Not that I'm obsessed, or anything (current Amazon rank: 1106), but here are the results from my incomplete survey of local book stores regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Barnes & Noble: "Out of Stock" in all local stores. Has never been in stock, really. Borders in Crossgates Mall: "Likely in store" according to the book finder computer, but if they actually put any out, either they sold them, or they're well hidden. The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: Two copies prominently displayed in the top row of the "new arrivals" case, between David Byrne's book about bicycling and John…

I'm typing this from the local Barnes and Noble, waiting for the dealership next door to finish changing my oil and inspecting my car. Sadly, they don't have How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on the shelves in their (rather small) science section. Grump, grump, grump. The disappointment at not immediately finding it on the shelves is tempered a bit by seeing it featured in The Big Idea at Scalzi's blog: Want a Big Idea that's about a really big idea? Well, this week's book is about quantum physics, and it doesn't get much bigger than that (well, given the scale quantum physics works on, it…

Today is the official publication date for How to Teach Physics to your Dog! I've got another reason or two why dogs should love quantum physics that I'll probably post later, but if the ones posted so far haven't sold you on the book, how about a really nice review from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy,…

The Mid-Majority "Sports information is like electricity or water. When the power's on and everything's flowing regularly, nobody notices. Everybody takes these things for granted. But whenever anything goes wrong, people act like it's the end of the world. Sports information directors are expected to be perfect, to have the entire school record book on the tip of their tongues, to make sure everything along every scorer's table runs correctly and efficiently during games. And they usually are perfect, spending their days in perfect anonymity. Which is why they're the true saints of this…

Paul Krugman had a post today calling Obama the WYSIWYG President: There's a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn't the man progressives thought they were voting for. But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that (a) There wasn't a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders (b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive Now it's true that many progressives were ardent Obama…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog goes on sale in fine bookstores everywhere tomorrow. But maybe the four previous posts explaining why dogs should care about quantum physics haven't yet convinced you to go buy a copy. So here's another reason, one appropriate to this solstice season, when dogs in the Northern Hemisphere will start to enjoy longer days again: Sunlight. You like sunlight, right? Of course you do, unless you're a vampire. And what dog doesn't like a sunny day? Well, you have quantum physics to thank for sunlight, because as hot as the Sun is, it's not nearly hot enough to burn…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is officially released tomorrow, because Tuesdays are New Book Days, but Amazon has been shipping them for a few days now, so it's very likely they are already appering "in the wild," as it were. So it seems like a good time to announce a new feature at dogphysics.com: The DogPhysics.com Pet Gallery, featuring photos of, well, pets with an interest in physics. And, more importantly, a copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The Gallery currently contains just two pictures of dogs-- John Scalzi's Kodi, and the official dog of the Digital Cuttlefish, shown…

Janet has a typically thoughtful post about tuition benefits, following on a proposal to eliminate tuition benefits for employees of the University of Illinois. Janet does a great job of rounding up the various pros and cons of the benefit and its possible elimination. It takes no time at all for the "Tuition benefits are unfair to people without kids" argument to pop up in comments. This is, as always, pretty stupid, because the same logic leads to thinking that health insurance benefits are unfair to people who don't become catastrophically ill. Tuition benefits are basically kid insurance…

Make it Sir: Star Trek's Patrick Stewart to be knighted | SCI FI Wire Sadly, William Shatner is not British. (tags: sf silly television movies theater world awards) Are Texas' auto safety inspections worth the hassle? | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News "Texas is one of 19 states left that require a periodic safety review - down from a peak of 31 states in the 1970s. The District of Columbia recently disbanded its inspection program because of high costs and a lack of evidence that the inspections saved lives. There is no serious discussion about eliminating Texas…

I've been playing around with the spiffy sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler wrote, because I'm a great big dork, and enjoy playing with graphs. Here's a graph of the sales rank vs. time through 2pm EST today (plotted in Excel from the data table at the bottom of the page): As I noted in my previous post on this, the downward-going jumps are striking, and probably indicate discrete book purchase events. There also seems to be a clear trend that jumps starting at higher numbers are larger than jumps starting at lower numbers. If we assume that's the case, what does that tell us about the…

