Quantum physics can sometimes seem so arcane that even humans don't need to worry about it, let alone dogs. It's actually tremendously important to our modern world. In fact, if you're reading this on a computer (and how else would you be getting it?), you have quantum physics to thank for it. Computers are based on millions of tiny transistors manufactured on chips of silicon. These transistors are combined together to make "bits" that can be in one of two states, which we call "0" and "1." Manipulating these bits lets us do mathematical operations, write books about dogs, and watch videos…

Checking in to see whether the Amazon page for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog has been updated (it had an older version of the cover copy yesterday morning, but that's been fixed), I see that the "Buy Together" box has been updated. It now says: Customers buy this book with The God Engines by John Scalzi That's much better than what we had yesterday. Thank you, Amazon, for some higher-quality recommendations.

Yesterday's reason to love quantum was the CCD sensor, which relies on the photoelectric effect to take digital pictures. Sticking with the photoelectric theme, today's first quantum-enabled technology is the photovoltaic cell, the basis for solar panels. Photovoltaic cells convert light into electricity, essentially via the same photoelectric effect used in CCD's. A photon of light comes along, and knocks an electron out of some material (typically something silicon-based), and that electron is used to create a current that can power electrical devices. There's some tricky business involved…

slacktivist: Preferring nightmares "What I don't get is the kind of deliberate delusion in which a person chooses to pretend the world is more horrifying and filled with more and more-monstrous monsters. Why would anyone prefer such a place to the real world? Why would anyone wish for a world filled with socialist conspiracies, secret Muslim atheists, Satan-worshipping pop stars and bloodthirsty baby-killers? But the Tea Partiers cling to these nightmares with a desperate ferocity. They get angrily defensive at the suggestion that this world isn't actually as horrific as they're pretending…

I've been writing a bunch of publicity copy for the book the last few weeks, and one of those things is a list of reasons why every dog should know about quantum physics. I've been planning to chop that up into a bunch of individual blog posts in the run-up to the book, but the Washington Post beat me to (one of) the punch(es): Getting a digital camera for Christmas? Before you fire it up to capture Uncle Wally's fateful fifth trip to the punch bowl, take a moment to picture this: You've got a genuine scientific marvel in your mitts. In fact, it took nothing less than two Nobel prizes and a…

While I'm thrilled to see How to Teach Physics to Your Dog listed on Amazon, I am distressed to see it offered as a pair with something called The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart. I'm not linking to the Amazon page for that book, because it's a giant pile of crap, and I wouldn't want anyone to accidentally one-click-order it after following a link from my page. If you should choose to look it up, you can read bits and pieces of it via the "Look Inside" feature, and it's true that the opening chapter or so is a reasonable-sounding description of the physics of quantum entanglement,…

"Edward Gorey's "The Trouble with Tribbles"" By Shaenon K. Garrity "By morning, the mass of mewling fluff had become quite suffocating" (tags: comics television sf silly literature) Dave Foley | Film | Random Roles | The A.V. Club "With his boyish good looks and wry delivery, Dave Foley was pegged as the breakout star of beloved Canadian sketch-comedy troupe The Kids In The Hall. He followed the group's eponymous show and its 1996 spin-off movie Brain Candy with a leading role in the beloved comedy NewsRadio, which ran from 1995 to 1999. In 1998, he voiced the lead character in the Pixar…

I'm spending today doing some Christmas shopping, god help me. So here's a seasonally-appropriate poll for you all: The worst part of going to a mall in December is:(polls) Please choose only one. No returns or exchanges.

It's exactly one week to the release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and to celebrate, I'm setting off on an expedition to the local mall(s) in search of Christmas presents. May God have mercy on my soul... Anyway, I wouldn't want you to be without entertainment while I'm off helping the economy, so here's another little video to mark the one-week anniversary. This one is the dog dialogue from Chapter 5, on the quantum Zeno effect, and while it doesn't have puppets, it does feature some happy dog video, before settling down into still pictures and graphics: We're at the point, now…

slacktivist: "Yes we can" "Evidence is of no consequence to Medina and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and the rest of the terrified angry mob calling itself a Tea Party because they're not acting based on evidence, or reason, or reality, or honesty. They're acting based on fear -- blind, howling, maddening, confusing fear." (tags: politics slacktivist race culture society US) Physics Buzz: Dark matters "[W]hen rumors circulated last week that CDMS had a paper coming out in the December 18th issue of the journal Nature, the physics blogosphere went mad in a way that reminded me endearingly of…

