Books
drorzel | December 20, 2008I've said a number of harsh things here about the bad attitude of people who consider themselve Intellectuals toward math and science. After reading this New Yorker discussion about a Young Adult novel, I may need to change my stance a bit.
It's not that they're better than expected when it comes to math and science-- the subject never comes up. The mind-changing thing is their really appalling ignorance of and attitude toward YA books. It's really pretty amazing. And if somebody said things in public that were half as insulting to teenage girls as what they say about teenage boys, they'd be…
drorzel | December 8, 2008I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of Competence Fiction), and a pop-science book titled The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Came of Age by Louisa Gilder, because it looked fairly relevant to my own book-in-progress.
Amusingly, my RSS feeds yesterday brought me the latest in a series of posts in which ZapperZ waxes peevish about the book…
drorzel | December 3, 2008Last year, around this time, I posted a rant about the lack of science books in the New York Times's "Notable Books of 2007." While I was out of town last week, they posted this year's list. So, have things improved?
Yes and no. They do, in fact, have two books that are unquestionably science books on the list: THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow (which I also reviewed), and THE SUPERORGANISM: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson.
By my count, they list 52 non-fiction titles, meaning that a whole 3.8…
drorzel | December 2, 2008A while back, Kate started doing a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Lord of the Rings on her LiveJournal. Life intervened, though, and the project fell by the wayside.
She's re-started it, this time as part of the Tor media empire. So far, there's an introductory post and a discussion of the foreword and prologue, with Chapter 1 to come next week. If they're conscientious about their use of tags, the whole thing should be at this link.
So there's yet one more reason to subscribe to Tor's RSS feed.
drorzel | November 30, 2008I've gotten out of the book-logging habit, but Spaceman Blues is good enough that I feel compelled to write about it. I had heard of the book some time back-- I believe I recall Patrick Nielsen Hayden saying nice things about it at some con or another-- but the packaging didn't really give me a clear idea of what it was like, so I never got around to buying it until Tor offered it as a free e-book. I'll buy a paper copy soon, though, and probably pick up his new book as well.
It's hard to fault the copy writer, though. This is a really difficult book to describe. The promotional site name-…
drorzel | November 15, 2008As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I've done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I'm rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn't able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I'm definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain…
drorzel | November 11, 2008In the recent discussion of Many-Worlds and making universes, Jonathan Vos Post asked what science fiction treatments of the idea I like. The answer is pretty much "none," because most SF treatments are distractingly bad.
For example, last night I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a whopping huge brick of a book setting up an incredibly imaginative alternate Earth, with a detailed intellectual history paralleling our own. It's got all sorts of great stuff, but it lost me when it started talking about parallel worlds, because it munges together the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum…
drorzel | October 26, 2008I tagged Ethan Zuckerman's post abpout video "windows" to other places in a links dump recently. The idea is to put big video screens and cameras in fast-food restaurants around the world, and provide virtual "windows" into other restaurants in other countries. In talking about the idea, Ethan threw out a great aside:
(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I'd write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping…
drorzel | October 22, 2008Another question from a generous donor, in this case Natalie, who asks:
As for my question, how about "who is your favorite author, and why?" or, if you'd rather, "what's your favorite book, and why?"
This is a difficult question, because it's subject to a sort of quantum projection noise. That is, my "favorite book" and "favorite author" exist in a sort of quantum superposition of all the various possibilities. When someone asks, I can give an answer and either the wavefunction collapses to that value at that instant, or the universe splits into many parallel universes, each with its own…
drorzel | October 10, 2008Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton has a post titled "College as magic garden: Why Pamela Dean's Tam Lin is a book you'll either love or hate". Tam Lin, for those who don't know it, is a version of the old ballad set at a liberal arts college in the upper Midwest (I believe it's based on Carleton, but I'm not sure). Jo's got a good description of it in her post.
