Pop Culture
drorzel | February 22, 2008The Hugo Award nomination deadline is fast approaching, so I've been doing a bunch of reading to make sure I've covered a reasonable range of potential nominees. I've been really bad about book-logging recently, but I thought I'd at least post some brief comments on my crash reading here, for those who are just dying to know my thoughts on the awards this year.
Recently read books:
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear: A professional assassin on a corporate-controlled frontier planet gets involved with a group of people who want to help the exploited indigenous aliens. I probably would've liked this…
sciencetolife | February 15, 2008What some are calling "Wiihab" is fast becoming a craze in rehabilitation centers across the country.
Wiihab is the use of Nintendo's Wii video game system as a physical therapy tool for patients recovering from strokes, broken bones, surgery and even combat injuries. The gaming system is said to provide patients with improved endurance, strength, coordination and entertainment all at the same time.
Wii games (especially sports games like baseball, bowling, boxing, golf and tennis) appear to be useful in physical therapy because they require body movements similar to traditional therapy…
drorzel | February 5, 2008It's Hugo nomination season again, which means that I need to come up with a list of works to suggest for SF's premier fan-voted award. It also means that there are lots of publications out there putting out lists of recommended works to help potential Hugo voters narrow their ballots.
Last year, there was a bit of a fuss kicked up because the list of nominees was almost all white males. Looking at my potential list of nominees (more detail below the fold), I would say at least my ballot is headed in that direction again. If you are a person who would like to see more books and stories by…
drorzel | January 24, 2008As promised (threatened?) in the previous post, here's a space for more general commentary in response to the question asked by our Corporate Masters, and modified slightly for blog use:
What non-scientific developments do you hope to be blogging or reading about in 2008?
Consider this open to all areas of politics and pop culture. What do you hope to see on blogs next year? The election of President Obama? The dissolution of the Discovery Institute? Britney Spears settling down and finding love at last?
Leave your answer in the comments, and do try to keep a civil tone. I have the keys to…
drorzel | January 15, 2008Steroid scandals in sports, most particularly baseball, have been dominating sports media for a couple of years now. I thought that there really wasn't anything I could possibly care less about, but the New York Times proved me wrong with an article on steroid use among hip-hop artists.
Actually, the Times story is a report on an investigation by my local paper (I'm so proud), but I read the Times first in the mornings. The Albany Times Union does come through with a handy guide to hip-hop artists accused of using steroids. Look quickly before it goes behind the paywall.
What these stories…
drorzel | January 14, 2008Well, OK, not really. You can, however, hear what I sound like by listening to a couple of official Tor podcasts made from the panel I did at Worldcon with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Adam Rakunas, Paul Cornell and Yoshio Kobayashi.
The panel was back in September, but I haven't seen the files on Tor's web page until just now. You can access them directly, if they move off the index page, using these links:
Part 1/2
Part 2/2
It's a pretty wide-ranging discussion, and a couple of funny things get said. The sound quality is pretty good, especially given that it was recorded by a single Tor…
drorzel | January 10, 2008Kate and I got our Hugo nomination ballots in the mail yesterday (as members of the 2007 Worldcon, we get the right to nominate works for the 2008 Hugo Awards). The nomination deadline isn't until March 1st, but this still seems like a good time to ask:
What should I be nominating for the 2008 Hugo Awards?
I usually use the Locus Recommended Reading issue as a template to remind myself what's eligible, but that won't be out for a while, and I've got this blog just sitting here, begging to be used. So, leave your suggestions in the comments.
Given last year's kerfuffle over the lack of female…
drorzel | January 10, 2008As I mentioned a few days ago, a colleague asked me if I'd be interested in doing a guest lecture for a class on science fiction. She suggested that a good way to go might be to pick one story to have the class read, and talk about that.
Kicking ideas around with Kate, I latched onto the Ted Chiang story "Story of Your Life," from the Starlight 2 anthology (and also his collection Stories of Your Life and Others), because it's got a lot of great stuff in it-- linguistics, physics, math, really alien aliens, and fantastic human characters and interactions. If you haven't read it, it's a great…
drorzel | January 9, 2008The first half of NOVA's Absolute Zero program aired last night, and I was able to watch the whole thing. Well, more or less-- it was a long day, so I was drifting off a little bit about fifteen minutes in, and didn't get all of the Michael Faraday story, but a phone call woke me up, and I watched the rest of it.
This half was mostly devoted to the history of ideas about cold, and the technology of making things cold. It didn't include any of the atomic physics topics of most immediate interest to me-- those will be in next week's installment-- but it did present a lot of fascinating…
drorzel | January 9, 2008Via a back channel, the Gardner Project of EniTech Research. They have an argon laser, so you know it's science!
(This is way too slick to be the work of real crazy people, and, of course, there's this ad... This is almost certainly either performance art or viral marketing for an upcoming tv show, but it's pretty amusing. Make sure to at least skim through the comments.)
drorzel | December 26, 2007It was sort of amusing when people started doing kitsch holiday commercials in a CGI version of those old quasi-claymation holiday specials (Rodolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the like). I'm ok with hipster irony, at least to a point.
