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drorzel | April 12, 2010No blogging this weekend, and not even a Links Dump for Monday morning, because I was busy with non-blog stuff all weekend. Such as fencing in Lake Steelypips:
OK, maybe that's too grandiose a name for the little decorative pond in our back yard. It's not all that large, but it is big enough to put SteelyKid at risk should she fall in, so it needed to be fenced. The actual fencing operation was dead simple, but was delayed for a bit when I forgot that I really ought to enclose the electrical outlet (for the pond pump) in the fence, requiring a second trip to Lowe's.
Between that and an…
drorzel | April 9, 2010There's no rest for the wicked, as last weekend's hectic running around is followed by another busy weekend, with some on-campus stuff on Sunday as part of our annual Accepted Students Days. More importantly, though, I will be on a panel at the Empire State book Festival on Saturday from 12:45-1:30 pm:
BLOOK: Going from Blog to Book
Empire State Convention Center, Meeting Room 4
Books derived from blogs are a publishing phenomenon of the past few years. Why is there an audience for previously digital content in analog form, and what does this say about the future of the book? Hear from a…
drorzel | April 2, 2010I forgot to schedule a blog post to remind people to tune in to my appearance on WAMC's "The Roundtable" yesterday morning, talking about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If you missed it, and have fourteen minutes to kill, they have the segment on their audio archive now.
It went well, and I had fun. I was really flattered when somebody at work asked if I'd gotten the questions in advance-- actually, I only got into the studio about three minutes before the interview started. Nice to see that a real radio studio looks pretty much like what you see on tv and in movies, only smaller, as is…
drorzel | March 31, 2010Physics Central is having a contest:
Do you love lasers? Ever wanted to unravel the mystery of the stimulated emission? Then the LaserFest video contest is for you. Take any laser you want and use it to somehow express a physics concept. Shine, lase, bounce and wave your way into physics history.
The winner will receive a trophy lovingly made by APS staff from some of our favorite laser toys as well as $1,000 cash. All entries must be received by May 16th at midnight.
If you know how to make videos for YouTube, and know something about physics, here's your chance at (Internet) fame and (…
drorzel | March 30, 2010SteelyKid is a fan of a web game called BumperStars, which my parents introduced her to. If I'm at the computer doing something, she'll march over, demand to be picked up, then point at the screen and say "Buh-Pah" until I open it up.
Of course, she's a toddler, and thus has an extremely short attention span (except when she doesn't). About two minutes after I start a game for her, she'll slide down off my lap, and go find something else to do. Which would be fine, except for one thing: I have competitive OCD.
I don't mean that I try to one-up other people who have obsessive-compulsive…
drorzel | March 29, 2010A flurry of things to kick off the new academic term. Reviews and news:
A nice write-up on Wired's GeekDad blog by Kathy Ceceri, about last week's homeschool event. Includes a picture of me giving a tour of my lab.
ZapperZ says that I'm not teaching physics, I'm teaching about physics. Which is probably fair, as he defines the terms. Of course, How to Teach Your Dog About Physics isn't as good a title.
And a bunch of upcoming events:
I'll be on WAMC's Roundtable this Thursday at 10am (well, after the news report that runs at the top of the hour).
I'm giving a Physics colloquium at Cornell…
drorzel | March 28, 2010Lest you think that the previous couple of posts indicate that I'm just a cranky curmudgeon who doesn't like anything he reads, let me put in a plug for Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll. I read about half of this piecemeal over a couple of months, then finished it on the plane to the March Meeting. Subtitled "An Alternative History of American Popular Music," it meticulously documents the fads and changes of American music over the first two-thirds or so of the 20th Century, and in the process tells a very different story than what you may think you know.
The origin of…
drorzel | March 27, 2010Spending less time reading blogs means that I have more time to spend reading fiction. Unfortunately, the fiction I've been reading has been letting me down. In particular, I'm very disappointed in the last two books I've (mostly) read.
For one of the books, N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (sample chapter),mit's not entirely the author's fault. Had I not gone on a big urban fantasy binge a little while back (as mentioned earlier), I probably would've liked this better. Having become fed up with the "My Awesome Werewolf Boyfriend" stuff in Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson books,…
drorzel | March 26, 2010Somebody at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has a really high opinion of this blog, as they not only sent me an Advance Reading Copy of Paul Davies's forthcoming book about SETI, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, they followed it up with a finished hardcover. I read the ARC on the plane on the way back from the March Meeting, and put the hardcover in the mailbox of a colleague who just finished co-teaching a course on astrobiology.
This book is being released in 2010, which Davies cites as the 50th anniversary of an active Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI…
drorzel | March 25, 2010Been a little while since I've done an Obsessive Update, but a few noteworthy things have come up recently:
A very nice review at Pet Connection: "this brilliant and (relatively) simple book explains the basic premises of quantum physics in terms that dogs and most English majors can understand." Which is not to say that English majors are less likely to understand it than dogs-- English majors are a big part of our target audience, and it's nice to hear that it works for at least some of them.
