Pop Culture
drorzel | November 16, 2008When I'm in the right mood, I'm a sucker for really awful sci-fi movies. For example, Saturday night I stayed up far too late to watch the end of the tv-movie version of The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by the prolific and recently deceased Luddite Fiction writer Michael Crichton. It's been twenty-plus years since I read the book, but I recall it being a whole lot better than this piece of garbage.
Crichton's original novel about a crack research team dealing with a disease of alien origin is remarkable for being somewhat understated. The action focusses on the scientists attempting to…
drorzel | November 15, 2008As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I've done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I'm rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn't able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I'm definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain…
drorzel | November 11, 2008In the recent discussion of Many-Worlds and making universes, Jonathan Vos Post asked what science fiction treatments of the idea I like. The answer is pretty much "none," because most SF treatments are distractingly bad.
For example, last night I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a whopping huge brick of a book setting up an incredibly imaginative alternate Earth, with a detailed intellectual history paralleling our own. It's got all sorts of great stuff, but it lost me when it started talking about parallel worlds, because it munges together the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum…
drorzel | November 7, 2008If, like me, you have long thought that the world needs more thrillers based on quantum physics, the students and post-docs of the Ultrafast Group at Oxford have got a short film for you: The DiVincenzo Code, in six parts on YouTube.
It doesn't make any less sense than a Dan Brown novel, and the production is impressively good. Ian Walmsley's turn as the evil Dr. Eve is not to be missed, particularly part V where he does the Mad Scientist Dance.
(Via the Pontiff.)
drorzel | October 28, 2008Over at Dot Physics (which might be the best physics blog in the world at the moment), Rhett Allain has a pair of posts exploring the physics of Fantastic Contraption.
The posts don't really lend themselves to excerpting, so you need to go over there and read them, but I think they're brilliant, and deserve better than just a spot in a links dump. These may be the best example of the scientific mindset that you'll find on a blog.
What he does is to set out to determine whether the world of Fantastic Contraption obeys a consistent set of physical laws, by coming up with ingenious experiments…
drorzel | October 26, 2008I tagged Ethan Zuckerman's post abpout video "windows" to other places in a links dump recently. The idea is to put big video screens and cameras in fast-food restaurants around the world, and provide virtual "windows" into other restaurants in other countries. In talking about the idea, Ethan threw out a great aside:
(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I'd write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping…
drorzel | October 22, 2008Another question from a generous donor, in this case Natalie, who asks:
As for my question, how about "who is your favorite author, and why?" or, if you'd rather, "what's your favorite book, and why?"
This is a difficult question, because it's subject to a sort of quantum projection noise. That is, my "favorite book" and "favorite author" exist in a sort of quantum superposition of all the various possibilities. When someone asks, I can give an answer and either the wavefunction collapses to that value at that instant, or the universe splits into many parallel universes, each with its own…
drorzel | October 10, 2008It's been a frustrating and annoying week here at Chateau Steelypips, so I was probably in the perfect mood for Mike Hoye's subway busker story:
After a relatively crappy day, I got off the subway, and there's a couple of buskers playing a fiddle and a banjo at the station. And they're really going at it, playing the hell out of those things, and I can't figure out why 'til I get up close. The answer turns out to be that a couple of local b-boys have decided that it's time to throw down, to the tune of these guys playing some good old-time country fiddlin' and pickin'.
And man, did that cheer…
drorzel | October 5, 2008Jennifer Ouellette's pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I'm really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I'm going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I've been trying to correct that.
Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the Science21 meeting, but am just getting around to blogging. Longitude is Dava Sobel's bestselling book about English clockmaker John Harrison and his forty-year sturggle to win 20,000 pounds for making a clock capable of keeping time at sea well enough to allow navigation.
This…
chrisdrudge | September 30, 2008Belpoggi F, Soffritti M, Tibaldi E, Falcioni L, Bua L, Trabucco F. Results of long-term carcinogenicity bioassays on Coca-Cola administered to Sprague-Dawley rats. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2006 Sep;1076:736-52.
So apparently Coca-Cola causes breast and pancreatic cancers in rats. Better cut back on the Coke, kiddos.
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Chung YW, Han DS, Park YK, Son BK, Paik CH, Jeon YC, Sohn JH. Huge gastric diospyrobezoars successfully treated by oral intake and endoscopic injection of Coca-Cola. Dig Liver Dis. 2006 Jul;38(7):515-7.
Huge gastric diospyrobezoars are huge solidified clumps of nondigestible food…
drorzel | September 16, 2008Time for everybody's favorite morbid pop-culture game: as we all know, it's a standard joke that celebrity deaths come in threes. So, who completes this week's triad:
David Foster Wallace, Richard Wright, and ...?
drorzel | September 15, 2008Via Brian and John, John Cleese's take on genetic determinism:
All the best social commentary comes from comedians, these days.
drorzel | September 2, 2008Comedy Central is re-playing Friday's episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, which includes Stephen Colbert's interview with Lori Lippman Brown of the Secular Coalition for America. It's interesting to see that she doesn't really fare any better than any of the religious nutjobs he's had on in his various interview segments, in more or less the same way:
I doubt there's really any way to not look somewhat silly, given his whack-job act and good video editing, but it's always a little surprising just how unprepared a lot of his interview subjects are. You'd think they'd have some…
drorzel | August 22, 2008Over at Tor.com, David Levine describes a really cool event he went to just before Worldcon: a crash course in modern astronomy for SF writers:
The idea behind Launch Pad is Gernsbackian: getting good science into popular fiction as a form of public education and outreach for NASA. SF writer and University of Wyoming astronomy professor Mike Brotherton managed to get a NASA grant to fund this workshop for five years, of which this was the second. All the attendees' expenses were paid, including transportation to and from Laramie, housing in college dorms, and most meals--though we had to pay…
drorzel | August 6, 2008I've been on a big Jim Butcher kick recently, re-reading most of the Dresden Files books. This is largely because holding a regular book is still uncomfortable with my bad thumb, and I have electronic copies of the Dresden books that I can read on my Palm (well, Kate's old Palm, which I just use as an ebook reader).
While in the bookstore yesterday looking for Karl Schroeder's new Virga book (which, alas, was not to be found), I was struck by the huge number of Dresden Files knock-offs on the shelves. Well, OK, they may not really be Dresden Files copies, but it seems like there are dozens of…
drorzel | August 4, 2008Last weekend's post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there.
I may have some additional comments on the issue later, but it's a little hard to focus while going crazy waiting for FutureBaby.
(There's also a tiny chance that this will be noticed by some of my colleagues, which could be interesting. I know that some of them read the Chronicle of Higher Education religiously, but I'm less…
drorzel | August 3, 2008Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion.
I'm not sure if this is an editorial mandate, but if it is, this week's feature article takes it to the logical conclusion of just profiling people who are irredeemably awful, and unapologetic about it. This week, they take a look at the culture of Internet trolls:
Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing…
drorzel | July 30, 2008A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question:
As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course "Can Computers Think?" (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course. If you have a minute, please let me know if you have any suggestions on the following topics:
Technology and Privacy
Sustainability
Ownership and intellectual property rights
Threats and possibilities of A.I.
Some of these are pretty obvious-- "Technology and Privacy"…
drorzel | July 29, 2008Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend's two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now:
My rant was actually anticipated by this post at "It's The Thought That Counts,", which was pointed out to me in comments.
Janet had the first direct response, with a later follow-up speculating about the reasons for the divide. As I said in one of my own comment threads, I think a lot of it has to do with…
drorzel | July 28, 2008The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?." This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines:
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers' scores on…