I was Googling for "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" last night, to check whether a review of said book that I know is coming has been posted yet (side question: Does anybody know a good way to exclude the umpty-zillion versions of Amazon and other sellers from this sort of search? Most of the results are just product pages at one online retailer or another.). The review I was looking for isn't up yet, but I did find a goodreads page, a nice entry at the Cincinnati public library calling it "abstract science delivered painlessly," and this pre-publication alert from Library Journal. "Wait a…

Upper Mismanagement | The New Republic "Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that's the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM's top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his…

I gave a talk last night to the Albany Area Math Circle, a group of high-schoolers who are interested in science and math, and enter and do very well in national math competitions. I think there were 48 kids there last night, which was pretty impressive. I gave basically the same talk I gave at Boskone on the Many-Worlds Interpretation, including reading the dog dialogue from Chapter 4. I made an effort to update the SF references a little, to things that people born in the early 1990's might recognize. (Wow, I feel old.) The talk was probably a little too abstract for the audience, and I…

The Mighty Power of Blogosaurus? | The Loom | Discover Magazine "I've heard this sort of story many times before, and this is where it usually ends. Blogosaurus slinks back to his office and sulks. But today the story has another ending. Wedel now reports that someone from the Discovery Channel called him up and is going to make things right. I can only guess that blogs do actually make a difference some of the time. Or maybe just this once." (tags: media science dinosaurs journalism blogs television) Bad Year for Weird Fiziks § Unqualified Offerings "So, a bad year for people hoping to…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is now listed as "In Stock" at Amazon, so it's the perfect time to order a dozen or so copies for your last-minute holiday gift needs. "But, wait," you say, "why do I want to teach my dog physics? Particularly quantum physics-- why does anyone need to know that?" The answer is: "Lasers." Lasers are pretty awesome, right? Let's ask an expert: If I were creating the world I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One! OK, maybe he's a bad one to ask. Still, lasers are pretty awesome, and lasers…

I've been dimly aware that physics in the UK was being hit hard by a financial crisis for a while now. It seemed to be a bit deeper than what people in other countries complain about, but I hadn't given it much thought until I read this Physics World story on the latest cuts, which includes the following explanation: The origin of the cuts can be traced back to December 2007 when the STFC announced that it had an £80m budget deficit for the UK government's current spending round that lasts from 2008 to 2011. It is thought that the deficit emerged by an accounting mistake was made when the…

I continue to be boggled by the Bob Dylan Christmas album. Thus, a deeply silly poll: Having recorded a Christmas album, what should Bob Dylan's next project be?(polls) Happy Holidays!

As a physicist with a blog, I am contractually obligated to do a post on the CDMS almost-a-result. This is that post. The short version: they expected at most 0.8 events (that's total events, not events per day, or anything-- this is a whole community built on detecting nothing at all), and got 2, with maybe a third that was close to making the cut, but didn't. I think Joe Fitzsimons on Twitter summed it up best, writing: Isn't that the least informative number of events possible? It's more events than expected, but not enough to really be meaningful. The probability of this level of signal…

Creating Citizen Scientists § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM "A few days ago, sitting in my office, I contributed to peer-reviewed scientific research in biology, astronomy, and psychology. Even though I don't hold degrees in any of these fields, my contributions will help advance science: I was doing real investigative work, not the prosaic replications of classic experiments that are typically taught in introductory lab courses. I was taking part in a blossoming "citizen science" movement occurring across a wide swath of scientific fields." (tags: science seed computing astronomy biology psychology…

It's Thursday again, and that means Baby Blogging. But first, SteelyKid has a message: "Thanks for the awesome rocking frog, Aunt Erin!" Of course, as with any toy at this age, the box is just as much fun: And, of course, the obligatory Appa picture, showing that she is an enormous baby: She's big enough to lift a bison!