How-to-Teach
drorzel | May 25, 2012The blog is recovering from the transition to WordPress, but I'm still not fully confident in it. So We'll turn to another corner of the social media universe for my procrastinatory needs this morning: Having Emmy answer physics questions on Twitter.
The same deal as when we've done this before: If you've got a physics question you'd like my dog to answer, post it to Twitter with the hashtag #dogphysics (or leave it in a comment, or email it to me), and Emmy will answer via Twitter, where she's @queen_emmy.
drorzel | May 21, 2012I was going to post something noting that the great WordPress transition will begin at 7pm tonight, and comments after that time will be lost like Roy Batty's tears. However, I have much happier news: tomorrow's Science Times (available on the Web already) will include a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog!
I considered reading this book aloud to my dog, even though I doubted he would understand relativity, even as explained by the witty and clear-thinking Chad Orzel. Maxwell does seem to show some interest in Newton's first law: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in…
drorzel | May 18, 2012So, you find yourself living in the San Francisco Bay area, and you maybe have a dog who would like to know something about relativity, or you maybe want to someday have a dog who will want to know something about relativity, or you maybe want to know something more about relativity yourself, in case you ever find yourself cornered in a dark alley by a Rhodesian ridgeback who snarls "Explain time dilation to me, or I'll eat your face!" Well, in that case, you definitely want to be at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park on the evening of June 14th, when I'll be doing a book promotion thing for How to…
drorzel | May 3, 2012A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because "it's bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex areas like decoherence, entanglement and quantum teleportation," which I like to see because that's one of the things I especially wanted to do.
Natasha Zaleski, a grad student, has a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, which is good but not great, because it hit the usual failure mode: the…
drorzel | April 26, 2012I've been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I'm too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places:
The most significant, in terms of probable impact on sales, is this excerpt at BoingBoing, which is the text for the dog dialogue from Chapter 8. This is the same dialogue that became the "Looking for the Bacon Boson" video, and, indeed, they were nice enough to include the video in the post, too. Woo-hoo…
drorzel | April 16, 2012My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn't get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children's book section:
I am a ten year old who likes Physics. What is Physics, you might ask! Well, Physics is the science of pretty much everything around you. It asks big questions like where did we come from? How long ago was the Big Bang? Quantum Physics is the part of physics which talks about atomic and sub atomic particles,…
drorzel | April 12, 2012I'm re-instituting the quota system for the moment-- no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress-- but I'll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books on quantum physics up today:
Since its inception in the early part of the 20th century, the theory of quantum mechanics has consistently baffled many of the great physicists of our time. But while the ideas of quantum physics are challenging and notoriously weird, they seem to capture the public imagination and hold an enduring appeal. Evidence of this…
drorzel | April 9, 2012 I'm trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I've actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn't notice the first posted review at Amazon until my parents mentioned it to me. It's a really good one, though:
I'm at the point know where I could answer some of the most basic questions that his dog has, but I remember a time when I couldn't and when the questions the dog asks would've been exactly the questions that I would have had. Pretty much every time a statement by the author…
drorzel | April 1, 2012In comments to yesterday's post, Andrew G asked:
Speaking of writing, is there an errata list somewhere for "How to teach relativity to your dog"?
No, but there probably should be. I believe there's an error in one of Maxwell's equations (an incorrect sign, though you should've seen the first typeset version...), but given the length and complexity of the book, there are almost certainly other mistakes. So, if you've spotted an error, in physics, grammar, or anything else, leave a comment here, and I'll compile a list of things to fix if we ever get the chance.
drorzel | March 25, 2012I had a signing yesterday at the Barnes & Noble in Vestal, NY, which drew a smallish crowd mostly of friends and family. SteelyKid came, of course, and while she spent most of her time bopping about other parts of the store, she came over to the signing area while I was signing books for people after reading a bit. They had a big stack of copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, and she started picking them up and handing them to me.
"No, honey," I said, "Those are for other people. Give them to somebody else." So she happily ran one over to my mother. And then to one of my aunts.…
drorzel | March 23, 2012The quick publicity items for this weekend:
1) I will be on the Science Fantastic radio show either Saturday or Sunday, depending on when your local affiliate runs it (or when you choose to livestream it over the Internet). The interview has already been recorded, which leaves me free for:
2) I will be signing and possibly reading from the new book at the Barnes and Noble store in Vestal, NY at 2pm on Saturday. If you're fortunate enough to live in the Southern Tier, stop by and say hi.
drorzel | March 22, 2012"Hey, dude," the dog says, looking concerned. "We need to talk."
