Pop Culture
drorzel | August 29, 2010We're trying not to let SteelyKid watch a whole lot of tv, but we've taken to showing her YouTube videos of old Sesame Street and Muppet Show skits as a way to wind her down before bedtime. this, of course, has let to her demanding to watch videos any time one of us is anywhere near a computer.
One of her current favorites is this clip of Viking pigs from the Muppet Show:
I've been horribly earwormed with this for days, now, and since misery has bosonic character, I thought I'd share it with you all.
drorzel | August 28, 2010Over at Torque Control, Niall Harrison is doing a Short Story Club, hosting discussions of SF short fiction. As I always vaguely regret not reading enough short fiction to make sensible nominations for the Hugos, this seemed like a good opportunity to read a selection of stories that a smart person with pretty good taste thought were worth discussing. As a bonus, these all appear to be available online for free, so it doesn't require me to buy, let alone subscribe to, one of the big magazines.
The first story up in this year's edition is "The Things" by Peter Watts. It's a fast read, if you…
drorzel | August 28, 2010I've never thought of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. I haven't had to, since I don't live in The City, so about all I remember about him is that his choice of party back when he was first running seemed awfully opportunistic. I was really impressed with his appearance on the Daily Show this week:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Michael Bloomberg
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Tea Party
This is about the best response to the endless mosque nonsense that I've seen from an elected official. Granted, he's not…
drorzel | August 26, 2010Same deal as the last game: Each of the following pairs of words is taken from a pop song, where they are set up to rhyme (many of the phrases don't really rhyme, but they're treated as if they do). Your job is to guess the song based on the rhyming pair.
1) Lion sleeps/ soul to keep
2) bartender/ medical center
3) health department/ glove compartment
4) backup plan/ foreign land
5) in the crotch/ Scottish loch
6) insanity/ and misery
7) fidgety-fidge/ Waterloo Bridge
8) a coma/ aroma
9) burden/ curtains
10) gets mentioned/ detention
11) write exams/ give a damn
12) Edison/ medicine
13)…
drorzel | August 25, 2010New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie is getting mocked for a clip where he takes some time to name all his children (the clip isn't as bad as the description makes it sound-- he's slow, but he doesn't struggle all that badly). Cromartie claims that HBO manipulated the footage to make him look bad.
Of course, there's an easy way to avoid this kind of mess: simply give all the kids the same name, thereby reducing it to a previously solved problem.
In discussion on a mailing list where this came up, someone wondered about how many children Wilt Chamberlain would've fathered, given his…
drorzel | August 22, 2010I was channel-surfing the other night, and stumbled across a History Channel program on paleoanthropology, talking about new-ish theories of how humans first populated the Americas. Coming off my recent read of 1491, this seemed like a good way to pass a little time.
After a little bit, it started to talk about some guy's theory that the Younger Dryas cooling and the mass extinctions at around that time were caused by an asteroid impact on one of the ice sheets. Which, you know, is a theory, I guess. The problem with this was, part of the evidence they were citing for the impact hypothesis…
drorzel | August 21, 2010Nobody who likes both SF and the graphing of odd things as much as I do could possibly fail to link to Orbit's charts of fantasy art. These include the frequency plot of various elements seen at right, a comparison of fashion trends for urban fantasy heroines, color trends in cover dragons, and a study of word and font frequencies in titles. If you're planning a fantasy series, Bloody Death Dragon of the Magic Shadow God would apparently be a good title choice.
drorzel | August 17, 2010So, I blew off stuff I should've been doing, and went to see a matinee of the Scott Pilgrim movie this morning (it's very much not Kate's sort of thing, and I would feel guilty ditching her with SteelyKid to see it during the evening or on a weekend). Actually, first I went to Borders for half an hour to read the last volume of the comic, so I could compare the two endings-- I should probably buy these, because I really like the story, but I balk at shelling out that much money for something that I can read in half an hour in a bookstore.
I liked it a lot, but then, I'm a sucker for this sort…
drorzel | August 15, 2010A slightly different twist on the occasional guess-the-lyrics game. The following list gives pairs of rhyming words from a song that I think can be used to identify a specific song. So, for example, the pair:
diplomat/ Siamese cat
identifies "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, thanks to the lines:
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to guess the songs from the rhymes below. Some are pretty easy, some are pretty obscure. If you don't choose to accept this mission, well, come back…
drorzel | August 14, 2010Tongues of Serpents is the nth book in the Temeraire series started with His Majesty's Dragon (in the US, anyway), and another "Meh" review from me. In this case, this is probably less to do with the book itself than with the fact that I am not really in the target demographic for this book.
The series, for those who aren't familiar with it is basically Patrick O'Brian crossed with Pern: our chief protagonist is William Laurence, a sailor in the Biritsh Navy in the Napoleonic Wars who captures a dragon's egg, and inadvertently becomes the human captain of Temeraire, a Chinese Celestial dragon…
drorzel | August 14, 2010I don't believe the actual book is out yet, but you can get an electronic Advance Reading copy of the Nth Miles Vorkosigan book, Cryoburn already. Kate picked up a copy, and while she hasn't gotten around to it yet, I read it this week while putting SteelyKid to bed.
