Book Writing
drorzel | December 15, 2009It'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…
drorzel | December 14, 2009In 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…
drorzel | December 8, 2009John Scalzi sends along photographic proof of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog working for a dog who isn't Emmy:
This isn't quite an "in the wild" shot, as it's not at a store or a store-bought copy (John wrote a blurb for the book, so he got sent a copy), but we're getting close. The official release date is just two weeks from today. It may well start showing up in stores before then (it's not in the Barnes & Noble store in Colonie yet, though I swear I did not go in there just to check that...). You can, of course, order it from Amazon, as several people have obviously done already,…
drorzel | November 30, 2009The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is three weeks from tomorrow, but a couple of new reviews have been posted, one linkable, the other not so much. The linkable one is from one of our contest winners, Eric Goebelbecker, at Dog Spelled Forward (an excellent name for a dog-related blog):
Quantum physics can be some heavy stuff, and this book teaches you the basics without dumbing it down or putting you to sleep. Professor Orzel has a gift for funny dialogue and straightforward explanation. In addition to the entertaining conversations with Emmy, there are fascinating…
drorzel | November 24, 2009The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is exactly four weeks from today. So here's a dramatic reading of Chapter 3 to mark the occasion:
I've put this up before, but I edited it to remove the URL, which was apparently a deal-breaker for booksellers. And yes, I will post about something other than the book, Real Soon Now...
drorzel | November 23, 2009The pictures I posted last night aren't really the greatest for seeing the cover of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so here's a shot of the book jacket spread out on my desk:
This isn't the greatest, either, but it does give you a sense of the key features of the jacket design, which I like a lot:
First of all, there's the quizzical looking black dog on the cover. I've known about this image for a while, but I really like the dog's expression. I wish I could reliably get Emmy to do that and get a picture of it.
The second element, and the first new to me, is the yellow spine with the…
drorzel | November 22, 2009Look! How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is a real book:
Emmy says, very seriously, "You will buy a copy, won't you?"
Of course, like everything else in this house, SteelyKid had to grab a copy:
She whipped through to the last page pretty fast:
Emmy says "What'd you think, human puppy?"
SteelyKid says "If I knew how to read, Daddy's book would be my favorite book ever. People who can read should definitely buy it."
You heard the kid and the dog...
drorzel | November 19, 2009It's not often that I regret having a cell phone that is just a phone, but this is one of those occasions-- I stopped by my publisher today to talk about marketing and publicity, and record a video for the web, and got a stack of finished copies of the book, hot off the presses. If I had a cell phone camera, I'd post a picture, but I don't, so you'll have to settle for a plain-text "Woo-hoo!"
On an only vaguely related note, our cultural activities in NYC will include some college hoops, as there's a preseason "tournament" taking place at Madison Square garden tonight. Syracuse vs. Cal, and…
drorzel | November 3, 2009... until the release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The official release is set for December 22nd, though the books are set to start printing in about three weeks. Exciting, isn't it?
Are you excited about the upcoming release of _How to Teach Physics to Your Dog_?(survey)
If you're still wondering what all the excitement is about, let me direct you to the book previews page at dogphysics.com, where you can download a PDF of Chapter 1, and watch a little video I made to go with a dramatic reading of Chapter 3's dog dialogue. There will probably be more previews in the next few weeks…
drorzel | November 2, 2009This year's DonorsChoose Challenge entry came up just short of $8,000, at $7,976. Many thanks to everyone who donated.
As promised during the challenge, I will be giving away one advance copy of the book (either a real copy when they start printing in a few weeks, or a galley proof if you want one Right Now) to the largest individual donation, and one to a donor chosen at random from the set of donors who sent me email asking to be considered.
At present, the list of people who have asked to be part of the drawing is much smaller than the list of people who donated. So, I'll hold off on the…
drorzel | October 6, 2009We're six days into the DonorsChoose challenge, and at the time of this writing, ten people have contributed just over $1,700 to the Uncertain Principles challenge entry. That's an impressive average, and I thank you all for your generosity.
I also offered a number of incentives, and Lauren Uroff is claiming one:
I'd like to take you up on your offer to answer questions. The first question I'd like help with is telling me how to tell my teenager about wave-particle duality, the classic experiments that show light is both a particle and a wave, and why he should care.
