Pop Culture
drorzel | February 13, 2012So, the big How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Photoshop contest concluded on Friday. We got five really good entries, and the judges (me and Kate) had a hard time reaching a decision. After long deliberation, though, we've come up with a solution.
But first, the entries:
Jane Di Giuseppe has Emmy as the dog pulling Einstein's strings:
John Pearce has Emmy playing with Einstein as well:
And Joseph Roith tells Maxwell's Demon to respect Emmy's authoritah!:
But in the end, it came down to two pictures: Tristan Croll's take on the famous chalkboard photo:
It's a little-known fact that not…
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 5, 2012Proving that you can find physics in everything, Sean Carroll points to a strange anomaly in the Super Bowl coin toss: the NFC has won 14 coin tosses in a row. The odds of this happening seem to be vanishingly small, making this a 3.8-sigma effect, almost enough to claim the detection of a new particle, and certainly enough to justify the generation of a press release.
Of course, there are two problems with Sean's analysis, one classical and one quantum. The classical objection is that what we have a record of is one team winning the toss every time, which does not mean that the coin is doing…
drorzel | February 5, 2012Like many Americans, I'm going to be hugely preoccupied today. Thus, a poll for your blog-like entertainment needs:
The Super Bowl is today. Who's going to win?
If you choose the last option, please arrange to have contacted me in the past to tell me who to have laid a significant bet on so I will have won a large sum of money.
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 | January 3, 2012I'm a little late to the Most Popular Posts of the Year list party, partly because I wanted to wait until the year was actually over, and partly because Google Analytics was being Difficult, and I had to switch back to the "old" version to get actual numbers out. Having sorted that out, though, here are the top posts to this blog for the calendar year 2011:
Because 4% of the Energy Controls 100% of the Photons, 28607 pageviews
Links for 2011-09-04, 11470 pageviews
The Innumeracy of Educators; or Mark Twain Was Right, 9048 pageviews
Faster Than a Speeding Photon: "Measurement of the neutrino…
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 14, 2011A predictably stupid discussion of this xkcd cartoon in a place I can't link to reminded me that I haven't posted the list of Christmas songs that don't suck yet this year. This has expanded somewhat since last year, thanks to some recommendations from readers, so it's worth posting again to see if there's anything else I ought to add.
These are the 49 songs in my "Good Christmas" playlist that are rated 4 or 5 stars on iTunes. The full playlist is 129 songs, but most of those are three-star "it's ok in December, but I wouldn't want to hear it the rest of the year" songs. These ones, I won't…
drorzel | December 13, 2011And what happened then?
Well, in Who-ville they say
That the Grinch's small heart
Grew three sizes that day.
And then the true meaning
Of Christmas came through
And the Grinch found the strength
Of ten Grinches, plus two
-- Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas
It's nearly Christmas, so SteelyKid keeps demanding to watch the two classic Christmas specials we have recorded, Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Watching these over and over again, my thoughts naturally turn to physics, and what sort of physics you could do with these shows.
The…
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…