It was a whole lot less amusing when somebody (I've forgotten who) did a commercial this year using the actual characters from the Rudolph special. If you want to ape the feel of the show, that's one thing, but keep your grubby hands off Yukon Cornelius.
But now, they've really crossed the line-- ESPN's SportsCenter has been hyping the Patriots to the skies,…
drorzel | December 10, 2007"Do you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -- Steven Brust, Dzur
Way, way back in October, when I was annoying you all with DonorsChoose fundraining posts, I offered to sell post topics for $30. I've paid off most of these, but I have three left, one of which was for something more regarding Robert Jordan.
As I noted at the time, the Wheel of Time books were ridiculously important in my life-- because of them, I got involved with the Robert Jordan group on Usenet (I take obscure pride in being there from before the founding of rec.art.sf.written.robert-jordan), and through…
drorzel | December 9, 2007Kate and I went to see The Golden Compass last night because, dude, armored bears! Also, we both really enjoyed the book, back when it first came out (though I haven't re-read it since The Amber Spyglass, to see if it was retroactively ruined by the third volume).
From the opening titles in the left-over Lord ot ht Rings font, it's clear that this is New Line's bid to reassert their dominance over the "movie adaptations of popular fantasy books" genre, and as a spectacle, it's very good. There's a nifty steampunk aesthetic to Lyra's world and, dude, armored bears!
I didn't walk out of the…
jstemwedel | December 8, 2007My better half and I have been catching up on movies (thanks to Netflix and our DVD player). Last week we watched 28 Days Later .... Last night we watched 28 Weeks Later. It is my better half's view that the rage virus has burned itself out, so to speak, and that there won't be another movie in the franchise.
But the drive to make sequels of sequels in inexorable, and I believe a recent news item from the UK holds the key to the next movie in the franchise.
First, the news, as reported in The Mail:
Abandoned baby hedgehogs are too weak to hibernate
by DAVID DERBYSHIRE
... The RSPCA says…
drorzel | December 7, 2007Over in LiveJournal land, Sherwood Smith links approvingly to an essay by Tom Simon in response to what are apparently some "logical positivist" evles in Christopher Paolini's books. I haven't read the books in question, but it really doesn't matter, as Simon very quickly spins this off into a larger essay about the nature of the world, in the mode of C.S. Lewis:
In my life, I have never witnessed an instance where the laws that govern the world sufficed to explain an event. That is, I have never seen anything that was not, strictly speaking, the after-effect of a miracle. Many events have…
drorzel | December 6, 2007John Scalzi is talking a big game:
I was just taking one of those Internet tests to see how much of a geek I am, when I suddenly thought, what the fuck am I doing? I'm a published science fiction writer. Do not pass "go," do not collect $200, you know? Just go straight to the geek win.
That's right, I win at geek. Tell me I'm wrong.
All I have to say is, "Enjoy it while you can, Heinlein boy."
I'm writing a book based on talking to my dog about quantum physics. Scalzi holds the title for the moment by virtue of actually being published, while my book is still pending.
But he's just keeping…
drorzel | December 4, 2007Physics World has an interview with Alastair Reynolds, who was trained as an astrophysicist but is now a full-time SF author:
How does your physics training help with your writing?
Less than people imagine. I think the most important attribute for a science-fiction writer is to be fascinated by science -- in all its manifestations. It's not necessary to be able to understand all the details, but just to be inspired and stimulated. Most of the ideas that have fed into my writing have come from reading popular articles on subjects far away from my own very limited specialization, such as…
drorzel | December 2, 2007I don't really want to turn this blog completely over to bitching about the poor representation of science in "Year's Best" lists of books, but it's that time of year when every media outlet puts out their lists of favorite books, so it's hard not to talk about it. Today's list is from the Washington Post's Holiday Guide, where they helpfully break their non-fiction list down into categories. By my count, there were 94 non-fiction books listed, divided among 11 categories:
Arts: 7
Biographies: 17
Culture and Society: 9
Current Events: 8
Foreign Affairs: 9
History: 23
Literature: 2
Memoirs: 9…
drorzel | November 29, 2007In comments to my earlier cranky post about the New York Times, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn't released their "Ten Best Books" list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They posted the list today, and there's nothing on it that wasn't also on the Notable Books list, so no dice.
Another common response to my complaint was along the lines of "Do they ever list science books?" I was looking for a way to kill a little time at one point yesterday, so I went back through the last few lists and counted science books. The tallies for 2003-2006 (using a fairly…
evolgen | November 26, 2007
So, I missed the three year anniversary of evolgen (it was last Wednesday for those of you keeping score). What does that have to do with police dogs and civil rights protesters in Alabama in the 1960s? Absolutely nothing. But I'm combining two unrelated topics into a single post -- neither of which have anything to do with the American civil rights movement. Or do they?
Police dogs attacking black people are as big a part of Alabama culture as nooses hanging from trees in Louisiana. Too soon? Whether it's at a protest march or on a football field, there's not denying it. Anyway, here's a…