Books
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 2, 2010Most of my fiction reading at the moment is done while rocking SteelyKid to sleep at night, using a Palm as an e-book reader. This does not really lend itself to the reading of weighty Literary Novels, but rather lightweight genre trash. Which means I've been reading a bunch of "urban fantasy," because that is the default mode of trashy genre fiction at the moment.
I'm kind of souring on the (sub)genre at the moment, though. I've read a bunch of Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson novels, whose "My Awesome Werewolf Boyfriend" interludes are really beginning to grate. I barely made it through the…
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 29, 2009 Today's miscellaneous information about How to Teach Physics to your Dog:
-- Following on yesterday's discussion about Barnes & Noble, which seems to have numerous in-store copies everywhere but New England, where I am, it's not some system-wide issue-- B&N stores have a healthy number of copies, and have sold a pretty reasonable number of them already. It's probably just a matter of shelving/ distribution associated with the holidays.
-- I couldn't really be the only blogger to think of connecting dogs and physics, and, indeed, I'm not. A bloodhound in Manhattan named Wimsey offers…
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 23, 2009Janet has a post grappling with the ethical implications of telling children about Santa Claus. SteelyKid is too young for this to be an issue yet, but on this issue, like many others, I turn to my favorite literary philosopher, Terry Pratchett:
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little--"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE…
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 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 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, 2009While I'm thrilled to see How to Teach Physics to Your Dog listed on Amazon, I am distressed to see it offered as a pair with something called The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart. I'm not linking to the Amazon page for that book, because it's a giant pile of crap, and I wouldn't want anyone to accidentally one-click-order it after following a link from my page.
If you should choose to look it up, you can read bits and pieces of it via the "Look Inside" feature, and it's true that the opening chapter or so is a reasonable-sounding description of the physics of quantum entanglement,…
drorzel | December 14, 2009The overlap between my readership and SF fandom is not as high as one might like, but I thought I would throw this out there anyway:
What were the best science fiction and/or fantasy stories of 2009?
("Stories" here can mean anything from short stories to novels to feature films. We're all about inclusiveness, here at Chateau Steelypips...)
My interest in this is not purely academic, as I am eligible to nominate works for the Hugos (as a member of this past Worldcon), and I intend to purchase a supporting membership for next year's Worldcon, allowing me to vote for the 2010 Hugos. I don't…
drorzel | December 14, 2009Like every other media outlet, Slate has a Best Books of 2009 list, in this case featuring one book chosen by each of their 22 editors. Editor in chief Jacob Weisberg chose Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, and writes:
If, like me, you didn't study much science after high school, this absorbing narrative will make you appreciate the gravity of your mistake. At one level, it is simply an enchanting group biography of the great British discoverers Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, and William Herschel, and their relationships with the likes of Keats, Coleridge, Byron and the Shelleys. At another,…
drorzel | December 11, 2009You know, if somebody were to put together an application that would periodically check the Amazon sales rank of a given book and generate a Google Analytics style time series graph, and charge authors $5/book to see the output, I bet they'd make a bunch of money.
Granted, it would put that person on the same moral level as a crack dealer, but I imagine a big pile of $5 bills would go a long way to soothe that...