personal
drorzel | October 18, 2014It's been a brutally busy couple of weeks here, what with reading folders for the job searches we have going on, trying to keep on top of my class, and multiple day-care closings for the Jewish holidays. But the kids are still very cute, as you can see from the above caricatures of The Pip as Pooh and SteelyKid as a Lego construction worker. These were done by Rich Conley who does caricatures at LT's Grill in Niskayuna on Tuesday nights, which probably explains what we're doing for dinner for Tuesdays in perpetuity...
We're off to Scenic Whitney Point for a bit (after kid soccer, that is),…
drorzel | October 13, 2014I recently shot a bunch of video of myself in front of a green screen, for something that will be revealed in due time. Of course, if you have green-screen footage of yourself, you're pretty much obliged to do something silly with it, so here's a quick GIMP-ing of a still from the video (also visible as the "featured image" above...).
One does not simply science into Mordor
(I was going to try to put myself inside Mount Doom holding a Ring, but I couldn't find a suitable background image, and I've already spent too much time on this silliness. It's not the classic Boromir pose, but it'll…
drorzel | October 5, 2014Saturday afternoon, I drove down to the city to see the reunited Afghan Whigs play the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. I saw them years and years ago in DC, around 1996 or so on the tour for Black Love, and that was a great show. They've always been one of my favorite bands, so it was great to get another chance to see them live again.
Of course, the passage of 18 years has wrought some changes, most significantly a different lineup for the band. They never had much luck keeping drummers around, but this time they've also lost original guitarist Rick McCollum. This has both good and…
drorzel | October 4, 2014The exciting news of the week: Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has gotten a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Woo-hoo!
They've said nice things about my previous two books, but getting the star is a big deal. And it's a really good capsule description of the book, with a great pull quote in the last sentence:
This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe.
Really, I can't ask for better than that.
I found out this was coming at the end of last week, where it was an absolute life-saver after some sanity-threatening stuff…
drorzel | September 26, 2014The JCC is closed today for Rosh Hashanah-- and best wishes for a happy new year to those who celebrate it-- so I'm spending the morning with The Pip before Kate comes home to take the afternoon shift while I teach my class. SteelyKid is in school today as usual, so don't tell her, but the Little Dude and I went down to the river to enjoy a beautiful fall day, with trees just starting to turn colors, as you can see in the featured image above.
The highlights for The Pip, though, were the chance to throw rocks in the water, and drum on the pilings along the sides of Lock 7:
The Pip is an…
jdupuis | September 19, 2014Is jazz satire possible? Can it possibly be funny or even relevant?
This question is more immediate and pressing that you would normally imagine in the wake of serial controversies in the jazz world.
It all began at the end of July when The New Yorker posted a article in their humour column by Django Gold purporting to be the thoughts of jazz legend Sonny Rollins where he basically says jazz is a waste of time and they his whole life has been in vein. The jazz world exploded as it was not immediately obvious that it was satire. If it had been in The Onion people might have realized it…
drorzel | September 18, 2014The London School of Economics has a report on a study of academic refereeing (PDF) that looked at the effect of incentives on referee behavior. They found that both a "social incentive" (posting the time a given referee took to turn around the papers they reviewed on a web site) and a cash incentive ($100 Amazon gift card for meeting a 4-week deadline) worked to increase the chance of a referee accepting a review request, and improved the chances that they would meet the deadline. The effect of cash was a little smaller for tenured faculty, but they were slightly more susceptible to the…
drorzel | September 12, 2014Via a whole bunch of people on social media, there's a new study of gender roles in academia, which the Washington Post headlines "Study: Male scientists want to be involved dads, but few are". This is not inaccurate. Some quotes that jumped out at me:
“Academic science doesn’t just have a gender problem, but a family problem,” said Sarah Damaske, a sociology professor at Penn State and one of the report’s authors. “We came to see that men or women, if they want to have families, are likely to face significant challenges.”
The study, Damaske said, showed there was potential for change, in…
drorzel | September 9, 2014One of the weirder experiences I had at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers a couple of weeks ago was having people ask me "How are you so productive?" (or the equivalent). That caught me off guard, because I don't feel like I'm especially productive-- in fact, I tend to feel like I'm falling behind on things I would like to get done.
And yet, this image is kind of at odds with objective reality, a sort of tenured-white-guy version of Impostor Syndrome. I mean, I'm not Neil de Grasse Tyson, but I've actually got a pretty nice career going as a C-list public intellectual. And, of course…
drorzel | September 1, 2014I'm up way too early with jet lag, looking over Twitter, and ran into Nick Falkner's report on the TED panel I moderated at Worldcon, which reminded me that I never did write anything about the con. Late is probably still better than never, so here are some quick long-after-the-fact comments about my program items:
-- Only one person showed up for my Kaffeeklatsch, probably because it was at dinnertime on the first day of the con, and also the Kaffeeklatsch rooms were in a place that didn't look like somewhere you were allowed to go. My one guest was a guy I've exchanged emails with for many…
drorzel | August 24, 2014While I kill time waiting for it to be a reasonable time to call Kate and the kids back in the US, a list of most of the pubs I've visited during this trip to London. Because why not?