The overlap between my readership and SF fandom is not as high as one might like, but I thought I would throw this out there anyway: What were the best science fiction and/or fantasy stories of 2009? ("Stories" here can mean anything from short stories to novels to feature films. We're all about inclusiveness, here at Chateau Steelypips...) My interest in this is not purely academic, as I am eligible to nominate works for the Hugos (as a member of this past Worldcon), and I intend to purchase a supporting membership for next year's Worldcon, allowing me to vote for the 2010 Hugos. I don't…

In response to my post about Amazon sales-rank tracking, Matthew Beckler created just such a tracker: That's the last few days' worth of hourly rankings of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, as of 10am Eastern. Enormous dork that I am, I find this really fascinating, and not just in an absolute-number sense (because, really, these numbers don't mean much of anything). The big thing that jumps out at me is the quantization of books. You see a bunch of sharp, downward-going jumps in the graph, which presumably correspond to discrete book purchase events. In between jumps, there's a slow upward…

Like every other media outlet, Slate has a Best Books of 2009 list, in this case featuring one book chosen by each of their 22 editors. Editor in chief Jacob Weisberg chose Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, and writes: If, like me, you didn't study much science after high school, this absorbing narrative will make you appreciate the gravity of your mistake. At one level, it is simply an enchanting group biography of the great British discoverers Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, and William Herschel, and their relationships with the likes of Keats, Coleridge, Byron and the Shelleys. At another,…

Blog U.: 'With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them' - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed "According to the report, the US has now slipped to tenth place in international college completion rates. I don't think it's coincidental that we are one of the few developed countries in which subsidized day care is not a given." (tags: academia education society culture social-science kid-stuff gender blogs inside-higher-ed) Conversation Hackers "Two important men are having a careful conversation on military training. What do you call the guy who, having no particular competence or interest in the matter at…

SteelyKid is a great big baby. By which I mean, she's large for her age. We keep running into other parents whose kids are about the same size as her, but a year or more older. Every now and then, though, she does something to remind us that she's still got a lot of growing to do, such as trying on my house slippers: For her sake, I hope those slippers never fit her...

I mostly try to avoid stupid celebrity gossip stories, but the last two weeks, it's been impossible to escape the sordid Tiger Woods thing. I still don't care about his personal life, but there's one thing that keeps coming up in the media coverage that's annoying me even beyond the stupidity of the whole business. Tony Kornheiser is probably the clearest proponent of it, at least in the stories I've seen. He keeps saying that Tiger needs to "show himself," that he needs to make a public appearance and at least read a statement, if not take questions. He claims that Woods's public silence has…

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable | Cracked.com "[H]ow did we wind up with a more negative view of the world than our parents? Or grandparents? Back then, people didn't live as long and babies died more often. Diseases were more common. In those days, if your buddy moved away the only way to communicate was with pen and paper and a stamp. We have Iraq, but our parents had Vietnam (which killed 50 times more people) and their parents had World War 2 (which killed 1,000 times as many). Some of your grandparents grew up at a time when nobody had air conditioning. All of their…

Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border Boing Boing With information on how to donate to his legal defense. (tags: canada sf law blogs crime US stupid) The Good and Bad of the New Hubble Image : Starts With A Bang Earlier this week, I showcased the newly-released Hubble Ultra Deep Field in the infrared, and compared it with the older image of the same region taken in visible light. As many astute readers noticed, the newer image looks blurrier than the old one! This is true, and there's a good reason for this. (tags: science astronomy galaxies…

I was sitting in my office on campus, working on some computer stuff, when I noticed a bunch of guys from Facilities out in the hall, bustling around doing something. A few minutes later, one of them stopped right outside my door, and called into the main Facilities office on his cell phone. "We're up here in Science and Engineering to do the annual fire alarm test but, um, there are a bunch of faculty still in the building. Could you, you know, send them an email or something to let them know we're going to ring all the alarms?" This wouldn't be a big deal if it were a one-off thing-- we are…

One of the things I forgot to mention in yesterday's post about why I like AMO physics is that AMO systems have proven to be outstanding tools for solving problems from other fields of physics. In particular, ultra-cold atoms have proven to be a fantastic venue for studying problems from condensed matter physics. There's a comprehensive review of the subject in this Reviews of Modern Physics paper, which is also freely available on the arxiv. I say "comprehensive review," but, of course, it's almost certainly already out of date, given how much work is going on in this area. To understand why…