Book Writing
drorzel | April 1, 2009Because a book isn't a real book until it has a promotional website, I give you:
http://dogphysics.com
the official(ish) site for promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which will be published this December (and can be pre-ordered on Amazon).
The site does, in fact, contain content you won't find on the blog, including "interviews" with me an Emmy, so go check it out.
A note on the design: the site is cobbled together by me, using my cargo-cult CSS skills. It was more or less ready yesterday, until I discovered that it looked awful on Internet Exploder, because Microsoft chooses to…
drorzel | March 13, 2009I have an official release date for the book-in-production: December 22nd. There's no lay-down date, though, so they may turn up in stores before then. Mark it down on your Christmas list now...
There's also an official title and cover:
Emmy's slightly miffed that she's not the dog on the cover, but that's what she gets for refusing to do the quizzical head-tilt when I have the camera.
I am, as you might guess, pretty excited. I've also got a complete schedule for the process from here on out-- the next step is getting the copyedited pages, which should get here in the second week of April.…
drorzel | March 10, 2009The book is now starting through the production process, and people at Scribner are thinking about publicity. I got email asking whether I could set up a Facebook page for Emmy as a promotion.
I'm not sure whether that meant a fan page for the dog, or a Facebook profile for her, as if she were a user of the site. I'm also not sure whether setting up a Facebook account for my dog is acceptable within the normal Facebook operating parameters. Still, it's amusing to consider what she would have on her Facebook profile.
I mean, obviously, she's looking for random play, and her interests include…
drorzel | February 23, 2009Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading.
Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by "Trollops." It's a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias.
As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder…
drorzel | February 22, 2009Holding TUH not very neatly done up in pink butcher's paper, whcih was all he could find in a last-minute search before leaving to catch his train for London, Mr Earbrass arrives at the offices of his publishers to deliver it. The stairs look oddly menacing, as though he might break a leg on one of them. Suddenly, the whole thing strikes him as very silly, and he thinks he will go and drop his parcel off the Embankment and thus save everyone concerned a good deal of fuss.
-- Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel
I have just now sent off the (hopefully) final…
drorzel | February 9, 2009The Book-in-Progress is slowly but surely moving toward being the Book-in-Production. There isn't an officially official date yet, but I've gotten what should be the last round of edits, and been told that it should be out this fall, just in time for holiday gift-buying.
Between the book and my class, I don't have a great deal of spare mental energy for blogging. Here are a few notes from the ongoing book work, though:
I am amused to discover that the official way to enter a cross-reference is to put "Page XXX" in the text. Not the page number, mind, the exact string "Page XXX." I'm told…
drorzel | January 26, 2009FemaleScienceProfessor posted a few days ago about "intense" editing of scholarly writing, and the different reactions students have to the experience:
Although an individual student's response to being intensely edited can vary with time and mood, there tend to be typical responses from each student. These typical responses are no doubt related to very deep aspects of their psyches and stem from previous experiences with teachers, women (maybe even their mothers..), or anyone who has ever criticized their punctuation. Who knows from whence these reactions spring.. Whatever the source, it's…
drorzel | January 15, 2009Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean writes:
You know what the world really needs? A good book about time. Google tells me there are only about one and a half million such books right now, but I think you'll agree that one more really good one is called for.
So I'm writing one. From Eternity to Here: The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time is a popular-level book on time, entropy, and their connections to cosmology, to be published by Dutton. Hopefully before the end of this year!
Dammit! Now it's a race to see whose pop-physics book will be out first. The approximately final draft of my…
drorzel | September 10, 2008We're out for a walk, when the dog spots a squirrel up ahead and takes off in pursuit. The squirrel flees into a yard and dodges around a small ornamental maple. Emmy doesn't alter her course in the slightest, and just before she slams into the tree, I pull her up short.
"What'd you do that for?" she asks, indignantly.
"What do you mean? You were about to run into a tree, and I stopped you."
"No I wasn't." She looks off after the squirrel, now safely up a bigger tree on the other side of the yard. "Because of quantum."
We start walking again. "OK, you're going to have to explain that," I say…
drorzel | July 23, 2008There's a classic paper on the Quantum Zeno Effect that I discuss in Chapter 5 of the book. The paper does two tests of the effect, and presents the results in two bar graphs. They also provide the data in tabular form.
My question is this:
If I copy the data from the table, and make my own version of the graph, am I obliged to contact them and ask permission to duplicate their results in my book?
If I were copying their graphs directly, I would definitely contact them and ask permission, but I'm not as certain about using their data to make my own version of their graphs.
Complicating…
drorzel | July 10, 2008I'm currently revising the book chapter based on the original "Bunnies Made of Cheese" post, which deals with virtual particles and Quantum Electro-Dynamics. The best proof of the power of QED is the measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, where experiment and theory agree to something like thirteen decimal places.
