How-to-Teach

Not much news on the book front this morning-- various promotional things are in progress, including an on-campus thing tomorrow afternoon, but there's nothing new to link to. We do, however, have the first non-mammal added to the DogPhysics Pet Gallery: a lizard, sent in by Marcella McIntyre. It's not actually a pet, per se, but it's shown reading up on the Uncertainty Principle, so at least it has a healthy curiosity. If you've got a copy of the book, and you have pets, send a picture of your pet(s) with the book to queen_emmy@steelypips.org, and we'll add it to the Gallery. And if there's…
Not a whole lot new, but it's been a few days. Also, it's a challenge to remain ambulatory at the moment, thanks to this cursed cold, so I'm not really prepared to turn out Significant Blogging. -- This morning's vanity search (why yes, I am searching for "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" on a daily basis. Aren't you?) turned up this Current Geek podcast, which talks about the book. They haven't read it yet, but picked up the BoingBoing mention, and are enthusiastic about the idea. They pretty well nail the thinking behind the book. -- The vanity search also turned up this discussion of my…
Today is the first day of classes, and to celebrate, I've come down with the Martian death virus that Kate and SteelyKid have had the last few weeks. Joy. This calls for a How to Teach Physics to Your Dog update, to distract myself from the cotton balls and vacuum pump oil that have apparently been stuffed into my sinuses: The primary news is that Peter Woit has posted a review, in which he says mostly good things: While Brian Greene in his Elegant Universe Nova special introduced general relativity by trying to discuss it with a dog, concluding that "No matter how hard you try, you can't…
In talking to a reporter about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on Wednesday, I learned of a mistake in the text of the book-- a footnote on page 71 says that Scientific American published an article on how to make your own "quantum eraser" in April 2007, when in fact it was May 2007. If that's the worst mistake in the published book, I'll be very happy. It is a mistake, though, and needs to be corrected. This also reminded me that I never did post the scholarly references that go with the book, so maximizing the birds killed per stone, I have added a References and Errata page to DogPhysics.…
There isn't all that much news for a real obsessive update, so I'll lump in a few writing-related items of possible interest to people who read books other than mine. A real obsessive update item: BradDeLong doubts my book can help his dog. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog gets four out of five stars as part of a good books round-up in the Timmins Daily Press in Ontario. (Google News search is nifty). A fortuitous discovery thanks to, of all things, an ad in GMail: QM for cat lovers, part of an old blog of imaginary conversations with Einstein. I doubt this will change anybody's mind about…
I should probably start date-tagging these updates about miscellaneous How to Teach Physics to Your Dog news. I don't really mean this to become a second daily links dump, but it's kind of looking that way... -- As a general matter, it's dangerous for authors to acknowledge the existence of Amazon customer reviews (acknowledgment leads to responding, responding leads to madness), but the half-dozen customer reviews already posted are really good. These three especially. There are also a couple that aren't much more coherent than comment spam, so go figure. -- At the risk of setting up a…
Today's miscellaneous information about How to Teach Physics to your Dog: -- Following on yesterday's discussion about Barnes & Noble, which seems to have numerous in-store copies everywhere but New England, where I am, it's not some system-wide issue-- B&N stores have a healthy number of copies, and have sold a pretty reasonable number of them already. It's probably just a matter of shelving/ distribution associated with the holidays. -- I couldn't really be the only blogger to think of connecting dogs and physics, and, indeed, I'm not. A bloodhound in Manhattan named Wimsey offers…