The book is another "Lord Auditor Vorkosigan" story, with Miles on a mission to Kibou-Dani, a half-terraformed planet with a positive fetish for cryopreservation. A quirk in local laws gives the "cryocorps" that preserve millions of frozen citizens the right to proxy vote for their clients, and control of their property, so they…
drorzel | August 13, 2010Over at the Whatever, one of Scalzi's guest bloggers has posted a ginormous list of upcoming live music shows in the DC area. This makes me sad, because when I used to live in the DC area, I was a grad student, and couldn't afford to go to any of the dozens of great concerts that came through there. Now that I have plenty of money I could spend on live music, I live in Schenectady, where we don't get anywhere near as many good shows, and I have a wife and child to boot, which makes it difficult to justify going out.
Anyway, whining aside, this seems like a good topic for a reader poll: What…
drorzel | August 11, 2010A Japanese physicist who I worked with as a post-doc spotted the Japanese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the wild, and picked up a copy. He sent along a scan of a couple of pages of the text, one of which I reproduce here:
I had totally forgotten that Japanese books are often printed with the text in vertical columns from right to left, which creates a slightly weird effect. What's even stranger, though, is the way the equations are done-- they're also rotated to be vertical, but the kanji characters are rotated as well. Not that the rotation changes the readability in any…
drorzel | August 6, 2010In comments to yesterday's post about my favorite Many-Worlds story, a couple of people mention "All the Myriad Ways," a Larry Niven short story. I don't think I've ever actually read the story, but it gets brought up all the time, so I'm familiar with the concept. It's an angle on Many-Worlds that I don't like, and has something in common with the central conceit of Inception, which is also not high on my list of literary tropes, though my reaction isn't anywhere near as negative as Scott's.
If you're not familiar with it, here's the summary from Wikipedia:
A police detective, pondering a…
drorzel | August 6, 2010I was going to write something serious about physics, but it's my student's last day, so we're taking him to lunch. So here's a silly poll to entertain you until I get back:
If I suspected I might be living in a dream, but couldn't be sure, I would:survey software
You can only choose one answer... Unless it's all a dream! In which case, you should slap yourself repeatedly for dreaming about blog polls, because, really.
drorzel | August 6, 2010We haven't yet gotten to the point where we're comfortable leaving SteelyKid with a babysitter, so seeing the movie everybody's talking about took a while. Since she's off at Gammy's, though, we got a rare night to ourselves and went to the movies.
My immediate reaction is that it's great to see a movie that's kind of smart and not based on anything dominating the box office. If this helps break us out of the endless cycle of re-makes and comic-book movies, I'll be as happy as anyone.
This is an extremely well-done movie, with everything shot, acted, and choreographed very well. There was…
drorzel | August 5, 2010Today, Tor.com has posted the complete story "Divided by Infinity" by Robert Charles Wilson. This remains probably the best science fiction story ever using the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics (though it doesn't call it that explicitly), and also the creepiest:
In the year after Lorraine's death I contemplated suicide six times. Contemplated it seriously, I mean: six times sat with the fat bottle of Clonazepam within reaching distance, six times failed to reach for it, betrayed by some instinct for life or disgusted by my own weakness.
I can't say I wish I had succeeded,…
ksnyder | August 2, 2010Silk taffeta, flowing gowns, sheaths, and...a lab coat? It may sound like a fashion faux pas, but these were the makings of NYC-based designer Shin Choi's spring 2000 collection.
At $378, this lab coat should probably be saved for the most special occasions
That season's catalogue, which recently ended up on my desk after a coworker's office-cleaning session, featured a fitting backdrop: intriguing scientific scenes at Brookhaven Lab. Alongside the slender model stands bulbous cryogen tanks, an abandoned bubble chamber, and widgets and gadgets galore.
This shot was taken next to a set of…
drorzel | August 1, 2010Every couple of weeks, there's another bunch of stories about how e-books are transforming the world, and paper books will soon survive only as collectible fetish objects. It occurred to me this morning that I share a house with a reason why paper books will be around for a while yet, at least in some markets. In fact, I share a house with the cutest reason why paper books will be around for a while yet:
That's SteelyKid with an alumni magazine, not a book, but you get the basic idea. And a lot of the time, she's much less gentle with her reading material:
Kate and I have both largely…
drorzel | August 1, 2010The voting for the 2010 Hugo Awards closed last night. I sent in my ballot yesterday, but I'm trying to limit my computer time this weekend, so I didn't post about it until today.
The following lists are my votes, with miscellaneous commentary. The Hugos use a complicated vote-counting scheme, including a "No Award" option to distinguish between works you wouldn't mind seeing win, even if they're not your first choice, and works you consider so bad you would rather see them cancel the award than win.
Best Novel
The City and the City by China Mieville
Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson…