Science
drorzel | February 1, 2010Two events in the next couple of weeks at which I will be appearing live and in person:
1) This Thursday, Feb. 4, I will be giving a talk at the University of Maryland, College Park at 3:30 pm in the Lecture Hall (room 1110) in the Kim Engineering Building. The title of the talk is "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help." Which reminds me, I need to tweak those slides...
Lest I get overly nostalgic about Our Nation's Capital, there's snow predicted for Friday and Saturday, just in time to potentially screw up my flight home.…
ddobbs | January 31, 2010
Me (right) hypnotizing Carl Zimmer just before the Rebooting Science Journalism session at ScienceOnline 2010. It worked. Carl had planned to use his 5 minutes to just say, "We are DOOOMED." Instead he talked about duck sex.
I've been meaning for two weeks now to post on ScienceOnline 2010 and the Rebooting Science Journalism session, in which I joined Ed Yong, John Timmer, and Carl Zimmer as "unpanelists." Lest another frenzied week delay me further, here's my addition to the #scio10 #reboot corpus.
Journalists-v-bloggers is (almost) dead
Many at the conference, and pretty much everyone…
grrlscientist | January 31, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
drorzel | January 31, 2010The Firedoglake Book Salon with Sean Carroll last night was a lot of fun. I was generally impressed with the level of the questions, and the tone of the discussion. We went through all of the questions I had typed out in advance (I type fairly slowly, and revise obsessively, so it's hard for me to do this stuff in real time), and got a decent range of questions from the audience.
The introductory post I wrote for the salon is more or less what I would put in a review post here:
ean Carroll's From Eternity to Here sets out to explain the nature of time, particularly what's known as the "arrow…
grrlscientist | January 30, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is almost here once more and it is still seeking submissions for tomorrow's edition of this blog carnival! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written blog essays to the host?
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The…
rallain | January 30, 2010After judging the science fair last week, I would like to revisit my tips for you the science fair participant.
Warning number 1
Some of the things I say here might go against what your teacher has told you. I am not sure what you should do in this case. Your teacher gives you a grade and I am just some dude on the internet. Proceed at your own risk.
Oh, and maybe you are a teacher. I think that is great that you are seeking more tips for your students. However, note that I have not read any science fair rules. I am merely thinking about science fair projects from a science viewpoint.…
drorzel | January 30, 2010A few bits and pieces of news regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
We got and accepted an offer for the audio book rights from one of the biggest audio book publishers. Actually, I think there were two offers for the audio rights, which is amazing. I have no idea when it would be produced or who would read it, but the contract does say they'll consult with me about the reader, so I'll know at some point before it comes out...
Speaking of other editions, I'm getting emails from my publisher about the paperback edition already, which just seems weird. The hardcover's only been out for a…
drorzel | January 29, 2010Hard to believe it's been a couple of days since I posted anything with this title... Anyway, there are a couple of small updates:
The vanity search turned up this mention on ScienceBase, in with a bunch of other recent science books that sound pretty good.
The Union student paper, the Concordiensis, has a story about the book. I exchanged emails with the author, so it has a couple of new quotes that haven't been in other papers.
Once again, if you're in New York's capital district tomorrow, I'm doing a signing at the Book House at 2pm. If you're not in the Albany area, I'll be the host for…
oracknows | January 28, 2010...is, sadly, this:
Boomtown Rats - Up All Nightby epb21
It's times like these that my surgical residency training comes in handy.
Yep. As I've alluded to, it's been grant time, and this was my night. But the R01 is finished. I'll have my lab people go over it one last time for errors and typos, and then it's off to the university grants office. I hope.
That reminds me. As all NIH rats know, the real deadline for R01 grant submissions is February 5. At least that's the date when the NIH wants them. However, our grants office requires us to get the electronic package to it a whole week…
stoat | January 28, 2010Three posts in one day. And all of such high quality. You lucky people.
Pascal has a go at explaining the std.nutters. Some of it is the usual correct stuff, but some of it is wrong: What you need, over and above all that, is constant social interaction with other practising scientists. Oral tradition and daily exposure to other scientists' everyday decisions are indispensable. That sounds fairly plausible, doesn't it? Until you think of Newton. Or indeed, of Einstein.
drorzel | January 28, 2010Last week's Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics post sparked a fair bit of discussion, though most of it was at the expert level, well above the level of the intended audience. such is life in the physics blogosphere.
