. This is a good strategy for producing a mix of teams-- I get to root for both Brazil and Portugal, for example, and also underdogs like Japan and South Korea-- but it has one major flaw: we've sold Italian rights. And I find it really hard to root for Italy, one of the flopping-est, whining-est,…

In the Hunt for Planets, Who Owns the Data? - NYTimes.com "Astronomers everywhere, who have been waiting since Kepler's launch in March 2009 to get their hands on this data, will be rushing to telescopes to examine these stars in the hopes of advancing the grand quest of finding Earthlike planets capable of harboring life out there. But a lot of attention has been paid in astronomical circles over the past few months to what the Kepler team will not be saying. By agreement with NASA, the team is holding back data on its 400 brightest and best planet candidates, which the astronomers intend…

At last weekend's Hidden Dimensions event, Brian Greene had a graphic of a Calabi-Yau object (it wasn't this one, but it's the same idea). He put this up several times, but never actually explained what the hell it was supposed to show. It just looked kind of cool. Last week's Through the Wormhole program segment on Garrett Lisi kept showing an animation of some sort of graphical representation of the E8 group, shifting between some collection of circles and that giant mandala-looking thing they use to illustrate every story about the guy. Again, there was no explanation of what the hell this…

I've already read three of this year's six Hugo-nominated novels, and am highly unlikely to read two of the remaining three, but since I have voting rights, and want to be as responsible as I can about this, I started on Palimpsest by Cat Valente last night. The language is very rich, and I'm not far enough in yet to tell if it will eventually develop a plot, but I was jarred very badly by one early section, in which a Japanese character visits a Kyoto landmark, the Silver Pavilion: The temple grounds were deserted. She settled onto the grass a ways off from the great silver temple. She…

There was a nice story in the Schenectady Gazette about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I'd love to link to it, but the Gazette paywalls everything, so all you really get is the story title, unless you subscribe. And if you subscribe to the Gazette, you don't really need me to tell you there was a story in it about my book. So you'll just have to take my word that ther's a story, and a nice short review. The reason for this late attention is that I'll be signing books at the Open Door bookstore in Schenectady this Saturday, the 19th. In fact, they did up a nice little flyer for the signing…

In Defense of Evolutionary Psychology: Why They're Asking The Wrong Questions : The Thoughtful Animal "Evolutionary Psychology suffers from a PR problem, which can be mostly blamed on ignorant (even if well-intentioned) members of the population who don't know what they're talking about. Evolutionary psychology attempts to describe the evolution of the mind and of behavior and, well, everyone has a mind, and everyone can observe behavior. This makes people think that they are experts. Anybody who has ever had a child knows everything there is to know about child development. Anybody who has…