drorzel | January 14, 2011The physics book generating the most bloggy buzz in the latter part of 2010 would have to be Ian Sample's Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science, about the as yet undetected particle known as the Higgs boson. Detecting the Hiigs is the most immediate goal of the Large Hadron Collider, so it's a topic that's in the air at the moment, so this book was inevitable-- in fact, the publisher sent me not one but two review copies. I gave one away, but that makes me feel even more guilty for taking months to get around to reviewing it.
This is, basically, a concise…
drorzel | January 14, 2011
The Virtuosi: Darts
A scientific analysis of where to aim to get the most points, and how that point shifts depending on your skill level.
(tags: science games statistics math blogs virtusoi physics)
Real Genius | Film | The New Cult Canon | The A.V. Club
"Here's a movie that has all the elements of a standard nerd comedy: Pranks? Yes. Shenanigans? You betcha. A crusty-dean type? The best ever. It also features mild semi-nudity, montage sequences set to forgotten (though winning) songs by obscure '80s pop outfits [...], and comeuppances galore. But while Real Genius more or less follows…
drorzel | January 13, 2011I am in Florida for a meeting this week, having flown from Albany to Ft. Lauderdale. Due to the vagaries of the air travel system, though, this required a change of planes in Orlando. The Orlando-Ft. Lauderdale flight is sufficiently short that I like to think of it as a ballistic route-- you're not cruising at altitude for any significant time, but start going down practically as soon as you're finished going up.
Let's imagine that we have a commercial enterprise-- let's call it Angry Birds Airlines-- that wants to fling objects from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale. What would that require? That…
drorzel | January 13, 2011
Pimp My Novel: Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity
"The sample sizes aren't quite identical yet, folks (232 votes this round compared to 342 last round), but currently 54% of those of you who responded own an e-reader, as opposed to only 42% in June 2010. Granted, this is an entirely unscientific survey, but it seems to me that e-reading is on the rise. Not that we couldn't have guessed this already.
Speaking of e-books, I thought I'd take a moment to rehash the two primary ways they're sold: via either the agency model or the wholesale model. How does this affect you?"
(tags: publishing…
drorzel | January 12, 2011Another response copied/adapted from the Physics Stack Exchange. The question was:
What are the main practical applications that a Bose-Einstein condensate can have?
Bose Einstein Condensation, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a phenomenon where a gas of particles with the right spin properties cooled to a very low temeprature will suddenly "condense" into a state where all of the atoms in the sample occupy the same quantum wavefunction. This is not the same as cooling everything to absolute zero, where you would also have everything in the lowest energy state-- at the temperatures…
drorzel | January 11, 2011It occurs to me that I'm kind of dropping the ball on my shameless self-promotion because I haven't mentioned that one of my posts made the cut for this year's fifth edition of the best-of-science-blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. The post included is Science Is More Like Sumo Than Soccer, a discussion of the importance of avoiding jargon.
I was a little surprised at that one, but re-reading it to copyedit the text for publication, I guess it is pretty good. It wasn't one of the top posts of last year, traffic-wise, but I think it's useful, and am happy to have it included.
(It's…
drorzel | January 11, 2011As usual, the best commentary on this weekend's shootings comes from Jon Stewart:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Arizona Shootings Reaction
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>
The Daily Show on Facebook
If you prefer your sensible commentary in convenient HTML form, John Scalzi's got you covered.
Comments closed, because I don't want to host a discussion of this. If you want to hold forth on the situation, it's a big Internet, and there are lots of other places where you can do that.
drorzel | January 11, 2011
Cocktail Party Physics: i think that i shall never see / a carbon offset as lovely as a tree
"I heard a NASCAR broadcaster make the following claim: "NASCAR offsets 100% of the carbon emissions from this race via their tree-planting program." Anytime someone says "100%" or "always" or "without exception", my ears perk up.
[...]
But tree planting... beautiful PR idea. Get your biggest stars out to dig the holes, put the trees at a local school or park. Bingo. So how many trees do we have to plant?
Some brilliant NASCAR PR person did major damage to the cause of logic and educating the…
drorzel | January 10, 2011I'm always a little hesitant to post reviews of books that I'm using as reference sources when I'm writing something, because it feels a little like recommending that you skip past my book and go to my sources instead. This is, of course, completely irrational, because however much I my use a given book as a resource, what I'm writing is going to cover a different set of topics, with a slightly different slant. And since the folks at Cambridge University Press were kind enough to send me a review copy of Tatsu Takeuchi's An Illustrated Guide to Relativity, I really kind of owe it to them to,…
drorzel | January 10, 2011A seasonally appropriate poll, brought to you by this morning's frigid dog walk (15F/ -9C), and the memory of a newscast back when I was in Maryland that referred to an overnight low temperature of 22F/-6C as "Bitter, bitter cold":
The maximum (daytime high) temperature I would characterize as "bitter cold" would be:survey software
For the purposes of this poll, assume a still day with no significant "wind chill." All of these temperatures are too high for quantum effects to be significant, so you may only choose one answer at a time, not a superposition of multiple answers.
drorzel | January 10, 2011
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense.