Another blog review, this time at Synergy of One: "Throughout the book, the author's extremely…
drorzel | March 10, 2010Several items in the general category of charitable activity:
Kate is running the Con or Bust auction again this year, with proceeds going to support people of color interested in attending SFF cons, principally Wiscon. Bidding is open through Saturday at 11:59pm ET, and items up for bid include many things that may be of interest to readers of this blog, including a certain book, plus a bunch of other stuff I will put below the fold.
I got email from the Nobel Prize committee the other day. Well, OK, the webmaster for Nobelprize.org. They have an "Ask a Nobel laureate" feature going on…
drorzel | March 10, 2010On this morning's walk, a woman stopped me and Emmy to say that she recognized us from a picture. Emmy was adopted from the Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society shelter back in 2003, and when they heard about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, they contacted me about writing Emmy up as a distinguished alumna. And, in fact, there's a piece in their print newsletter, including a picture of the two of us sitting by the couch (page 8 of the PDF newsletter for February 2010).
Emmy, of course, regards this as no more than her due. She's hoping to be invited to give a commencement address at some…
drorzel | March 5, 2010Another dramatic reading of a chapter from How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, just because. This is Chapter 4, which is based on the original Many Worlds, Many Treats post that kick-started the whole thing:
I'm sitting at the computer typing, when Emmy bumps up against my legs. I look down, and she's sniffing the floor around my feet intently.
"What are you doing down there?"
"I'm looking for steak!" she says, wagging her tail hopefully.
"I'm pretty certain that there's no steak down there," I say. "I've never eaten steak at the computer, and I've certainly never dropped any on the floor."
"…
drorzel | March 3, 2010I've been buried in work, so I haven't had time to do any real blogging, but I do want to post a quick reminder of this week's signing:
-- This FRIDAY, March 5 (that is, the day after tomorrow), I will be signing books at the Vestal, NY Barnes and Noble at 7pm. I'm not entirely sure what they expect, but at the very least, I will be signing books and answering questions. If they want me to read stuff, I can do that, too, and will bring along the unpublished dialogue that I read at Boskone.
If you're in the Binghamton area, and are looking for a way to kick your Friday night off with some…
drorzel | March 1, 2010I've tried a couple of times to read China Mieville's highly praised Perdido Street Station, but found it so unpleasant that I stopped maybe a third of the way in. Some of the things he said about his theories of literature as the guest of honor at Readercon a few years ago also made me think that there was little chance of me liking his work.
Still, he is regarded as a Major Figure in the SF field at the moment, so when he came out with The City and the City and the premise didn't sound completely horrible, I figured I should give it a shot. Especially since I'm nominating for the Hugos this…
drorzel | February 26, 2010A couple of upcomign events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
-- Next FRIDAY, March 5, I will be signing books at the Vestal, NY Barnes and Noble at 7pm. This is the big-box chain store closest to my hometown, and my parents report already getting calls about it, which is weird but cool. If you're in the Broome County area, stop on by.
-- I will be at the APS March Meeting in Portland March 14-18 (getting in a little early, leaving a little early). I'm giving an invited talk, but haven't been able to line up anything more public, alas.
-- I'm giving a Physics colloquium at Williams…
drorzel | February 25, 2010One of the weird-but-cool things about being C-list famous on the Internet is that some publishers now send me unsolicited review copies of forthcoming books about science. These aren't always the books I would really like to get free copies of, but, hey, free books.
Among the books I've received in the last year or so is Anil Ananthaswamy's The Edge of Physics, which I got as an ARC several months ago-- I read a bunch of it in Houston at the Sigma Xi meeting back in November-- but I just realized that it's due out next Tuesday, and I really ought to post a review of it.
As you can guess from…
drorzel | February 23, 2010What's the application? CD and DVD players use lasers to read (and in some cases write) digital information from convenient plastic disks.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How do we store a large amount of digital information in a convenient and stable fashion?" 2) "How do we make everybody buy the White Album a second time?"
How does it work? The optics at the core of a CD player are very simple, and illustrated in this graphic that I lifted from the excellent explanation at HyperPhysics:
Light from a diode laser is collimated and then focused down onto the surface of the CD. The…
drorzel | February 18, 2010While Adam Roberts was kind of an ass regarding last year's Hugo ballot, the summary of his latest, Yellow Blue Tibia, sounded pretty entertaining to me, and it was on the Locus Recommended Reading list, so I got it out of the library.
The book is presented as the memoir of Konstantin Skvorecky, a Soviet science fiction author who, along with several of his colleagues, was brought in by Stalin in the late 1940's to concoct a story of an alien invasion that could be used to provide a new enemy for the Soviet Union to rally together against. They concoct a story about aliens of pure radiation,…
drorzel | February 17, 2010A couple of reviews, an offer, and a mystery regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
The reviews:
A review at suite101 that went up a while ago, but I somehow missed in the vanity search. It's a nice, detailed review, and if I had to pick a pull quote it would probably be: "You can be prepared for a good scientific romp throughout Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Thinking like a dog is a big help."
Scott at a physics teaching blog has a more recent review: "I often pick up books and don't bother finishing them. This book kept pulling me back to discover what oddity was next. I…