drorzel | July 5, 2009This is a rare weekend in which I've completed two serious books-- the aforementioned Newton and the Couterfeiter and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America (a review copy showed up Friday, thanks guys), about which more later. They're very different books, but both excellent in their own way.
While they have very different subjects, though, they have one unfortunate element in common, one of the most pernicious ideas in non-fiction publishing: the un-noted endnote. Both books are exhaustively researched and contain many pages of notes at the end of the text-- just under…
drorzel | July 5, 2009I've been enjoying Tom Levenson's "Diary of a Trade Book" series quite a bit (the latest post is on cover art), so when I say a stack of copies of Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist at the bookstore the other day, I snapped one up.
As the title suggests, it's a little like CSI: London 1697, with a good deal of detail about how Newton built a court case against the notorious "coiner" and con man William Chaloner, who earned Newton's personal enmity by not only passing fake coins, but by spreading stories of incompetence and corruption…
drorzel | July 4, 2009
slacktivist: The short straw
"Tony Perkins looks nervous, unsure if he should be glad he gets to go first. He reaches out and makes his choice. Grinning broadly, he holds up the long straw for the others to see and, chuckling to himself, makes his way to the back of the room.
âItâs not fair,â says George Weigel of the Ethics & Public Policy Center. âWe had to take Santorum. We should get a pass this time.â"
(tags: politics US silly stupid blogs slacktivist)
Answers to Selected Questions
"As I promised a week ago, I am posting answers to a few of the 42 questions which constituted the…
drorzel | July 4, 2009SteelyKid shows off her recently expanded climbing ability:
I could attempt to make a strained connection to the Fourth of July by making some analogy between a baby climbing stairs and the need for constant slow improvement in the national character, or some such. But really, it's just a cute baby picture being posted as filler.
Enjoy the day. I hope you have better weather than we do.
drorzel | July 3, 2009
Charlie Rose - An interview with David Foster Wallace
A 1997 interview, when Wallace was promoting A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, covering a wide range of topics.
(tags: video writing books literature movies humanities academia society culture)
In Which Your Host Witnesses a High-Speed Chase : Built on Facts
"Conservation of momentum happened. The collision was not entirely inelastic nor was it entirely elastic. The truck struck the car very solidly on its right side behind the center of mass of the car, sending the car into a spin more or less along its original trajectory.…
drorzel | July 3, 2009I have a new appreciation for Cathy and Amanda and the rest of the infant room staff at the day care center, after two days of chasing a fully recovered SteelyKid around the house because she still had a couple of coxsackie virus blisters on her hands. They're earning the money we're paying them.
She's back in day care today, but my brains have turned to cheese, so here's a lyrics-guessing game. Same drill as before: each of these two-word phrases identifies a song; if you know it and want to guess, leave your guess in the comments, and include a two-word phrase from a different song for…
drorzel | July 3, 2009After a long baby-induced delay, we are finally ready to announce the winners of the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Caption Contest and Poetry Contest. I've obtained a few more copies of the bound galleys from the publisher, so we'll be giving two awards in each contest
category: one for each photo, one for Cuttlefish poetry, and one for non-Cuttlefish poetry.
And the winners are:
Photo 1: The award goes to Nick at #25:
Photo 2: The award goes to Eric Goebelbecer at #8:
Honorable Mention: Dave W. at #11 and Konrad at #30.
Let's ask the judges what they thought:
Chad: All three of the…
drorzel | July 2, 2009
Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: Rosters: Managing the list
"Overall, I like administering the list because I can virtually guarantee that any time I want to play, there will be others to play with. I also like the fact that I have some control over who gets on the list, and more importantly, who is excluded from it. Now don't get me wrongâthis isn't some velvet rope thing, and it certainly isn't as exclusive as this basketball list. I invited almost all the regular players at the gym. However, I was also able to subtly exclude a few bad apples by intentionally failing to…
drorzel | July 2, 2009SteelyKid has recovered her usual energy level, as you can tell by the giant debris field she's created in the living room:
Looking at her there, among the scattered toys with Appa, you might be saying "Boy, what a great big baby she is!" It's all a matter of perspective, though:
She's still pretty small standing next to me...
