Books
drorzel | March 5, 2009Two announcements of science-related festivals have turned up in my email in the last week or so:
The second annual World Science Festival will be held in New York June 10-14 this year. They feature an impressive array of speakers again, including Nobel laureates (Physicists David Gross, Frank Wilczek, and William Phillips), well-known authors, distinguished scientists, and actors. Last year's festival was a huge success, by all reports, and let's hope this year's is as good. And, hey, it's not during DAMOP this year, so I might even be able to make the trip down if anything looks…
drorzel | February 24, 2009The winners of the American Physical Society's Science Writing Awards for 2008 were announced today:
Ann Finkbeiner won in the Journalist category for The Jasons, her book about a secretive groups of scientists who work on classified problems for the US government.
Gino Segre won in the Scientist category, for Faust in Copenhagen, about the early days of quantum mechanics.
Julia Cort won in the Broadcast category for the NOVA ScienceNow episode Asteroid, about whether a giant asteroid will kill us all in 2036.
Alexandra Siy and Dennis Kunkel have won in the Children's category, for their…
drorzel | February 21, 2009We are now one week out from the deadline for Hugo Nominations. I'm eligible to nominate this year, and while a couple of past requests for recommendations have failed to generate anything, I thought I'd throw up a preliminary look at my ballot in hopes of bringing in a few recommendations:
Best Novel
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I don't like his take on Many-Worlds, but it's a terrific book all the same.
Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. A fantastic setting, a great fast-moving plot, and some nice revelations about the universe.
Pirate Sun by Karl Schroeder. Cut-and-paste the comments from the…
drorzel | February 16, 2009On Saturday at Boskone, I gave a talk on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM. This was held up a bit by waiting for the projector to arrive (I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn't notice that I hadn't received confirmation of my request for a projector until late Thursday night, so this was entirely my fault). They were able to come up with a projector, sparing people the need to squint at my tiny tablet PC screen, but it took some time off the beginning of the talk.
The talk consisted of me reading the dog dialogue from Chapter 4 (not to different from the original post), then…
drorzel | February 12, 2009I usually post something here about what panels look interesting when the Boskone program goes up on the web. This year's program went up over the weekend, and I'm just now getting around to making a list of worthwhile items. This tells you what kind of week I'm having.
Anyway, I looked the program over this morning, and here's what I came up with:
Friday 7:30pm Independence:
Reading
Rosemary Kirstein
We won't be able to leave Schenectady until 4pm or so, so the odds of making it to this are pretty slim. I'm really curious to know what the status of the Steerswoman books is, though.
Friday…
drorzel | February 11, 2009I didn't expect the post griping about the Best American Science Writing anthology to generate as much discussion as it did. Shows what I know.
In comments, "bsci" made a good suggestion:
Instead of complaining about this volume, I'd love it if you and your readers made a list of the best physics writing in the past year. I assure you that I would be one of many readers of the pieces on the list.
That's a good suggestion, so let's put it out there: What were the best articles about physical sciences published last year? These could be in general magazines (The New Yorker, etc.), in science…
drorzel | February 10, 2009I'm running a little behind this week, but I wouldn't want this week's Science Saturday bloggingheads to slip by without a mention. It's a conversation between George Johnson and Louisa Gilder about The Age of Entanglement, which I liked quite a bit:
The conversation is primarily about her book, the story it tells, and how she came to write it. There's also some discussion of publishing in general, and a bit about the recent teleportation results from Maryland, toward the end.
drorzel | February 3, 2009Locus magazine has come out with its "Recommended Reading" list of science fiction and fantasy published in 2008. There are, as always, some annoying quirks-- several of the books making the list have been published only in the UK or by small presses, so I've never even seen them-- but it's a reasonably good consensus list of what people on the literary end of SF think was good.
