Pop Culture
drorzel | March 13, 2009I have an official release date for the book-in-production: December 22nd. There's no lay-down date, though, so they may turn up in stores before then. Mark it down on your Christmas list now...
There's also an official title and cover:
Emmy's slightly miffed that she's not the dog on the cover, but that's what she gets for refusing to do the quizzical head-tilt when I have the camera.
I am, as you might guess, pretty excited. I've also got a complete schedule for the process from here on out-- the next step is getting the copyedited pages, which should get here in the second week of April.…
drorzel | March 10, 2009The book is now starting through the production process, and people at Scribner are thinking about publicity. I got email asking whether I could set up a Facebook page for Emmy as a promotion.
I'm not sure whether that meant a fan page for the dog, or a Facebook profile for her, as if she were a user of the site. I'm also not sure whether setting up a Facebook account for my dog is acceptable within the normal Facebook operating parameters. Still, it's amusing to consider what she would have on her Facebook profile.
I mean, obviously, she's looking for random play, and her interests include…
drorzel | March 7, 2009It's March now, which means that we're at the absolute peak of the college basketball season. Small conferences have already started their tournaments, playing for the one shot those teams have of getting into the NCAA's. Big conference tournaments start next week, with the Big Dance the week after.
So, of course, ESPN and all its variants are devoting all of their energy to... speculating about Terrell Owens and Alex Rodriguez. Because, apparently, those two have signed-in-blood contracts with Satan ensuring that not one week passes without one or the other being the lead story on…
drorzel | March 5, 2009Two announcements of science-related festivals have turned up in my email in the last week or so:
The second annual World Science Festival will be held in New York June 10-14 this year. They feature an impressive array of speakers again, including Nobel laureates (Physicists David Gross, Frank Wilczek, and William Phillips), well-known authors, distinguished scientists, and actors. Last year's festival was a huge success, by all reports, and let's hope this year's is as good. And, hey, it's not during DAMOP this year, so I might even be able to make the trip down if anything looks…
drorzel | February 24, 2009The winners of the American Physical Society's Science Writing Awards for 2008 were announced today:
Ann Finkbeiner won in the Journalist category for The Jasons, her book about a secretive groups of scientists who work on classified problems for the US government.
Gino Segre won in the Scientist category, for Faust in Copenhagen, about the early days of quantum mechanics.
Julia Cort won in the Broadcast category for the NOVA ScienceNow episode Asteroid, about whether a giant asteroid will kill us all in 2036.
Alexandra Siy and Dennis Kunkel have won in the Children's category, for their…
drorzel | February 22, 2009This week's Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs. Plait is really energetic (he spends a couple of minutes talking over Zimmer without even noticing), making it a livelier-than-usual conversation.
I'm not sure I agree with him about newspapers, though. What he rattles off is more or less the standard triumphalist-blogger line-- newspapers are too slow…
jstemwedel | February 21, 2009On our drive to the Monterey Peninsula last night, la familia Free-Ride listened to (most of) the new Jonathan Coulton album JoCo Looks Back. (We skipped a few songs whose subject matter and lyrics were deemed "too mature" for the audience in the back seat.) The Free-Ride offspring had some prior exposure to Jonathan Coulton by way of concert videos on YouTube, but this was their longest duration Coulton jam.
"Do you know him," the younger offspring asked me.
"No, sweetie," I replied. "I don't personally know everyone on the internet."
"Well, then could you write on your blog that I…
drorzel | February 21, 2009We are now one week out from the deadline for Hugo Nominations. I'm eligible to nominate this year, and while a couple of past requests for recommendations have failed to generate anything, I thought I'd throw up a preliminary look at my ballot in hopes of bringing in a few recommendations:
Best Novel
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I don't like his take on Many-Worlds, but it's a terrific book all the same.
Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. A fantastic setting, a great fast-moving plot, and some nice revelations about the universe.
Pirate Sun by Karl Schroeder. Cut-and-paste the comments from the…
sa smith | February 20, 2009Its gonna be okay, guys. Its gonna be okay.
Wil Wheaton got to preview 'Watchmen', and he loved it.
I've read interviews with him, and I've heard from some second-hand sources that he cared deeply about the material, but until I saw him speak last night, I didn't fully appreciate just how passionate he was. While I listened to him speak, it hit me: Zack Snyder cares about Watchmen as much as we do, and it shows.
Before I realized it, I was on my feet, getting in line, not to ask a question, but to make a comment.
When I approached the mic, I felt my hands get cold and I couldn't feel my feet…
drorzel | February 16, 2009On Saturday at Boskone, I gave a talk on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM. This was held up a bit by waiting for the projector to arrive (I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn't notice that I hadn't received confirmation of my request for a projector until late Thursday night, so this was entirely my fault). They were able to come up with a projector, sparing people the need to squint at my tiny tablet PC screen, but it took some time off the beginning of the talk.
