Book Writing
drorzel | January 4, 2010Today is the first day of classes, and to celebrate, I've come down with the Martian death virus that Kate and SteelyKid have had the last few weeks. Joy.
This calls for a How to Teach Physics to Your Dog update, to distract myself from the cotton balls and vacuum pump oil that have apparently been stuffed into my sinuses:
The primary news is that Peter Woit has posted a review, in which he says mostly good things:
While Brian Greene in his Elegant Universe Nova special introduced general relativity by trying to discuss it with a dog, concluding that "No matter how hard you try, you can't…
drorzel | January 2, 2010In talking to a reporter about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on Wednesday, I learned of a mistake in the text of the book-- a footnote on page 71 says that Scientific American published an article on how to make your own "quantum eraser" in April 2007, when in fact it was May 2007.
If that's the worst mistake in the published book, I'll be very happy. It is a mistake, though, and needs to be corrected. This also reminded me that I never did post the scholarly references that go with the book, so maximizing the birds killed per stone, I have added a References and Errata page to DogPhysics.…
drorzel | January 1, 2010There isn't all that much news for a real obsessive update, so I'll lump in a few writing-related items of possible interest to people who read books other than mine.
A real obsessive update item: BradDeLong doubts my book can help his dog.
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog gets four out of five stars as part of a good books round-up in the Timmins Daily Press in Ontario. (Google News search is nifty).
A fortuitous discovery thanks to, of all things, an ad in GMail: QM for cat lovers, part of an old blog of imaginary conversations with Einstein. I doubt this will change anybody's mind about…
drorzel | December 30, 2009 I should probably start date-tagging these updates about miscellaneous How to Teach Physics to Your Dog news. I don't really mean this to become a second daily links dump, but it's kind of looking that way...
-- As a general matter, it's dangerous for authors to acknowledge the existence of Amazon customer reviews (acknowledgment leads to responding, responding leads to madness), but the half-dozen customer reviews already posted are really good. These three especially. There are also a couple that aren't much more coherent than comment spam, so go figure.
-- At the risk of setting up a…
drorzel | December 29, 2009If you're still not sure whether you should be teaching physics to your dog, here's another good reason: Superconductors.
The "super" in "superconductor" refers to the fact that these materials conduct electric current with absolutely zero resistance, better than the best ordinary metals. This has obvious applications in the green technology field (which dogs should definitely be interested in, as discussed in a previous installment)-- if you could remove the resistance of power lines, you would lose less energy on the way from the generating plant to your home, increasing the energy…
drorzel | December 28, 2009When I saw the data generated by the sales rank tracker Matthew Beckler was kind enough to put together, I joked that I hoped to someday need a logarithmic scale to display the sales rank history of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Thanks to links from Boing Boing, John Scalzi, and Kevin Drum, I got my wish:
For those not familiar with the concept, a log scale plots values on a scale that represents each order of magnitude as a fixed distance. So, the top horizontal line on that plot represents a sales rank of a million, the line below that a hundred thousand, the line below that ten…
drorzel | December 28, 2009Various and sundry updates regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, now available wherever books are sold:
Well, ok, that last sentence is a slight exaggeration. I spent a little while punching ZIP codes of places I've lived into the Barnes and Noble page, and couldn't find any stores that have copies in stock. Grumble, mutter, grump. Borders on the other hand, has sporadic availability. At least one copy has been sold in-store at the Clifton Park Borders, because a friend bought one there last week (the web page now lists it as "Out of Stock" for that store, so maybe they only had the one…
drorzel | December 24, 2009A couple of quick book-related items that I can't resist posting, even while on vacation:
First, the sales rank cracked the top 500 on Amazon last night, peaking at 396. I don't know if this is just a matter of relative sales volume being low, or what, but it's a huge kick all the same. For the moment, it's the top seller in the Physics category, and #35 in Science as a whole. Statistical fluctuation or not, that's very cool.
Even better is this excellent online review from New Scientist:
Talking quantum physics with a dog may seem a tad eccentric, but Orzel's new book is a true delight to…
drorzel | December 22, 2009"Hey, dude, whatcha doin'?"
"I'm making dinner."
"Yeah? What are you guys having?"
"Well, since the book was published today, we're having a couple of nice steaks to celebrate."
"Just a couple?"
"Hmm? What do you mean?"
"Well, you might remember, I had something to do with the book..."
"It'd be hard to forget."
"So, I should get steak, too. Right?"
"Why do you think your bowl is up on the counter?"
"Oooooh! I get steak! Steaksteaksteaksteaksteak!"
"Okay, I'm done. Can I have some more?"
drorzel | December 22, 2009Not 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…
drorzel | December 22, 2009I'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…
drorzel | December 22, 2009Today 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,…
drorzel | December 21, 2009How 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…
drorzel | December 21, 2009How 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…
drorzel | December 20, 2009I'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…
drorzel | December 20, 2009I 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…
drorzel | December 19, 2009I 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…
drorzel | December 18, 2009How 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…
drorzel | December 17, 2009Checking 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.
drorzel | December 16, 2009I'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…