Pop Culture
drorzel | January 11, 2011As usual, the best commentary on this weekend's shootings comes from Jon Stewart:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Arizona Shootings Reaction
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>
The Daily Show on Facebook
If you prefer your sensible commentary in convenient HTML form, John Scalzi's got you covered.
Comments closed, because I don't want to host a discussion of this. If you want to hold forth on the situation, it's a big Internet, and there are lots of other places where you can do that.
drorzel | January 10, 2011I'm always a little hesitant to post reviews of books that I'm using as reference sources when I'm writing something, because it feels a little like recommending that you skip past my book and go to my sources instead. This is, of course, completely irrational, because however much I my use a given book as a resource, what I'm writing is going to cover a different set of topics, with a slightly different slant. And since the folks at Cambridge University Press were kind enough to send me a review copy of Tatsu Takeuchi's An Illustrated Guide to Relativity, I really kind of owe it to them to,…
sa smith | January 9, 2011I have nothing against media whores, per se.
Kathy Griffin do what she gotta do to pay the bills.
Snookie is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame. The Situation actually appears to be making the most of the situation.
But then you have the kinds of media whores like Chris Mooney. The whores who deny their true selves and pretend they are actually contributing to society. A vapid little git, speaking out both sides of his mouth and throwing allies under the bus whenever it suits his whorish needs. Thus I suppose it didnt come to anyones surprise that a man who professes to care so much about…
drorzel | January 9, 2011A reader from the UK, James Cownie, was kind enough to send this picture of the "New and Bestselling" shelf at a WH Smiths " at one of the service stations on the M20." You might not recognize the cover immediately, but in the #11 spot on that list is occupied by How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK version of my book. Or, given how well it's doing there, perhaps I should start referring to the cover pictured in the left column of the blog as "the American edition..."
Anyway: Woo-hoo!
drorzel | January 9, 2011Every genre reviewer in the world seems to be raving about Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, so I picked it up for Hugo nomination consideration. I'm about a third of the way into it, now, and to be honest, it's kind of bugging me. There are some good bits, but also stretches where the author seems inordinately impressed with his own cleverness, which is kind of grating.
Also, I realize that this is more magic realism than SF-- the time travel is clearly more of a literalized metaphor than an attempt to do something traditionally science-fictional-- so it's a…
drorzel | January 7, 2011There's a new wrinkle in the endless controversy about Huckleberry Finn, with NewSouth Books preparing an expurgated edition replacing "nigger" with "slave" throughout. Sentiment in the parts of the Internet I frequent is mostly against the change, which has been made with the goal of getting it back on high school reading lists, which it has fallen off in many places because of concerns over the language. (Note that it doesn't appear to have been done in response to any great outcry for such an edition: "Mr. Gribben said no schools had expressed interest yet in teaching the book.")
It's a…
drorzel | January 5, 2011Back in the fall, I got an email from my UK publisher asking me if I'd be willing to read and possibly blurb a forthcoming book, The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek. The book isn't exactly in my field, but there really wasn't any way I'd turn down a request like that. Coincidentally, I received an ARC of the book a few days later from the US publisher. They weren't asking for a blurb, but I'm always happy to get free books.
From the title, I expected this to be another book laying out the now-standard model (if not…
drorzel | January 2, 2011Because I'm sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here's the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form:
In case you can't numerically integrate that in your head, I'll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to crack the million mark in any one year, but the total number of pageviews over the history of ScienceBlogs is just short of 3.9 million. Not too shabby.
Looking at the overall traffic states for the five years (five years!) that I've been blogging at ScienceBlogs, the thing I'm happiest about is this…
sa smith | December 31, 2010Hey, Im hanging out in Lima, Peru for some reason right now, and I want to ask you all a weird question:
Okay, you know how we are all pretty loyal to our SciFi actors. Yeah, 'Firefly' got canceled, but we will watch/support any new shows that cast Summer ('Sarah Connor Chronicles') or Nathan ('Castle') or Morena ('V') or are ideas out of Joss Whedons head (even if they are confusing and borderline nonsensical, like 'Dollhouse').
We like to see 'our' actors working.
But someone recently asked me who my favorites were in the ~20-year-olds range.
My response was 'Um... Summer Glau... and...…
drorzel | December 30, 2010I've shifted the iTunes shuffle from the Christmas-music playlist over to the top-rated songs of the year playlist because, well, it's the time of year when anybody with any pretension of writing about pop culture does some sort of Top N list to wrap up the year. And, since I've got "pop culture" right up there in the masthead, that means I should do one as well.
