Books
drorzel | June 1, 2009Two noteworthy things in the meta-blog category:
1) The 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prize nominations are up, and it's a great list of sciencey bloggy goodness. If you're looking for a way to procrastinate, you could kill several days reading all 171 entries.
Once you're done reading them, go vote for your favorite. The top 20 vote-getters will be the shortlist given to Steven Pinker to choose the winners from.
2) Not on the list yet, but sure to provide some quality entries next year is the brand new X-Change Files blog from the Science and Entertainment Exchange. They're providing…
drorzel | May 25, 2009Over at the Inverse Square Blog, Tom Levenson is doing a series of blog posts walking through the steps involved in getting a book published. Unfortunately, there isn't a compact way to link to the whole series, but the posts to date are:
Part 0: Introduction to the Series
Part 1.0: The Proposal (with an example to look at)
Part 2.0: Agents
Part 2.5: Agents and Publishers
I'm not all the way through the publishing process for my first book yet, and my path into the whole business was sufficiently idiosyncratic that I'm not all that comfortable giving advice, but I don't have any hesitation…
drorzel | May 14, 2009I watched Jonah Lehrer on the Colbert Report a few months ago, and thought he did a really good job. So, when we were offered free copies of his new book, How We Decide, I asked for one, even though it's not my usual sort of thing.
The main point of the book is that what you think you know about thinking is wrong. Through both interesting historical anecdotes and summaries of the latest in cognitive science research, Lehrer shows that our usual decision-making process is nowhere near as rational as we would like to believe. And, moreover, that's not such a bad thing-- without contributions…
drorzel | May 14, 2009I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen bloggers commenting on Tom Hanks's appearance on The Daily Show, in which he talks about CERN:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
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Everything he says is pretty much true, but garbled and exaggerated for comic effect. People at CERN have to be shaking their heads, though. Or maybe they don't bother watching the interview segments...
At any rate, it's not nearly as good as their earlier segment with John Oliver at CERN
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M…
drorzel | May 7, 2009You might think that Monday's discourse on thermodynamics in the Goldilocks story was the only children's story in which physics plays a role, but that's not true. Physics is everywhere in fairy tales.
Take, for example, the story of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a mysterious little man demands a terrible price for helping a miller's daughter spin straw into gold. This raises the obvious question of exactly how one would go about extracting gold from straw.
The use of the term "spin" might suggest the use of rotational motion-- if the straw were ground up very fine, and mixed with water, it might…
drorzel | May 6, 2009The proprietor of Good Mom, Bad Mom emails to point out a post spinning off Monday's Goldilocks post. A good thing she did, as Technorati has collapsed into utter uselessness, at least for finding people who link to my posts.
Her post quotes an unnamed correspondent, who writes:
My two daughters are both compulsive readers, gobbling up everything in their path. As a result, they both have very large vocabularies are very well informed about a range of things. I love it--instead of watching TV and getting dumb, they're reading, and getting smart. Mostly they read novels, but it's amazing how…
drorzel | May 1, 2009Some time back, I was a little surprised to hear James Nicoll use Asimov as a touchstone for science popularizers. I only really knew his fiction, and can't recall hearing his pop-science books cited by anybody who wasn't also an SF fan.
So, when I ran across one of his science books while we were sorting through a bunch of old books left in the department after we cleared out Ralph Alpher's old office and some other old book collections, I grabbed it figuring I should check out some of his science writing. The book in question is The Collapsing Universe: The Story of Black Holes. It has a…
drorzel | April 29, 2009I've had the Quiche Moraine post on editing open in a browser tab for far too long, now, but it deserves a more prominent comment than just a link in the daily links dump. It really is an excellent presentation of the important role of editing:
Editing requires the strange ability to stand in the place of the audience and the author simultaneously. As an editor reads a piece, whether it be a story or a journal article, they have to understand what the author intended to say without losing track of not just what one individual reader will take away, but how the piece will come across to…
drorzel | April 22, 2009We had a talk last night by Alan Lightman of MIT, a theoretical physicist and novelist, best known as the author of Einstein's Dreams. He spoke for about an hour about his own background, and the similarities and differences between the worlds of science and the arts.
One of the differences he mentioned was the way the different disciplines handle names. He claimed that science is deeply concerned with naming things, because naming a thing in some sense defines it-- the word "electron" carries with it a whole host of properties that are shared by all electrons in the universe. In the arts, on…
drorzel | April 21, 2009I tagged Geoffrey Pullum's rant against The Elements of Style for del.icio.us a few days back, because it struck me as interesting, but I didn't have time to say more. In the subsequent days, I've seen a bunch of "Preach it, Brother Pullum!" responses, most recently from revere. I've also received the copyedited manuscript of the book-in-production, so I've been thinking a bit about grammar and style in my own writing.
Most of the pro-Pullum responses I've seen seem to me to be missing the point. Or, rather, they're criticizing the book because it's not very good as an absolute and…
drorzel | April 11, 2009...what with his wife, Emily, giving birth to twins. It sounds like he's pretty happy with this state of affairs, though.
Go leave him a congratulatory comment. Or, better yet, go buy one of his books-- they're great fun for you to read, and will help keep Toby supplied with the vast number of diapers he'll need in the next several months...
drorzel | April 8, 2009New ScienceBlogger and American Gladiator Ethan Siegel of Starts With a Bang has a couple of nice posts about dark matter and how we know it's there (one, two).
These posts reminded me that I never did follow up on the discussion following my post about Magic World Media, who are looking to publish kids' books about science, and seeking kindergarten-level explanations about dark matter and dark energy. A few commenters expressed doubts about whether this could or even should be explained to kids at that level.
I don't have any strong feelings about the "should" question, but it seems to me…
drorzel | April 4, 2009The monthly Sigma Xi email newsletter for April included a link to Magic World Media, a new company producing children's books about science:
Magic World Media was founded in 2008 by scientists in order to offer children a view into the mysterious ways of life and the universe through books and other forms of media. Our goal is to nurture the imagination and wonder of young children by introducing them to the world that exists beyond the limitations of our senses and, importantly, exposing them to the vastness of what is still unknown. Our books generally place the child at the center of a…
drorzel | March 29, 2009I was rather surprised when Friday's quick post about Tolkien spawned a lengthy comment thread full of people arguing against the suggestion that The Lord of the Rings is affected by Tolkien's Catholic faith. I'm no Tolkien scholar, but my impression of the field is that this is simply not a controversial statement, that there is ample material in the reams of letters, early drafts, and other background material showing that this is the case.
On reflection, it seems that there are two things going on here. One is that some people seem to think that a book cannot be said to contain Christian…
drorzel | March 27, 2009Arts & Letters Daily had a link to a City Journal article about religious symbolism in science fiction, which attempts to claim that there has been a recent swing toward Christian symbolism in the genre (at least, in movie and television SF-- the only books mentioned are forty-ish years old). There are a number of problems with it, but the most jarring has to be this paragraph:
One reason that Disney finally made a movie out of C. S. Lewis's Christian allegory The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005 may be that popular fantasy has become increasingly religious at heart. Peter Jackson…
drorzel | March 20, 2009The nominees for this year's Hugo Awards were announced last night. The most important category is, as always, Best Novel:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK) — Free download
Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)
Surprisingly, I've already read four of the five. This is either blind luck, or a sign that I'm better in tune with the tastes of SF fandom than ever before. I'm not sure which I'd prefer.
The as-yet-…
drorzel | March 18, 2009In an effort to wrest something positive from the smoking ruins of the fannish precincts of LiveJournal, a number of people (Kate included) have put together a community to raise money to provide financial assistance to fans of color who want to attend Wiscon or some other convention. They're auctioning off a lot of interesting stuff, from books to artwork to personal services.
The community is Con or Bust, and information about how the thing works is also available. If you're interested in supporting this project, either by bidding or offering items for bid, head on over and check it out.
drorzel | March 14, 2009One of last year's highest-traffic posts was, weirdly, Talk Like a Physicist. I say "weirdly" because it wasn't much more than a link to Tom at Swans On Tea.
It's that time of year again, and Tom's back with an updated list of vocabulary for your physicist-talking needs. I don't have much to add, but one of Tom's items:
We physicists quantify relationships -- something that is complicated is "nonlinear," or even "highly nonlinear." Opposites are "inversely proportional"
reminded me of a great literary reference, from Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life":
"So they can read a word with equal ease…
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…