drorzel | July 25, 2007Live Granades has a survey of current SF, done in the form of a school walk-through with new principal Michael Capobianco (who won the SFWA election discussed earlier this year). It's pretty amusing if you know the authors involved, but one bit made me just about spit my drink at the monitor:
Of course. I'd be happy to discuss the students' groupings with you. Let's start with the fellows in the camouflage. They're very interested in military science fiction. It's all guns and dropships and the like with them. The student who's holding forth very loudly is John Ringo, and that's David Weber…
drorzel | July 25, 2007I can't resist the snarky title, but this is a serious topic. Tara Smith has a review of a math book by Danica McKellar, titled Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. It's aimed at getting middle-school girls to have more positive feelings about math in general.
I am not now nor have I ever been in the target audience for this book, so I won't attempt to evaluate it. However, I think everybody this side of "Uncle Al" agrees that finding better ways to teach math to middle-school girls is a Good Thing, so I wanted to post a pointer to…
drorzel | July 25, 2007Some time back, I was offered a review copy of Why the Sky Is Blue by Götz Hoeppe by Princeton University Press. Looking at their web site, I noticed a forthcoming book by an emeritus professor at my alma mater, so I asked if they'd send me a copy of that, too. I'm all about the free books.
The Grand Contraption is an excellent example of what I call a Smart People Book, in which the author pulls together a wide range of material to take an exhaustive look at some topic or another, and basically show what a smart person he or she is. This particular book is subtitled "The World as Myth,…
drorzel | July 25, 2007The Weekly World News is shutting down its print operation at the end of August, though the web site will continue to be active. Long lines in the supermarket will be that much duller.
Actually, a moment of silence is probably the wrong tribute. Maybe a moment of screeching like a bat child found in a cave, instead?
(True WWN anecdote: A friend of mine in college applied for a job with the Weekly World News after graduation. Sadly, he didn't get a rejection letter written by Bigfoot, or anything. I'm not sure they responded at all, actually...)
(He was an art major, who did a woodblock print…
drorzel | July 25, 2007If you'd like to know what hapens in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without having to read two hundred pages worth of camping-related program activities, there's a slightly snarky scene-by-scene summary at Gibberish in Neutral:
Yaxley: HAI I IZ DEATHEATER NOT APPEARING IN PREVIOUS BOOKS. YOU HAS NEWS?
Snape: Of course I have news. I'm an evil genius of unaccountable intelligence.
YAXLEY: THAT IZ GOOD. WE B FRENDS?
Snape: Come on, Lord Voldiething is waiting.
YAXLEY: LOOK MALFOY BE HAVING ALBINO PEACOCKS LOLOLOLOLZ!
Also, and here is a sentence I thought I'd never type, I basically…
drorzel | July 24, 2007In the previous post about light polarization, I promised to post an explanation of why it is that "Polarized" is a selling point for sunglasses. Given that sunlight is unpolarized, the only obvious benefit would be that polarized sunglasses will automatically block half of the light hitting them, but it's actually much better than that. To understand why they work, though, we need to talk about how it is that light waves are produced and propagate in a medium.
Sticking with the classical picture of light as an electromagnetic wave, you can understand the production of electromagnetic waves…
drorzel | July 24, 2007No, I'm not talking about Harry Potter books-- there won't be any more of those for a while, at least until J. K. Rowling decides she really needs to buy Bolivia. I'm talking about "Harry Potter" the cultural phenomenon-- the inescapable, endlessly hyped mass-culture Event that everybody talks about and obsesses over. The question is this:
What will be the next "Harry Potter" style mass-culture phenomenon?
"That's ridiculous," you say, "Nobody saw the Potter thing coming, so how could we possibly predict the next 'Harry Potter' scale phenomenon?"
True enough, but think about this:
The Potter…
drorzel | July 23, 2007Kate was out of the house around nine on Saturday morning, which usually only happens if we have a plane to catch, which should tell you the importance Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had for her. She tore through it by dinnertime.
I'm not that big a fan, but I hate missing out on a Cultural Moment, so I picked it up yesterday, and finished it tonight. Kate's spoiler-free booklog entry has it about right: it's a Harry Potter book, no less, and no more. She also has a spoiler-laden review post, if you'd like more details.
If you throw a rock into the air, it will land on a blog featuring…
drorzel | July 23, 2007One of my tasks this week, before heading off to the Caribbean for a relaxing vacation, is going to be to find a new pair of polarized sunglasses that aren't ridiculously ugly. This seems like a decent hook of a physics post, explaining why "polarized" is a selling point for sunglasses, but first, I probably ought to explain what we means when we talk about the polartization of light.
As you know, even if your name isn't Bob, light can be thought of as an electromagnetic wave. You have an electric field oscillating in space and time, and a magnetic field with it, oscillating at the same…
drorzel | July 23, 2007There's a quick mention in Inside Higher Ed today of the latest news on the college presidents opposed to the US News rankings. They're up to 61 signatures on their letter committing college presidents to 1) refusing to provide information for the rankings, and 2) refusing to use the rankings in their publicity.