As It happens, I have…
drorzel | October 5, 2009In this week's issue of Publishers Weekly there's a short review (scroll down) of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (which will be released December 22):
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Chad Orzel. Scribner, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4165-7228-2
What do dog treats and chasing squirrels have to do with quantum mechanics? Much more than you might imagine, as Orzel explains in this fun introduction to modern physics based on a "series of conversations" with his dog Emmy. Dogs make the perfect sounding board for physics talk, because they "approach the world with fewer preconceptions than humans, and…
drorzel | September 24, 2009One of the photo caption contest winners, Nick O'Neill, has finished his galley proof, and posted an early review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Casual physics intro books are quite possibly the hardest subgenre of physics books to write. Textbooks and further upper-level reading have expectations both of what you already know and how quickly you should pick up new material. Generally, those who pour through these types of books will read and reread until they've figured things out, regardless of how well the text actually explains things. Casual intro books, on the other hand, exist…
drorzel | September 22, 2009The scheduled release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is three months from today. This is, as you most likely know, a book based on the frequent conversations Emmy and I have about physics:
To mark the pre-anniversary, Emmy has decided to use social media to showcase her physics knowledge: She's answering physics questions on Twitter. Post a question, tag it #dogphysics, and she'll answer it there. If you've got a philosophical objection to Twitter, you can leave a comment here, and get your answer via the Twitter link above.
So, if you've got a question about physics that you've been…
drorzel | September 21, 2009I got email a couple of weeks ago asking if I'd be interested in appearing at the Empire State Book Festival in Albany next April. While I recognize intellectually that I will be an Actual Published Author by that time, this still feels sort of weird. Anyway, it's in Albany, so of course I said yes. Not a real big logistical hurdle for that one...
This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I am happy to do talks, panels, whatever that will help promote my book, the subject of physics, or science in general. I don't have any formal book-tour plans at this point, but that's mostly…
drorzel | August 24, 2009"So what do I need to do, again?"
"First, you have to pick a username. So people know who you are."
"OK. How about 'Emmy the Magnificent, Queen of Niskayuna and Surrounding Regions.' That should do the job."
"Ah, no. That's 64 characters. Nobody would ever reply to you with a username that long. How about 'emmy_orzel'?"
"You just want to get your name in there, and hog all the credit. How about 'Queen Emmy'?"
"Fine, queen_emmy it is."
"OK, so now what? When do I get bunnies?"
"What bunnies? It's a Twitter account. There are no bunnies on Twitter."
"Birds, then. This will help me catch…
drorzel | August 17, 2009The results of the estimation contest are in. There were 164 serious entries (I excluded the $12,000 and $1,000,000 "guesses" from the final data). The mean value guessed by commenters was $83.30, and the median was not far off, at $77.12. The standard deviation was high-- $43.10-- but as you would expect with a large sample, the standard error (or standard deviation of the mean) was small, $3.37.
Or, in convenient graphical form:
That's a histogram with $20 wide bins showing the number of guesses in a given range. A pretty nice distribution, on the whole.
The red line indicates the actual…
drorzel | August 14, 2009This wooden box sits on top of my dresser, and every afternoon when I come home, I dump the change from my pockets into it. It's getting close to full, as you can see:
I've got a couple of extra galley proofs kicking around, so here's a contest:
Guess the total dollar value of the change in this box.
Leave your guess in the comments. I will take the box to the bank next Monday, and have the change converted to folding money. At that time, the commenter whose guess is the closest to the actual dollar value of the change in the box (above or below) will receive a galley proof copy of How to…
drorzel | August 14, 2009A cosmologist, a science writer, three best-selling science fiction authors, a best-selling mystery novelist, and a Nobel laureate walk into a bar--
Oh, wait, that's not the opening to a joke. That's the list of people who have provided blurbs for my book... Kind of an eclectic bunch, but I'm pretty psyched. I'm not quite sure why the final list of blurbs gets locked in this early-- we don't even have the cover copy written yet-- but it's set now, and they look pretty good:
"Chad Orzel teases out the mysterious and seemingly incomprehensible side of advanced physics and makes it…
drorzel | August 13, 2009One of our poetry contest winners has been reading his proof copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and posted some comments. Actually, it was posted last week, but I was at Worldcon, and not dealing with much of anything else.
The comments are pretty positive, but he asks a couple of questions along the way, and I figured I should respond to those here. So, below the fold are Adrian's questions and my responses:
I don't get what's so weird about the Quantum Eraser, other than things that are already weird in simpler double-slit experiments in any case. Once you've accepted that a photon…