"Q: What does it mean if I get a small snake that is also very strong?
A: Snake-picking is not an exact science. The size of the snake is the main factor. The snake may be very strong, or it may be very weak. It may be of Asian, African, or South American origin. It may constrict its victims and then swallow them whole, or it may use venom to blind and/or paralyze its prey. You shouldn't read too much into these other characteristics. Although if you get a poisonous snake, it often means that there was a…
drorzel | January 9, 2011A reader from the UK, James Cownie, was kind enough to send this picture of the "New and Bestselling" shelf at a WH Smiths " at one of the service stations on the M20." You might not recognize the cover immediately, but in the #11 spot on that list is occupied by How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK version of my book. Or, given how well it's doing there, perhaps I should start referring to the cover pictured in the left column of the blog as "the American edition..."
Anyway: Woo-hoo!
drorzel | January 9, 2011Every genre reviewer in the world seems to be raving about Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, so I picked it up for Hugo nomination consideration. I'm about a third of the way into it, now, and to be honest, it's kind of bugging me. There are some good bits, but also stretches where the author seems inordinately impressed with his own cleverness, which is kind of grating.
Also, I realize that this is more magic realism than SF-- the time travel is clearly more of a literalized metaphor than an attempt to do something traditionally science-fictional-- so it's a…
drorzel | January 9, 2011
Graphic Stories for your Hugo 2011 Nomination Consideration | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts
"As I noted the last time around, there seems to be a trend for Hugo nominators to stay comfortably inside their reading boxes--comics by folks already famous in other corners of SFF, like Neil Gaiman or Paul Cornell, or easily accessible webcomics that deal with comfortable tropes. (Which is not to say that Girl Genius wasn't a deserving winner; just that it's been two years in a row, now.) Compare the Eisner Awards with the Hugo for Graphic Story and there are startling…
drorzel | January 8, 2011
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)
"A medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.
When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the…
drorzel | January 7, 2011A story to improve your opinion of humanity:
Egypt's majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.
From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as "human shields" for last night's mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.
"We either live together,…
drorzel | January 7, 2011There's a new wrinkle in the endless controversy about Huckleberry Finn, with NewSouth Books preparing an expurgated edition replacing "nigger" with "slave" throughout. Sentiment in the parts of the Internet I frequent is mostly against the change, which has been made with the goal of getting it back on high school reading lists, which it has fallen off in many places because of concerns over the language. (Note that it doesn't appear to have been done in response to any great outcry for such an edition: "Mr. Gribben said no schools had expressed interest yet in teaching the book.")
It's a…
drorzel | January 7, 2011Barack Obama will be visiting Schenectady next Tuesday, and local notables are suggesting things he might do. Particularly notable was this:
Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, R-Glenville, a basketball enthusiast like Obama, suggested that some hoop should be organized for the occasion.
"I'd like to challenge him to a two-on-two game .â.â. at the new YMCA in Schenectady," said Tedisco. He floated Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, or state Supreme Court Judge Barry Kramer as possible teammates.
Given that Tedisco is a Union alumnus, and was at one time a regular player in the noon hoops…
drorzel | January 7, 2011What with one thing and another, I forgot to tag anything for the links dump yesterday, which means no links dump this morning. But that's all right, because Fred Clark's post about humorless prigs deserves a more prominent link. The proximate cause is yet another story about a crazy religious group working themselves into a tizzy over what turns out to be an online parody. This by itself is unremarkable-- as Fred says, "So in other words, it's a weekday."
What's notable about the post is the bit that comes next, though:
We've previously discussed how an addiction to self-righteous…
drorzel | January 6, 2011It's really flattering when your kids start to imitate you:
This is SteelyKid playing with the toy laptop she got for Christmas in her basement kitchen. Sadly, not only is she imitating her father's computer-addict tendencies, she's also copying my poor laptop-using posture. We'll have to work on that.
For the traditional Appa-for-scale photo, here she is a little bit earlier in the evening, showing Appa how the trains work:
Appa, having the power of flight, is disdainful of rail travel.
(I really need to do an Appa FAQ, to go with these posts, but the Avatar fan site link will suffice for…