drorzel | July 2, 2009SteelyKid's nearly over her coxsackie virus, but has just enough spots left that we can't take her to day care. Which means another day of baby wrangling, and another poll question chosen by the dog:
What is the biggest single threat to your household security?(surveys)
Emmy is convinced that we're insufficiently serious about home defense.
drorzel | July 2, 2009There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis. This mostly seems to be due to bad experiences with English Lit classes in high school and/or college, at least based on the long rants they used to uncork on Usenet, back in the day.
I suspect that it is this element of fandom that is responsible for godawful dreck like Mike Resnick's stories making it onto the Hugo Award ballot. Their rejection of the very idea of thinking about what's going on beneath the surface level of a story has left them incapable of…
drorzel | July 2, 2009Just a reminder, if you're someone who's eligible to vote for this year's Hugo Awards, the deadline to do so is tomorrow. Of course, you probably already know that-- they sent out reminder emails last night. They want me to vote so badly, in fact, that I got four reminder emails last night, two with my own member number and voting PIN, and two with somebody else's...
I sent my vote in this morning. Once again, this was a year in which there was a huge gap between the category winners and the next-best nominees. It was awkwardly large, in fact-- not quite big enough to put "No Award" second,…
drorzel | July 1, 2009
Newton, P.I. | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
"Happily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newtonâs later life â his career as a criminal investigator. Not really âP.I.â, as Newton was acting in his capacity as a government official, the Warden of the Mint. The story is closer to something from Law and Order or CSI â remarkably close, in fact. "
(tags: history physics science books levenson blogs cosmic-variance)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Strong Basis in Confusion…
drorzel | July 1, 2009Whoever came up with the idea of making little string bikinis in infant sizes should be beaten to death with Barbie dolls.
Seriously. The world does not need 6-9 month size versions of the useless "swimwear" that gets modeled in Sports Illustrated. We barely need the adult versions.
drorzel | July 1, 2009I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled "Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light "-- somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish:
Scientist John Singleton insists that Albert Einstein wouldn't be mad at him, even though at first blush Singleton appears to have twisted the famous physicist's theories about light into a pretzel.
Most people think Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that's not really…
drorzel | July 1, 2009The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I'm not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an online reading group.
I've been reading a bunch of the commentary that's already been posted (see here for an early round-up, and here for the thoughts of a bunch of political bloggers), and I have to admit, I find a lot of it baffling. There's a lot of hating on the footnotes, and while I will admit…
drorzel | June 30, 2009
Acephalous: Infinite Summer: Morbid? Culturally Imperial? Morbidly Culturally Imperial?
"In the end, whatâs interesting about the 25-year-old Kleinâs post about the 46-year-old Foster Wallaceâs novel is the notion that someone who was 18 years old when the Clash first performed in America and someone who was 18 years old the year Joe Strummer died can be said to belong to the same generation. How does that work? Iâm tempted to blame it on the Internet"
(tags: blogs society culture literature music humanities acephalous)
Views: Books Aren't Everything - Inside Higher Ed
"Some in…
drorzel | June 30, 2009Over at Confused on a Higher Level, Melissa has been thinking about undergraduate research:
As a member of the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), over the past few months I've gotten several e-mails about the effort by CUR, the Society of Physics Students, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society Committee on Education to adopt a statement on undergraduate research. The CUR statement reads as follows, "We call upon this nation's physics and astronomy departments to provide, as an element of best practice, all…
drorzel | June 30, 2009Firday's quick and sarcastic post came about because I thought the Dean Dad and his commenters had some interesting points in regard to high school math requirements, but we were spending the afternoon driving to Whitney Point so I could give a graduation speech. I didn't have time for a more detailed response.
Now that we're back in town... well, I still don't have time, because SteelyKid has picked up a bit of coxsackie virus, meaning that nobody in Chateau Steelypips is happy. But I did want to offer at least a partial response to some of the comments both here and elsewhere.
To start off…