Books
drorzel | May 11, 2010I should note up front that I'm kind of jealous of Marcus Chown regarding this book. Subtitled "What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe," The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck is a book that uses trivial everyday observations-- the fact that you don't fall through the floor, the fact that the sky is dark at night-- as a jumping-off point for discussions about deep and fundamental scientific ideas like Pauli exclusion and inflationary cosmology. It's a fantastic idea for a pop-science book, and I wish I'd thought of it first.
The range of topics here is pretty big, covering most of…
drorzel | May 6, 2010My publisher would like to include a Teacher's Guide with the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. which means that, well, I need to put together a Teacher's Guide for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The problem is, I'm not exactly sure what should go in that sort of thing.
So, if you have any opinions on the subject of Teacher's Guides for pop-science books in general, or can point to examples of Teacher's Guides that you particularly like, or have suggestions for what ought to be in a Teacher's Guide for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If you were a teacher planning to…
drorzel | May 5, 2010It's been a couple of weeks since I did an update on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but that's been as much laziness as a lack of news. Some developments, mostly relating to foreign lands:
The US paperback edition is slated for December release. I'm working on a Teacher's Guide to go with it-- suggestions on what ought to be in there are welcome, as I have no idea
If you do the right search, you'll also find a forthcoming UK edition which will be out this fall with a slightly different title. There's a production schedule for this, and everything-- more information as things become…
drorzel | May 2, 2010Over at the Book Publicity blog, Yen takes up the question of Internet publicity (via SF Signal):
Yesterday I spoke at an AAR / Association of Authors' Representatives panel together with Connor Raus (who runs digital advertising agency CRKWD) about understanding social media and how to use it effectively -- as you know, a favorite topic of mine here on The Book Publicity Blog. I don't have time to summarize the entire panel here (and you don't have time to read a summary of the entire panel), but I did want to tackle the issue of timing, a common question among book publicists, authors,…
drorzel | May 1, 2010The APS now gives out an Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, which gives you some idea of how influential his work was, in particular "Subtle Is the Lord..." The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, which won prizes and sits in a prominent position on the bookshelves of many physicists. Like a lot of influential works, though, it's kind of odd to read it much later than some of the works it has influenced.
The ordering of the subtitle is very deliberate, and accurate. This is first and foremost a book about Einstein's science, with a biographical structure and occasional biographical…
drorzel | May 1, 2010A college classmate sent me this picture of a library display in the Boston area:
That's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog prominently displayed on the top shelf. Just below it, you can see Physics for Future Presidents, and to the right, you can just make out Richard Dawkins's book on evolution. Pretty good company to be in, and even better to be on top of...
(Yes, I know, relative position in a library book display doesn't have anything to do with anything. It's fun to pretend, though...)
(Thanks for the picture, Andrew.)
drorzel | April 29, 2010Over in Twitter-land, S. C. Kavassalis notes a Googler who's not afraid to ask the big questions:
Weird Google search of the week: 'the "one" scientific idea that we need to believe'. Uh um, I'm sure my blog couldn't possibly answer that.
It's a good question, though, ad there are a couple of different ways to take it. You could read it as "What one scientific idea is supported by the most experimental proof?" or you could read it as "What one idea is most central to science generally?"
"The Standard Model" was quickly suggested on Twitter, which could fit either. I think it might be…
drorzel | April 28, 2010I'm a little surprised at the vehemence of some of the negative reactions to Stephen Hawking's comments about aliens. Not so much in blogdom-- Ethan's response is pretty reasonable, for example-- but there was a flurry of Twitter traffic yesterday of the form "Where does Stephen Hawking get off pontificating about aliens?" which strikes me as kind of silly.
As all the news stories point out, Hawking's comments were made in the context of a Discovery channel series based on filming Stephen Hawking pontificating about stuff. And, really, if the Discovery Channel called me up and offered to film…
drorzel | April 25, 2010Jim Butcher's Changes, the 12th Dresden Files novel, came out not too long ago, and there's been a bunch of discussion of it in various places on the Internet. I seem to have a slightly less positive take on the book than a lot of other people, so I figured I'd put up a slightly grumpy post about it, to get it out of my system.
There are good things about the book, to be sure-- the ending is very eventful, to say the least, and fires a lot of the guns that have begun cluttering up the mantel. Butcher very emphatically justifies the title, ensuring that nothing will be the same after this…
drorzel | April 15, 2010The pace has slowed, but there are still occasional sightings of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in my Google vanity searches:
It turns up on library blogs with some regularity. This particular one, from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater is nice because it's not just a rewrite of the publicity copy
I was really excited to see Daily Kos show up as one of the sites found by the blog search, because they have bazillions of readers. It was only a plug in a comment, but still...
The strangest-- in a good way-- mention recently was this passing reference in a newspaper column from Michigan,…
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 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 their…
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."
"…