Books
drorzel | July 30, 2008A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question:
As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course "Can Computers Think?" (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course. If you have a minute, please let me know if you have any suggestions on the following topics:
Technology and Privacy
Sustainability
Ownership and intellectual property rights
Threats and possibilities of A.I.
Some of these are pretty obvious-- "Technology and Privacy"…
drorzel | July 28, 2008The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?." This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines:
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers' scores on…
drorzel | July 27, 2008A question raised in comments to yesterday's rant about humanities types looking down on people who don't know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science:
[I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science and engineering professors.
This is obviously not a question I can answer, but I agree that it would be good to know. So, how about it?
drorzel | July 27, 2008Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it's a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton's "Great Discoveries" series (which inexplicably lacks a web page-- get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing is part of the point.
Some time back, there was a "meme" that went through the science side of blogdom asking people to post about their favorite historical scientist. I didn't contribute, mostly because I didn't really have a favorite…
drorzel | July 27, 2008Having admitted that I know noting about fine art, here's an opportunity to prove it...
A week or so ago, I was in the Schenectady library looking for something else, and noticed a book called Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, which is packaged in such a way as to make it difficult to attribute, but appears to be the work of Emiliano Sefusatti, John Morse, and Hilary Thayer Hamann, a science writer, artist, and art expert, respectively. It's subtitled "Essential Physics Concepts and their Companions in Art & Literature," which sounded very Clifford Johnson, so I figured I'd give it a…
drorzel | July 23, 2008Via Tom, a big long list of books with which to showcase either my broad cultural background or pathetic cultural ignorance. As Tom's original source notes, the claim that most Americans have only read six of these is kind of hard to credit, given that I was assigned more than six of them by the time I finished high school.
As always with Top N lists, I have to wonder where this mess came from. I mean, I like Bill Bryson, but Notes From a Small Island doesn't fit in this. And The Wasp Factory?
It'd probably be more fun to get hundreds of people to go through this list and mark which books…
drorzel | July 18, 2008Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician's assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly close to my own age, was all but begging for medical clearance to go back to work. The PA refused to provide it, saying that it was out of the question until next week, when she removed the stitches from the surgery the woman had just had a day or two earlier.
In…
drorzel | July 11, 2008Tobias Buckell brought the whole sordid racist rejection letter episode to my attention a couple of days ago. This has apparently decided to become the "Violet Blue" episode for this week, and today, Toby dredges through the sewers of the Asimov's forums to find a few real gems of sexist and racist filth. I hadn't previously been aware that Asimov's hosted forums, and I can't say that this has inspired me to sign up.
Toby does make one important comment, though:
I know this stuff feels tiring, but there are a lot of cool people out there in the blogosphere who are just as annoyed by this.…
drorzel | July 7, 2008John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I've never gotten around to reading. I've been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read.
Unfortunately, I probably would've been a lot more impressed had I read it when it first came out in 1988. Most of the examples used to illustrate his point that people are generally very bad with numbers are exceedingly familiar. They appear in How to Lie With Statistics, and the recent The Drunkard's…
drorzel | July 6, 2008Kate and I are giving away books.
Not all of them, mind, and they're not totally free-- you need to pay shipping-- but a couple hundred duplicate/ disliked/ never-going-to-get-read books are being discarded. If you would like any of them, there are simple instructions on Kate's LiveJournal.
Don't worry that this will leave us bereft, though:
That's the first section of the hardcover collection, which continues:
(that's the same wall of shelves as the first picture, from the other end...), and ends on the other wall:
Note the ample space for new additions on most if not all of the shelves…
drorzel | June 27, 2008Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees.
You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I'm going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no less...), I better have some opinions..
The original post is very long, but can probably best be summarized by the following paragraph:
My thesis is that it's not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don't have the…
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 | June 9, 2008Reading Final Theory last night reminded me of something Patrick Nielsen Hayden said on a con panel once. The question was raised of why thriller-ish science fiction books don't do as well as thrillers with a thin SF gloss-- basically, "Why doesn't Greg Bear sell as many books as Michael Crichton?"
Patrick noted that there's a very different attitude toward the products of science in the two genres. In thrillers, he said, the plot is set in motion by the unleashing of some scientific discovery, and the plot is resolved by destroying or covering up that discovery. In genre science fiction, on…
drorzel | June 9, 2008I've gotten a fair number of free science books in the last few years, from publishers looking for bloggy publicity, but Mark Alpert's Final Theory is the first time that I've been asked to review a novel on ScienceBlogs (I've gotten advance copies of some other novels, but I've specifically requested those). Mark Alpert is an editor at Scientific American, and Final Theory is his debut as a writer of thrillers.
David Swift, a former physics student turned historian of science, gets a call to come to the dying bedside of Hans Kleinman, a former mentor from his physics days, who has been…
drorzel | June 3, 2008The World Science Festival happened while I was at DAMOP (I missed getting to talk to Bill Phillips, because he left shortly after his talk to go to NYC), and by all reports it was a success-- they claim 120,000 attendees on their web site, and sold more tickets than expected for several events, and favorably impressed journalists. Good news, all.
Of course, at the same time on the opposite coast, the annual Book Expo America was going on, and as Jennifer Ouellete reports, science was shut out:
Every conceivable genre was prominently represented -- sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, foreign…
drorzel | May 16, 2008Matthew Yglesias's first book arrives burdened with one of the longest subtitles in memory ("How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats"), which is a little off-putting. Of course, it also features a back-cover blurb from Ezra Klein calling it "A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." So there's a little in-jokey blog reference to lighten the mood.
I'm not a big reader of political books-- I don't even care for excessively political SF novels-- but I enjoy Matt's blog a good deal, and met him…
drorzel | May 7, 2008Writing in Scientific American, Mark Alpert argues that we need more novels about science:
A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer--all the illuminating particulars that you won't find in a peer-reviewed article in Science or Nature. Novels such as Intuition, with their fully fleshed out characters and messy conflicts, can erase the ridiculously sinister Dr. No cartoons. And most important, these books can inspire readers to become scientists themselves.
As you might imagine, this…
drorzel | May 6, 2008Speaking of YA literature (as I was, briefly, in the previous post), I would be remiss if I didn't note that Cory Doctorow has put up a Little Brother section on his web site, promoting his new book. As with all of his books, it's available for free download, so if you'd like to read it but don't want to pay for it sight unseen, you can check it out.
You may or may not remember, but I enthusiastically reviewed it back in March (I got an ARC at Boskone):
Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack…
drorzel | May 6, 2008The latest book by Iain M. Banks proudly proclaims itself to be a Culture novel-- part of a loosely connected series of novels and stories about humans living in a vast and utopian galactic civilization-- which makes its opening in a castles-and-kings milieu somewhat surprising. Well, all right, technically it opens with a prologue in which a woman called Djan Seriy Anaplian and her drone companion Turminder Xuss disrupt a medieval-level army with very little effort (she's an agent of the somewhat disreputable Special Circumstances, the group within the Culture that meddles in the affairs of…
drorzel | April 10, 2008I'm not sure whether he's making some kind of obscure point, or just trolling, but John Scalzi gave a recent installment of his "Big Idea" series over to the witterings of "Vox Day," talking about his book The Irrational Atheist. Curse you, Scalzi, for getting me to even look at that.
And it's not just me-- John undoubtedly has readers who had never encountered Mr. "Day" before. Don't you know that exposing innocent people to "Vox Day" has been classified as a war crime, and earnes you ten thousand years in Purgatory?
Anyway, having spent a bunch of time recently complaining about a lack of…