61 signatories is a good start, but I really doubt that they have the rankers quaking in their boots. I recognize a lot of the names on the list, but then, I'm in the liberal arts college business. Only two of the 61 (Kenyon and Denison) are in the top 50 of the infamous rankings, and…
drorzel | July 23, 2007Why is it that when non-famous people are quoted in the news media, their ages are always given? Just about every story in the paper features a sentence like:
"Of course, I'm aware of the wave nature of matter," said Tallulah Johnstone Black, 47, a homemaker from Waterloo who witnessed the incident while walking to the store, "But I never thought I'd see an elephant diffract."
Unless the story is about age specifically, I don't see the point. What am I supposed to do with that information?
Stranger still, the one time I was interviewed by the police as a witness to a "domestic disturbance"…
drorzel | July 22, 2007There's been some discussion recently in places I can't link to about the Purpose of Blogging, and whether it's really appropriate to be using the medium to exchange silly pictures of cats. Ethan Zuckerman made an important point about the utility of banality (that link 404's at the moment, but I assume Ethan will eventually fix it. Hint, hint. The post is still on the front page, though):
So while Flickr should be used for displaying pictures of cute cats, it’s also proved an effective tool for avoiding keyword filtering. Activists in China are using Flickr to disseminate images that…
drorzel | July 22, 2007The random pla feature on my iPod coughed up Warren Zevon's cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" this morning, which got me wondering. I own at least four different versions of that song (Dylan, Clapton, Zevon, G'n'R), and iTunes offers over a hundred different versions (not counting the twenty-odd different takes by Dylan himself). There are also a hundred-ish cover versions of "All Along the Watchtower" listed. Those have to be his two most-covered songs, and they're probably up there in the race for most-covered song of all time.
I wonder what Bob Dylan thinks of that, given that they're…
drorzel | July 21, 2007Next weekend will mark the start of Vacation Season here at Chateau Steelypips. Or, rather, out of Chateau Steelypips, as we'll be spending four of the next seven weeks in other places.
This, of course, will require books for me to read on the various airplane flights needed to reach our vacation destinations. And while the shelves here are positively groaning under the weight of unread books, I'm a little short on good Airplane Books, mostly because I tend to tear through those as fast as I get them. A quick pass through Borders yesterday didn't produce much, either.
So I throw this open to…
drorzel | July 20, 2007A week or two ago, one of my students measured the power output of a grating-locked diode laser, and came into my office saying "I think I may have killed the laser." The power output was much too low for a laser of that type, which is a bad sign.
So, we went down to the lab, and looked at the system, and after a minute, I said "Rotate the laser ninety degrees in its mount, and measure it again."
And, lo, the power was back up at the level we expected originally.
As I explained to my student, this wasn't actually black magic, just physics that I knew and he didn't. The light coming out of…
drorzel | July 20, 2007John Scalzi makes a startling admission:
I've never read a Harry Potter book.
In the same post, he also links to an old piece expressing the heretical opinion that the Lord of the Rings movies are better than the books.
He's got reasons for both of those, and you can go read them, but what this brings to mind is the parlour game "Humiliation" invented by David Lodge, in which "Players name classics of literature that they have not read, the winner being the one who exhibits the most woeful literary lacuna." Of course, why should the lit geeks get all the fun? This sounds like a topic for a…
drorzel | July 20, 2007Inside Higher Ed reports on two new NSF studies showing a decline in American scientific publishing. Sort of.
What the studies found, however, was that besides the well-known decrease in the relative share of journal articles originating from the United States, there was a slowdown in absolute numbers as well. This "plateau," as the reports call it, began in the early 1990s and stands in marked contrast to at least the two previous decades' worth of American research.
The flattening of growth in science and engineering publishing -- it has "essentially remained constant since 1992,"…
drorzel | July 19, 2007
Emmy says "Boring posts about religion and politics make me sad. You should post more about me."
There'll be news to make her happy in the next week or so. Until then, here's a picture.
drorzel | July 19, 2007Because it seems to be a good day for psoting about totally non-controversial political topics that I will undoubtedly not have time to follow up on, here's an article from Inside Higher Ed that takes a dim view of current arguments about Title IX:
Right now, the situation is getting us nowhere. Ultimately, all we ever talk about is the number of men and women playing sports at a given institution, and whether the women's number is as high as it ought to be. Raw participation numbers occupy a pretty small portion of the U.S. Department of Education's Title IX regulations, but the overwhelming…
drorzel | July 19, 2007Fred Clark at Slacktivist is the best writer in blogdom on issues of politics and religion in America, bar none. So when he takes up Amy Sullivan's Time article on the "God Gap", you know it will be worth a read.
He actually has two posts on the subject, the first making a good point about the cultural origin of evangelical voting patterns, and the second talking about the specific issue of abortion, which he thinks is the key to the whole problem.
What I really like about these pieces, though, is the end of the second post, which makes a much broader point:
I give Sullivan credit for…