Books
drorzel | February 13, 2012I've been falling down a little in the area of shameless self-promotion, but I will be at Boskone this coming weekend, where I'll be doing three program items:
Reading: Chad Orzel (Reading), Fri 19:30 - 20:00
This will be a section from the forthcoming book, probably involving Emmy and particle physics. Or possibly William Butler Yeats.
How to Wreck Your Career with Social Media (Special Interest Group)
(M), Sat 16:00 - 17:00
What are the new opportunities for public humiliation opened by the
Internet? Join this entertaining discussion about authors getting
into nasty public spats with…
drorzel | February 12, 2012We send SteelyKid to preschool at the Jewish Community Center in Schenectady, because when we looked at day care programs back in the day, they had the one we liked best. This is a mixed blessing in a number of ways-- they close for a lot of religious holidays when nothing else closes, creating some awkwardness with child care and our jobs. On the plus side, though, it's a chance to learn about another culture, and as an extra bonus, most of what we learn is filtered through SteelyKid, making it extra cute.
For example, on the way home Friday, she was chattering quietly to herself in the back…
drorzel | February 9, 2012In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they weren't able to hunt at night because the moon wasn't out and it was too dark. Which sort of bugged me, and I was reminded of it tonight when I took Emmy out for our post-dinner walk-- it's very clear tonight, and a lot of stars were visible, even here in the light-polluted suburbs, but the moon wasn't up yet.
And the thing is, while it's darker when the moon isn't…
drorzel | February 8, 2012I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and often blorting out 57 different pages on which my name appears in a sidebar link. It comes in handy from time to time, though, such as this morning, when it coughed up a whole bunch of pages linking to the Polish edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Finally, dogs in the ancestral homeland of my father's family can learn all about quantum physics. I'm a little surprised to learn…
drorzel | February 7, 2012A quick reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (cover in the left sidebar) will be released at the end of the month. If you'd like to win a signed copy early, though, you can enter our Photoshop contest. Just edit a picture of Emmy into another picture having something to do with physics. Like this:
(See the transcript here for the source of this comment.)
The deadline for entering is this Friday. We've already got some quality entries, but the more the merrier.
drorzel | February 2, 2012It's now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off-- the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I've got a copy already:
If you would like a copy of your very own, you can either wait until the release, or take part in this shameless publicity stunt: The second-ever Dog Physics Photo Contest!
Last time around, we did a LOLEmmy contest for a bound galley proof of the first book. This time, I'm giving away a signed copy of the finished book, so we'll go for something a little trickier: I've picked three pictures from my…
drorzel | February 1, 2012I'm using Dava Sobel's Longitude this week in my timekeeping class. The villain of the piece, as it were, is the Reverend Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, who promoted an astronomical method for finding longitude, and played a major role in delaying the payment to John Harrison for his marine chronometers. It's a good story, with lots of science and engineering and politicking.
There's one critical flaw, though, in terms of me teaching this book, which is that I don't really know how to say Maskelyne's name. And even Wikipedia is letting me down, here, by not providing a phonetic rendering of his name.…
drorzel | January 27, 2012I was going to write something about the politics of scientific publishing, but instead, I want to focus on what's really important in modern publishing:
That's right, I got a couple of early copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the mail this morning. It's a real book, with pages and everything... You can see it above, next to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and various clutter on my desk, for scale.
There's not much else to say, other than "Woo-hoo!" They're printing lots more, of course, and it will be available wherever books are sold starting Feb. 28th.
drorzel | January 24, 2012So, back when How to Teach Physics to Your Dog was coming out, I did a few "dramatic readings" of bits of the book, such as this one on the Quantum Zeno Effect:
This was made with Windows Movie Maker, because it was free (came with the computer) and dead simple. However, Movie Maker on my new computers is hopelessly broken-- I've made a couple of attempts to do the same sort of thing with my laptop, but I've never managed to get more than a couple of steps in before it crashes. (To be fair, this is one of only two things that are worse under Windows 7 than Vista, and the only one that's…
drorzel | December 30, 2011I will eventually do a "Year in Blog" post with a bunch of links to top posts and so on, but not until the year is actually over. At the moment, I'm too busy prepping next term's class to do all the link chasing.
That doesn't mean I can't engage in a little self-promotion, though. After all, my second book, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog will be out at the end of February. And the first pre-publication review is in, from Publishers Weekly:
Physics professor Orzel follows his How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with a compact and instructive walk through Einstein's theory of relativity,…
drorzel | December 9, 2011Three quick items relating to science in book form:
1) It's that time of year again when every media outlet of any consequence puts out a "Year's Best {Noun}" list, and John Dupuis is checking the lists for science books so you don't have to. It looks like a pretty reasonable year for science in the best non-fiction-book-list world, but you can see for yourself.