"Yeah? What's up?"
"Look, it's great that you're transcribing the human puppy's stories into Twitter and all, but I'm feeling left out. I've got my own Twitter account and all, but you hardly ever type any of my tweets any more. I have to do it myself, and it's hard to be witty when you have to type with your nose."
"I'm sorry. Is there something specific you'd like to tweet about?"
"Well, yeah," she says, in a tone like I've said something stupid. "I mean, obviously, we have a new book about relativity. And look at this…
drorzel | March 20, 2012A couple of cool items in the promotion of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
-- A little while back, I spoke to Alan Boyle, who writes the Cosmic Log blog for MSNBC, who posted a very nice story about the book last night. Mainstream media, baby!
It also uses this very cool picture of Emmy and me in my lab:
(Many thanks to Matt Milless for taking that and a bunch of others.)
-- This weekend (either Saturday or Sunday, depending on where you are), I'll be on the Science Fantastic radio show, talking about relativity with Michio Kaku. There's a lsit of stations that carry it linked from that…
drorzel | March 19, 2012I'm trying not to obsessively check and re-check the Dog Physics Sales Rank Tracker, with limited success. One thing that jumped out at me from the recent data, though, is the big gap between the book and Kindle rankings over the weekend. The book sales rank dropped (indicating increased sales, probably a result of the podcast interview), while the Kindle rank went up dramatically. This suggests that people who listen to that particular podcast are less likely to buy new books on the Kindle than new books on paper.
This got me wondering, though, whether this was an anomaly, or a general truth…
drorzel | March 17, 2012I've done a bunch of publicity stuff for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, some of which frustratingly continue to not appear yet, but one thing from this week has gone live: a podcast interview on the Matt Lewis Show, where I talk about why and how I explain physics to the dog, and a little bit about why relativity is cool.
I continue to struggle a bit with the fact that relativity is a very visual subject-- most of the best explanations involve pictures, which aren't much help in an audio-only medium. I had trouble with this at Boskone, too-- when I was doing a reading, it was hard to…
drorzel | March 6, 2012The new book is out, which means it's time for lots of promotional efforts and links to radio shows and news articles and that sort of thing. Such as this one: I'll be talking about relativity and dog physics tomorrow night, Wednesday the 7th, on the Big Science radio program(me) at 9pm London time (in the frame of reference in which London is at rest, anyway). This'll be the first radio show for the new book, though I've done a few phone interviews for print publications (links as they become available...).
If you're in London, and have nothing better to do, tune in. (We are, after all, more…
drorzel | February 29, 2012The Subject: header pretty much says it all: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is reviewed in Nature Physics. I am inordinately pleased with the existence of this-- not because I expect it to sell a significant number of books, but because a serious technical publication recognized it as worth writing up, despite the silly title.
Of course, Nature being Nature, it's paywalled, so you can only read the full thing via the above link if you have institutional access, or know a nice person who will email you a copy when you ask for it on Twitter. The review itself is about what I would expect…
drorzel | February 29, 2012One of the big stories in genre Internet news was Seanan McGuire's post last week, about reactions to the early release of some copies of her book, and the hateful garbage thrown her way by people outraged that the ebook didn't slip out early as well. And let me state right up front that the people who wrote her those things are lower than the slime that pond scum scrapes off its shoes. That's absolutely unconscionable behavior, and has no place in civilized society.
That said, Andrew Wheeler picked up on something that also struck me as odd, namely the way McGuire was so upset about paper…
drorzel | February 28, 2012I'm home with The Pip today, so no extended typing for me, but I pre[ared for this by typing something up ahead of time, and getting John Scalzi to post it for me, as part of his Big Idea series:
In a way, a book about Einstein's theory of relativity is uniquely suited to a series about Big Ideas. Relativity, at its heart, is a theory built on a single Big Idea:
The laws of physics do not depend on how you're moving.
For all its fearsome reputation, everything stems from that single,simple idea. Whether you're moving or standing still, floating in space or on the surface of a planet, you…
drorzel | February 28, 2012The Pip says, "Hi, folks. My daddy's book is released today, and he's shameless enough to use me to promote it:"
"I can't read it yet, because I'm just a baby, but I can report that it was very satisfying to drool on. So you should definitely buy a copy, maybe two."
"Also, dig the awesome stuffed alligator toy I got from my Aunt Erin and Aunt 'Stasia. It crackles, and it has a mirror! It's so cool!"