The following list is all the five-star rated songs that iTunes has a "2010" date for, with a bunch of remastered Rolling Stones tracks deleted, because really, while "Sweet Virginia" is a fantastic song, it's not remotely a 2010…
drorzel | December 22, 2010As is often noted, most modern recordings of Christmas songs range from utterly bland to excruciatingly awful. There are some that sorta-kinda work, though, and a bare few that are brilliant:
In the interest of promoting, you know, music that doesn't suck, it's perhaps worth taking a look at what makes the good songs work.
The key element is really an accurate assessment of the strengths of the artist in question. For example, the Pogues crafted an enduring classic by going with what worked for them in every other song they did: drunkenness, sordid relationships, and soaring music. It's a…
drorzel | December 16, 2010I'm very pleased to announce that the Uncertain Principles Person of the Year for 2010 is... SteelyKid:
Why do I say this? Well...
First, as lots of people will tell you, we're all citizen journalists now. Which means that I'm every bit as entitled to declare a person of the year as Time magazine is.
Second, everything in Chateau Steelypips revolves around her, so she is clearly the most important and influential person here.
Third, she's way cuter than Mark Zuckerberg. Granted, I don't have a picture of Mark Zuckerberg wearing a napkin as a hat for direct comparison, but I like my odds on…
drorzel | December 15, 2010As previously noted, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is selling very well via the Guardian's online bookshop, among other UK venues. It's doing well enough that I might need to start referring to the original text as the American edition of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog...
There's a nice ironic twist to the Guardian aspect of it, though, in the form of a review by that paper that I hadn't previously noticed until this book business summary brought it to my attention. It's a blisteringly bad review, basically dumping hate all over the talking-dog conceit. Which,…
ksnyder | December 14, 2010This guest post is written by Peter Takacs, a physicist in Brookhaven Lab's Instrumentation Division. Takacs, who earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, joined Brookhaven in 1979.
Peter Takacs
More than a half-century ago, Brookhaven Lab nuclear physicist Willy Higinbotham sought to "liven up the place" with an experiment in entertainment. At BNL's annual open day in 1958, Higinbotham created what is often credited as the world's first video game. Hundreds waited in line for a chance to play "Tennis for Two," an interactive game made from an analog computer, two chunky…
drorzel | December 14, 2010As usual, the most sensible commentary on the Southern organizations celebrating the 150th anniversary of secession comes from the Daily Show. Specifically, Larry Wilmore:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The South's Secession Commemoration
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>
The Daily Show on Facebook
This whole business makes me think the British have the right idea regarding the commemoration of treason. We should have an annual Jefferson Davis day, but along the lines of Guy Fawkes day, not a…
drorzel | December 12, 2010As you can see from the picture at right, we've got our Christmas tree up, waiting to surprise SteelyKid when she comes home in a couple of hours. This also means it's getting toward the time when I switch over to the holiday music playlist on iTunes.
Christmas music is, of course, a problematic genre. I spent half an hour in a toy store the other day, looking for stuff for SteelyKid, and the entire time that I was there, the only song that played was "The Christmas Song." After six different versions of that, I was more than ready to roast somebody's chestnuts.
So, it's time for the annual…
drorzel | December 11, 2010It's time now to talk about two of the greatest mentor figures in the literature of the fantastic. You know their stories well, I'm sure, but the parallels between them are eerie:
Both are gruff but kindly mentor figures who provide crucial guidance for the young and naive protagonist of the story as he moves out into a scary world to complete an important quest.
Both fall into a chasm while battling a fearsome monster to allow the protagonist time to flee.
Both return from their apparent death when least expected, just in time to save the day.
Both have awesomely impressive beards.
I am…
drorzel | December 9, 2010How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog continues to sell very well. The vanity search today led me to this, screen captured from the Guardian newspaper in the UK, which sells our book in its online bookshop:
Woo! Take that, biology!
Yeah, yeah, I should be so lucky as to squeak onto the list in 150 years. Still, it's kind of a hoot to see that list.
drorzel | December 9, 2010SteelyKid is off spending the weekend with her grandparents, so Kate and I went out to a nice restaurant last night (we love SteelyKid dearly, but miss eating in restaurants without a kids menu). I was kicking myself for forgetting to set the DVR to record a basketball game, though. Not the Duke or Kentucky games on ESPN, but the much more Mid-Majority friendly BYU-Vermont game up the road, on the local cable system.
Why? Because the game was being played in Glens Falls as a tribute to Jimmer Fredette, BYU's star point guard, and a local legend. Fredette started to get national attention…
drorzel | December 7, 2010Today is the official release date for the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I wanted to write up something cool about quantum physics to mark the occasion. I looked around the house for inspiration, and most of what we have lying around the house is SteelyKid's toys. Thus, I will now explain the physics of quantum teleportation using SteelyKid's toys:
"Wait, wait, wait... You're not seriously planning to explain something quantum without me, are you?"
"I could hardly expect to get away with that, could I. No, I'm happy to have your contributions-- the book is about…