2) In the "good books about science coming next year" category, the line-up for The Open Laboratory anthology of outstanding science blogging has been announced. I'm very pleased to report that my write-up of the OPERA preprint was…
drorzel | December 8, 2011One of the things that is sometimes very frustrating (to me, at least) about popular physics books is that they rush very quickly through the physics that we already know, in order to spend time talking about wildly speculative ideas. This not only gives some of these books a very short shelf life, as their wilder speculations get ruled out, but it does a dis-service to science. Because as cool as some of the things that might be true are, the stuff that we already know is pretty awesome in its own right, and even more amazing for being true.
Happily, Frank Close's new book, The Infinity…
drorzel | December 6, 2011It's hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another "imminent death of publishing" article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There's one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table books.
Clifford Pickover's new Physics Book is one of these. It's a very attractive and well-made book, pairing some 250 full-page images representing milestones in physics, paired with one-page descriptions of the underlying scientific…
drorzel | December 5, 2011I'm still getting back up to speed with the blog, as well as the huge backlog of stuff I've read during the past few months when I was too busy to blog. Thus, I am semi-officially proclaiming this Book Review Week. I'll post one review a day of books I was sent by publishers looking for a mention on the blog.
We'll start off with The Manga Guide to the Universe, which is from the same organization that brought us The Manga Guide to Relativity. This one is, as the title suggests, a cartoon introduction to astronomy.
As is standard for the Manga Guide series, this has a framing story involving…
drorzel | September 20, 2011I'm looking at an email from my editor when Emmy wanders by the computer, sniffing around just in case a crumb of food has fallen on the floor in the last five minutes. "Hey," I say, "Come here and look at this."
"Look at what?"
"This:"
"It's the cover for my new book."
"A-hem."
"OK, fine, it's the cover for our new book. Anyway, what do you think?"
"Hey, that's not bad. I'm way better than that dog, though."
"Yeah, well, they didn't want to make the owners of inferior dogs jealous."
"Oooh. Good point. See, this is why I could never make it in marketing."
"It's Madison Avenue's loss, I'm…
drorzel | August 30, 2011Back when I reviewed Mann's pop-archaeology classic 1491, I mentioned that I'd held off reading it for a while for fear that it would be excessively polemical in a "Cortez the Killer" kind of way. Happily, it was not, so when I saw he had a sequel coming out, I didn't hesitate to pick it up (in electronic form, this time).
As you can probably guess from the title and subtitle, 1493 is about what happened after Europeans made contact with the Americas. This covers a wide range of material, from straight history, to biology, to economics, but the central theme of the whole thing is basically…
drorzel | August 21, 2011As noted a while back, the Hugo Award nominations for this year were pretty uninspiring. The actual awards were handed out last night and, well, yeah. I wasn't all that wild about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but it at least would've been an interesting choice. But giving it to Blackout/ All Clear, a pair of books that almost nobody had anything good to say about? The only possible outcome that would've been less inspiring would've been a tie with Cryoburn.
Lower down the ballot, things are a little better. I don't read much short fiction, but lots of people who do said before the voting…
drorzel | August 20, 2011I've heard a bunch of good things about Dan Wells's John Cleaver series (a trilogy at the moment, consisting of I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, and I Don't Want to Kill You, but the ending of the last leaves an opening for more, should he want to write more), but I somehow didn't expect them to be quite as strongly in the Young Adult category as they are. It's a bold call, but it actually works pretty well.
The set-up here is that the first-person narrator of the series, John Wayne Cleaver, is a sociopath with all the usual traits of a serial killer in the making: pyromania, frequent…
drorzel | August 17, 2011A little more tab clearance: these are stories about the transformation of publishing that I've been meaning to say something about but haven't got around to.
First, some actual news: rumors of the imminent death of publishing may be somewhat exaggerated, as more books were sold for more money in 2010 than in a while.
Of course, that doesn't make Borders any less dead, so here are a couple of eulogies: from Dean Dad and Jeff Mariotte (the latter hosted by Borders so, you know, read it soon before it disappears).
If you remain convinced that traditional publishing is going the way of the…
drorzel | August 14, 2011Lev Grossman's The Magicians never got a full entry to itself, but as I said when I mentioned it in this round-up post, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a magical school novel about recognizable American teenagers attending Brakebills, a sort of liberal arts college for the wizarding set, somewhere in the lower Hudson valley (presumably near the Lake of the Coheeries). It's not to all tastes, but it resembles my actual college experience a lot more than most other magical college novels, so I enjoyed it quite a bit.
It's essentially impossible to say anything about the new sequel The Magician…