I think it's worth a little time to unpack some of the disagreement, though, as it sheds a little light on the process of writing this sort of thing for a general audience, and the eternal conflict between broad explanation and "dumbing down." And, if nothing else, it lets me put off grading the exams from last night for a little while longer.
So, what's the issue? The…
awild | January 28, 2010I did not expect everyone to nearly instantaneously solve yesterday's termite ball mystery. I'm either going to have to post more difficult challenges (from now on, nothing will be in focus!) or attract a slower class of reader.
Cuckoo fungus grows in a termite nest.
As you surmised, those little orange balls are an egg-mimicking fungus. It is related to free-living soil fungi, but this one has adopted a novel growth form that is similar in diameter, texture, and surface chemistry to the eggs of Reticulitermes termites. These hardened sclerotia are carried about the termite nest as if…
drorzel | January 28, 2010I've toyed around in the past with ways to use the Amazon sales rank tracker to estimate the sales numbers for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It's geeky fun, but not especially quantitative.
Yesterday, though, I found a reason to re-visit the topic: calibration data!
OK, "calibration data" is probably too strong a description. "Calibration anecdote" is more accurate.
Yesterday when I went into work a little after 10, a comment somebody made sent me to the actual Amazon page for the book, where I saw a little note next to the price information saying "Only 5 left (more are coming)-- order…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Two upcoming events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
This Saturday, January 30, I will be doing a signing at 2pm at the book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, on Western Ave. in Albany. I may or may not read something-- I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do as part of this, never having done a book signing before.
Next Thursday, February 4th, I'll be giving a talk sponsored by the Maryland Chapter of SPIE at 3:30 pm in the Lecture Hall (room 1110) in the Kim Engineering Building. The title of the talk is "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Via SFSignal's daily links dump, Lilith Saintcrow has a terrific post about the relationship between authors and editors:
YOUR EDITOR IS NOT THE ENEMY.
I don't lose sight of the fact that I am the content creator. For the characters, I know what's best. It's my job to tell the damn story and produce enough raw material that we can trim it into reasonable shape. (Which means I am responsible for my deadlines, but we knew that.) I'm also way too close to the work to be able to see it objectively. So, 99% of the time, the editor is right.
Read it. It's good, and very true.
"Yeah, but that's…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Dennis Overbye is a terrific writer, but I have to say, I hate the way that he falls into the lazy shorthand of using "physics" to mean "theoretical particle physics" in this article about a recent conference built around debates about the state of particle physics. He's got lots of great quotes from Lisa Randall and Lawrence Krauss and others about how things are really bleak on the theory side, and these are barely tempered by enthusiasm from experimentalists.
So, yeah, theoretical particle physics may well appear to be in crisis. But, look, theoretical particle physics is always in crisis…
bioephemera | January 26, 2010When I dared my friend John to make "You've Been SCIENCED" into a pop culture tagline, using his science radio show as a platform, I didn't think he'd actually DO it. But he did:
I just wish Drew Carey had used the "Pigs In Space" intonation of "You've been SCIENCED."
drorzel | January 26, 2010A few days back, Matthew Beckler added the Kindle edition to his sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Given my well-known love for playing with graphs of data, it was inevitable that I would plot both of these in a variety of ways.
So, what do we learn from this? Well, we learn that people in the Albany. NY area don't own Kindles:
OK, maybe that's not obvious to everybody...
When you look at that graph, the blue line is the Amazon sales rank of the physical book edition, while the red line is the Amazon sales rank of the Kindle edition. The two track each other pretty…
drorzel | January 26, 2010Way back in the early days of ScienceBlogs, I ran a competition of sorts to determine the greatest physics experiment in history. I collected a bunch of nominations, wrote up a post about each of the top 11 entries, and then asked people to vote for their favorite.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, let's take a stab at something similar:
What is the coolest thing you know of that's done with lasers?
Lasers are all over the place these days, from UPC scanners to telecom networks to optical drives to hospitals. All sorts of fascinating things have been done with lasers over the…
bioephemera | January 26, 2010Suppose you have a question about a new medication your doctor has prescribed to you. How do you find out more about it? You probably Google it, right? But what do you do with the list of results that come up, which is likely to include a Wikipedia page, a blog entry or two, some posts on e-patient forums, the manufacturer's website, and a few online pharmacies with FREE SHIPPING? Perhaps you skim these pages, judge their usefulness and reliability, and end up at a Wikipedia page or a knowledgeable blog entry written by the likes of Scibling Abel Pharmboy. No problem.
But now suppose it's…