In more or less chronological order:
The Victoria in Lancaster Gate. Or maybe Paddington, going from the URL. The naming of London neighborhoods is an enduring mystery to me. Anyway: given the name and location (two blocks from Hyde Park), I expected to be hip-deep in American tourists, but it was mostly a local crowd. Lots of Queen Victoria pictures, which mostly made me think of Eddie Izzard calling her "One…
drorzel | August 21, 2014OK, the photo above is a recent picture of me-- yesterday, in fact. But the spiral-carved rock I'm standing next to was carved that way a bit more than five thousand years ago, so that ought to count as a throwback...
We've been in Dublin the last few days, and on Thursday we took a bus tour out to Newgrange. this is one of the things I wanted to make sure to see while we were here, as I make reference to it in the forthcoming book, and at least two classes that I teach. And it is, indeed, spectacular; the reconstructed white wall might be historically dubious, but the interior passage and…
drorzel | August 15, 2014Small observations of things that have struck me as weird during our UK stay to this point:
-- There is no alarm clock in our hotel room.
-- There are no drinking fountains in public spaces.
-- The travel-on-the-left thing would be easier if it were consistently applied. About one stairway in three asks people to go up the right side instead, and for some reason the escalator etiquette is to stand on the right, walk on the left. (That last is sort of a moot point at Worldcon, given the tendency of many fans to just plop themselves squarely in the middle of the steps and block everything up…
drorzel | August 13, 2014Kate and I had a very nice time doing touristy things in Bath yesterday during the day-- old church, very old hot spring, Georgian architecture-- then went on to Bristol where I gave a talk on the forthcoming book, as you can see in the picture above. I would ordinarily include a SlideShare link to the slides I used for the talk, but the talk is so image-heavy and the hotel wi-fi so grindingly slow that I'm not even going to attempt uploading it.
The first bit, as you might guess from the photo above, was basically the same as my TED@NYC talk last fall, making an analogy between the…
drorzel | August 12, 2014I figured I probably ought to post something to let the wider world know we made it safely to London, and have been engaging in tourism. So, please take the above photo of St. Paul's with a backdrop of the ominous dark clouds that have been chasing us around the city as proof of our location.
We also dropped by the offices of Oneworld Publications, the nice folks who published the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. While there, I took these:
Covers for the UK editions of my first book and Sean Carroll's second, displayed in the publisher's offices.
Good company to be in...…
drorzel | August 9, 2014...of the Atlantic. After a few stress-inducing bits the less said about which the better, preparations are basically complete, and we're heading out for London tonight. In the highly unlikely event that I haven't done enough plugging of my appearances, here's a compact list of where you'll be able to find me if you happen to be in Europe the next couple of weeks:
-- I'm giving a talk about the material in the new book on Wednesday the 13th at 6:30pm in Bristol, at the Institute of Physics. I'm doing this one TED-style, with no words on the slides, so it's both exciting and terrifying.…
drorzel | August 2, 2014...if you're a first-grader in Niskayuna, anyway.
We've got 10-15 elementary school kids who are supposed to descend upon our house a bit before lunchtime. Morituri te salutamus...
SteelyKid's birthday party invitation.
Kidding aside, it's worth it, because SteelyKid is awesome, and she's super excited to have a whole mob of her friends over. I just hope the rain holds off, because I don't know where we'll put everybody if it doesn't...
(The photo is SteelyKid after taekwondo practice a month or so ago. She was demonstrating one of the forms, I think Taegeuk Il Jang, and I shot some…
drorzel | August 1, 2014I took a short nap yesterday, and of course as soon as I lay down on the bed, Emmy erupted in the furious barking that signals the arrival of a package. When I went out to get it, I found shiny new bound galley proofs of Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist:
The just-arrived galley proof for my forthcoming book. Laptop included for scale.
I knew these were coming, but didn't expect them so quickly. I asked for several to take to the UK, on the off chance that we're seated next to somebody really famous on the flight to London, who says "Gosh, I've always wanted to blurb a book about…
drorzel | July 27, 2014Lance Mannion has a really nice contrast between childhood now and back in the 1970's that doesn't go in the usual decline-of-society direction. He grew up not too far from where I now live, and after describing his free-ranging youth, points out some of the key factors distinguishing it from today, that need to be accounted for before lamenting the lack of kids running around outside:
-- A lot of the houses in "the old neighborhood" are still owned by the people who owned them back in the day, so the only kids around are visiting grandkids,
-- Those homes that are occupied by families with…
drorzel | July 19, 2014Since lots of other people are posting their Worldcon progrm(me) schedules, I might as well share mine, too. Frankly, I find it a little baffling:
Kaffeeklatsch
Thursday 18:00 - 19:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL)
Kay Kenyon, Chad Orzel
Banksian
Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, Capital Suite 9 (ExCeL)
'Banksian' has become a commonplace descriptor in SF reviews, but what do we mean by it? What are the characteristics we associate with Iain M Banks' work? How far has his influence travelled? Who is writing Banksian SF today?/>
Chad Orzel (M), Michael Cobley, Jaine Fenn, Paul Kincaid, Ruth O'Reilly
We…