The talk consisted of me reading the dog dialogue from Chapter 4 (not to different from the original post), then…
drorzel | February 12, 2009I usually post something here about what panels look interesting when the Boskone program goes up on the web. This year's program went up over the weekend, and I'm just now getting around to making a list of worthwhile items. This tells you what kind of week I'm having.
Anyway, I looked the program over this morning, and here's what I came up with:
Friday 7:30pm Independence:
Reading
Rosemary Kirstein
We won't be able to leave Schenectady until 4pm or so, so the odds of making it to this are pretty slim. I'm really curious to know what the status of the Steerswoman books is, though.
Friday…
drorzel | February 11, 2009I didn't expect the post griping about the Best American Science Writing anthology to generate as much discussion as it did. Shows what I know.
In comments, "bsci" made a good suggestion:
Instead of complaining about this volume, I'd love it if you and your readers made a list of the best physics writing in the past year. I assure you that I would be one of many readers of the pieces on the list.
That's a good suggestion, so let's put it out there: What were the best articles about physical sciences published last year? These could be in general magazines (The New Yorker, etc.), in science…
drorzel | February 10, 2009I'm running a little behind this week, but I wouldn't want this week's Science Saturday bloggingheads to slip by without a mention. It's a conversation between George Johnson and Louisa Gilder about The Age of Entanglement, which I liked quite a bit:
The conversation is primarily about her book, the story it tells, and how she came to write it. There's also some discussion of publishing in general, and a bit about the recent teleportation results from Maryland, toward the end.
drorzel | February 3, 2009Locus magazine has come out with its "Recommended Reading" list of science fiction and fantasy published in 2008. There are, as always, some annoying quirks-- several of the books making the list have been published only in the UK or by small presses, so I've never even seen them-- but it's a reasonably good consensus list of what people on the literary end of SF think was good.
As usual, I've only read a smallish fraction of these. Somewhat unusually, I've read more of the science fiction list than the fantasy list-- 4/20 science fiction novels (Matter, Pirate Sun, Anathem, and Implied…
drorzel | February 2, 2009There's a mini media blitz underway promoting Denis Dutton's new book The Art Instinct. He was on the Colbert Report last week, he's reviewed in the Times, and he's featured in this week's Bloggingheads Science Saturday:
While it's kind of entertaining to listen to John Horgan struggling to get a word in edgewise, I'm kind of skeptical about the book. Dutton's argument is that human aesthetics are, contrary to the claims of the academic art establishment, more universal than socially constructed, and can best be understood through evolution. Or, to be more precise, through evolutionary…
drorzel | February 2, 2009In Friday's installment of his ongoing examination of Left Behind: The Movie, Fred Clark points out some gaps in the movie-Antichrist's plan, where it departs from the loopy prophetic cosmology of the Left Behind books. He then notes how they could've done better:
If Team Nicolae had really done their homework, they'd have consulted with groups like the Canaan Land Restoration of Israel, Inc., to make sure they had all their ducks in a row before trying to launch their apocalypse. The frustrating thing for Nicolae at this point has to be that it's already too late for him to get in touch with…
drorzel | January 29, 2009I was thinking of trying to post something really erudite about science today, but a series of minor catastrophes has completely derailed that plan. Now, I'm just hoping to get through my afternoon lab without punching anybody.
So, in place of the science stuff, here's a pop music topic. While on the way to pick up SteelyKid from day care the other day, I heard "Live and Let Die" on the radio, which famously includes the phrase:
"this ever-changing world in which we live in"
A few hours later, the cable tv music channel brought up "Small Town" by John Mellencamp (I don't recall whether there…
drorzel | January 29, 2009Boskone, the Boston-area SF convention that Kate and I go to every year, is the weekend after next. Once again, I'll be doing a few panels and one talk. For those who might be attending, or who care about this for some reason, here's my preliminary schedule:
Saturday10am Physics: What We Don't Understand
Geoffrey A. Landis
Mark L. Olson
Chad Orzel
Karl Schroeder
Ian Tregillis
In 1999 John Cramer wrote a column in Analog describing seven big
unsolved problems in physics (including the nature of dark matter,
the origin of ultra-high…
drorzel | January 27, 2009I realize it's been several years now since the World Wildlife Federation won their lawsuit against the World Wrestling Federation, forcing Vince McMahon to re-brand his whole preposterous enterprise. Still, when I see a press release with the headline:
WWF seeks innovative solutions to bycatch through worldwide competition
I expect the "competition" to be settled by somebody getting smacked in the back with a folding chair while the referee's back is turned.
And, you know, as long as it's a dolphin swinging the chair, I'm good with that.
drorzel | January 26, 2009In what will surely come as a surprise to the people who say mean things about the award, the John Newbery Medal for children's literature was awarded to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.
Mr. Gaiman, 48, won for "The Graveyard Book," a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel. In announcing the winner of what is widely considered the most prestigious honor in children's literature, the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, cited Mr. Gaiman's work for its "…