In double-checking things this morning, I find that the Gabrielse group has released yet another improved measurement of the electron g-factor since the last draft of this chapter. I've updated the current draft accordingly, and continue to be amazed by the…
drorzel | July 8, 2008The final chapter of Bunnies Made of Cheese: The Book is currently envisioned as a look at the misuse of quantum mechanics by evil squirrels: qucks and hucksters of various sorts. As a result, I spent a good chunk of yesterday wading through the sewers of alternative medicine books on Amazon, using the "Search Inside This Book" feature to locate good manglings of quantum theory in the service of quackery. I feel vaguely dirty.
I also spent some time on the web page of Bob Park's favorite shills, BlackLight Power, which provides another example of the appropriation of quantum concepts for…
drorzel | July 6, 2008"2. Ever repeat a word so much it starts to lose its meaning? Writing a book is like that, only with 90,000 words."
Quantum quantum quantum, quantum quantum. Quantum.
drorzel | June 24, 2008I'm deep in book revisions at the moment, which largely accounts for the relative blog silence. This is expected to continue for a while yet, broken by the occasional post when something comes up that is irritating enough to push me to write about it. Such as, well, now.
In the chapter on the Copenhagen Interpretation, I spend some time laying out the basic principles of quantum mechanics, and mention the Schrödinger equation. I noted in passing that the name is taken from "the Austrian physicist and noted cad Erwin Schrödinger." Kate questioned whether this was really appropriate, but I left…
drorzel | March 28, 2008Today's question come to us courtesy of Ivy League white-reggae band Vampire Weekend:
So, who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma, anyway? Well, John Scalzi, obviously, but the real question is: why? Why does this simple piece of punctuation engender such strong negative feelings in people who are otherwise mostly sensible?
Personally, I lean toward using it, to avoid the "my parents, Ayn Rand and God" problem, but I can't say I feel strongly enough about that to go through an entire book manuscript "STET"-ing removed serial commas. So what gives?
drorzel | March 20, 2008Over at Making Light, Abi has proposed a parlour game using books as Tarot cards. As always for Making Light, the resulting comment thread is full of dizzyingly erudite responses, and clever literary in-jokes.
But it strikes me that there's a fundamental flaw in the game-- Abi's examples all involve selected works, chosen to be appropriate for the subject of the reading. For true divination, though, you need an element of randomness, whether it be yarrow stalks tossed in the air, or the iTunes randomizer. Fortunately, we have LibraryThing: if you look at our library, you'll see a "Random…
drorzel | January 13, 2008I'm sitting on the couch, watching tv, when the dog comes in. "Hey, dude, what ever happened with that book, anyway?"
"What book?" I ask, distractedly.
"The one about me. What other book would I be asking about?"
"Oh, yeah. I sent the first draft off to my editor and a bunch of other people, and I'm waiting for their comments."
"Oh. That must suck, huh?"
"What?"
"Waiting. I don't like waiting."
"I've noticed that." She's good for ten seconds or so, but more than that, and she starts creeping forward. "It's not so bad, though. I've already gotten some comments, which have been very positive…
drorzel | December 21, 2007"Hey, dude. What's in the binder?"
"Well, it's the first draft of my book. I finished it this morning, and printed it out to have a paper copy to look at."
"Ooooh! The book about me?"
"Well, it's a book about physics, featuring you. But yes, that's the only book I'm working on at the moment."
"That's fantastic, dude. You're all done, and now I get to be famous!"
"I wouldn't say I'm all done. In fact, I'd say that the work is really just getting started."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, for one thing, it's too long. The contract calls for 40,000 words, and this is a hair over 53,000. That's about…
drorzel | December 20, 2007As previously mentioned, I plan to end the book with a chapter on quantum flim-flam. As research for this, I've been looking at kook sites on the web, and Googled "quantum healing," which turns up all manner of gibberish from Deepak Chopra. It also includes a helpful little item at the bottom of the page:
Searches related to: quantum healing
maurice chevalier hugh grant deepak chopra ectomorphic
The Chopra search makes sense, and "ectomorphic" is a gibberish word that shows up in that sort of stuff. But Maurice Chevalier? And Hugh Grant?
If I could just figure out the connection between…
drorzel | December 7, 2007Kind of a technical question, but typing it out might provide some inspiration, or failing that, somebody might have a good suggestion in the comments.
Here's the issue: I'm starting on a chapter about quantum teleportation for the book, and one of the key steps in the teleportation scheme is an entangling measurement of two of the particles. If you're teleporting a photon polarization state, the easy way to do it is to make a joint measurement of the polarization of the photon whose polarization you want to "teleport" and one photon from the entangled pair you're using for the teleportation…