You might be surprised to learn that I come down on the "hate" side regarding this particular book. It's not that the portrayal of the small liberal arts college environment is off, or anything-- quite the opposite. It does a wonderful job of…
drorzel | October 9, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
I'll be honest, I've got nothing on this one. Anyone who knows anything about his work, please tell me about it in comments. My knowledge of French literature is limited to laboriously translating Le Petit Prince in class twenty years ago, so I've never even heard of this guy.
drorzel | October 5, 2008The best way-- really, the only way-- to sum up David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞ is by quoting a bit from it. This comes from the middle part of the book, after a discussion of Fourier series, in one of the "If You're Interested" digressions from the main discussion:
(IYI There was a similar problem involving Fourier Integrals about which all we have to know is that they're special kinds of 'closed-form' solutions to partial differential equations which, again, Fourier claims work for any arbitrary functions and which do indeed seem to-- work, that is-- being…
drorzel | October 5, 2008Jennifer Ouellette's pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I'm really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I'm going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I've been trying to correct that.
Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the Science21 meeting, but am just getting around to blogging. Longitude is Dava Sobel's bestselling book about English clockmaker John Harrison and his forty-year sturggle to win 20,000 pounds for making a clock capable of keeping time at sea well enough to allow navigation.
This…
drorzel | September 14, 2008One of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, apparently hung himself yesterday. His thousand-page novel Infinite Jest puts the magnum in magnum opus, but it's a spectacular piece of work, and in some ways, his nonfiction was better than his fiction.
Wallace was always a dangerous writer for me-- one of those people whose style I would end up unconsciously imitating whenever I read something new. He'd come out with a new collection, and I'd spend a week deleting footnotes from my emails and blog posts. I'm shocked and saddened to learn of his death, particularly in this manner.
drorzel | August 22, 2008Every time I mention the idea of teaching physics to a wider audience than just physics majors, somebody brings up Richard Muller's course, "Physics for Future Presidents," at Berkeley. So, I was pleased to find out that he has turned the course into a book, also titled Physics for Future Presidents, with the subtitle "The Science Behind the Headlines." I was going to try to cadge a free copy from his publisher, but our default local Borders is closing, and they were offering deep discounts on all their stock, so I just bought a copy.
The book is framed as a sort of memo to somebody who will…
drorzel | August 22, 2008Over at Tor.com, David Levine describes a really cool event he went to just before Worldcon: a crash course in modern astronomy for SF writers:
The idea behind Launch Pad is Gernsbackian: getting good science into popular fiction as a form of public education and outreach for NASA. SF writer and University of Wyoming astronomy professor Mike Brotherton managed to get a NASA grant to fund this workshop for five years, of which this was the second. All the attendees' expenses were paid, including transportation to and from Laramie, housing in college dorms, and most meals--though we had to pay…
drorzel | August 19, 2008First of all, if you're Tony DeCapio, you need to send Kate an email address so she can contact you regarding the free book offer. Leave it in a comment at her LiveJournal-- she's screening the comments, so there's no chance that spammers will get it.
If the previous sentence doesn't make sense to you, then you must have missed the previous announcements that Kate and I are giving away books, as long as you ask for them by Saturday. Details are in Kate's LiveJournal post.
drorzel | August 18, 2008As part of the library cull that accompanied moving our books to make room for SteelyKid, Kate and I are giving away some of our duplicate/ unlikely-to-be-read books. On Saturday, whatever is left will be donated to our local library book sale, but if you'd like to spare us the work of carting all those books down to the library, you can claim them for yourself by going to Kate's LiveJournal and following the instructions.
drorzel | August 6, 2008I've been on a big Jim Butcher kick recently, re-reading most of the Dresden Files books. This is largely because holding a regular book is still uncomfortable with my bad thumb, and I have electronic copies of the Dresden books that I can read on my Palm (well, Kate's old Palm, which I just use as an ebook reader).
While in the bookstore yesterday looking for Karl Schroeder's new Virga book (which, alas, was not to be found), I was struck by the huge number of Dresden Files knock-offs on the shelves. Well, OK, they may not really be Dresden Files copies, but it seems like there are dozens of…
drorzel | August 4, 2008Last weekend's post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there.
I may have some additional comments on the issue later, but it's a little hard to focus while going crazy waiting for FutureBaby.
(There's also a tiny chance that this will be noticed by some of my colleagues, which could be interesting. I know that some of them read the Chronicle of Higher Education religiously, but I'm less…