As usual, I've only read a smallish fraction of these. Somewhat unusually, I've read more of the science fiction list than the fantasy list-- 4/20 science fiction novels (Matter, Pirate Sun, Anathem, and Implied…
drorzel | February 2, 2009There's a mini media blitz underway promoting Denis Dutton's new book The Art Instinct. He was on the Colbert Report last week, he's reviewed in the Times, and he's featured in this week's Bloggingheads Science Saturday:
While it's kind of entertaining to listen to John Horgan struggling to get a word in edgewise, I'm kind of skeptical about the book. Dutton's argument is that human aesthetics are, contrary to the claims of the academic art establishment, more universal than socially constructed, and can best be understood through evolution. Or, to be more precise, through evolutionary…
drorzel | February 2, 2009In Friday's installment of his ongoing examination of Left Behind: The Movie, Fred Clark points out some gaps in the movie-Antichrist's plan, where it departs from the loopy prophetic cosmology of the Left Behind books. He then notes how they could've done better:
If Team Nicolae had really done their homework, they'd have consulted with groups like the Canaan Land Restoration of Israel, Inc., to make sure they had all their ducks in a row before trying to launch their apocalypse. The frustrating thing for Nicolae at this point has to be that it's already too late for him to get in touch with…
drorzel | January 29, 2009Boskone, the Boston-area SF convention that Kate and I go to every year, is the weekend after next. Once again, I'll be doing a few panels and one talk. For those who might be attending, or who care about this for some reason, here's my preliminary schedule:
Saturday10am Physics: What We Don't Understand
Geoffrey A. Landis
Mark L. Olson
Chad Orzel
Karl Schroeder
Ian Tregillis
In 1999 John Cramer wrote a column in Analog describing seven big
unsolved problems in physics (including the nature of dark matter,
the origin of ultra-high…
drorzel | January 26, 2009In what will surely come as a surprise to the people who say mean things about the award, the John Newbery Medal for children's literature was awarded to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.
Mr. Gaiman, 48, won for "The Graveyard Book," a story about a boy who is raised in a cemetery by ghosts after his family is killed in the opening pages of the novel. In announcing the winner of what is widely considered the most prestigious honor in children's literature, the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, cited Mr. Gaiman's work for its "…
drorzel | January 25, 2009Michael Brooks's 13 Things That Don't Make Sense turned up on a lot of "Best science books of 2008" lists, and the concept of a book about scientific anomalies seemed interesting, so I ordered it from Amazon. It's a quick read (a mere 210 pages, and breezily written), but ultimately a frustrating book.
It took me several chapters to pin down what bugged me about the book, but it all became clear when I looked at the back cover flap, and saw that the author is a former editor of New Scientist. The really pretty much sums it up-- in physics circles, New Scientist is known for publishing three…
drorzel | January 24, 2009Via a bunch of people, but most directly Matt Ruff, the Guardian has published a list of "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read". Which has triggered the usual flurry of procrastinatory blog posts indicating which books from the science fiction and fantasy sub-list one has and hasn't read.
I have other things I really ought to be doing, so of course, I had to follow suit. Below the fold is my list, following Matt's convention of marking in bold face those books that I've read all the way through, and putting an asterisk (*) after books I've started or skimmed, but never fully read.
The Hitchhikers…
drorzel | January 13, 2009Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid's Book...
This is a very odd book. It's printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It's too short and simple, though, to have much appeal to significantly older children, aside from the fact that the story is written over the top of 15 absolutely gorgeous reproductions of pictures of astronomical objects.
This is probably one of those objects whose cool appearance is the only real reason for the thing to exist. The pictures really are…
drorzel | January 5, 2009As Kate notes, I am a paid-up member of this year's Worldcon, and thus entitled to nominate works for the Hugo Awards. Of course, there are a zillion categories, and I'm not entirely sure what to nominate for any of them.
So, if you are a reader or watcher of science fiction and/or fantasy, this is your opportunity to influence my nominations. If there's a book, story, tv show, movie, editor, or artist that you really, really want to see on the ballot, drop me a comment and let me know. I'll look at the work, if I have time, and give it proper consideration.
If you are a person who cares…
drorzel | January 5, 2009Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel is another book in the Great Discoveries series of short books by noted authors about important moments in the history of science, and the people behind them. Previous volumes include Everything and More and A Force of Nature, both of which were excellent in their own way, and Incompleteness fits right in there with them.
As the subtitle makes clear, this is a book about Kurt Gödel's famous Incompleteness Theorem, which shows that any formal logical system complex enough to describe arithmetic must allow the formation of…
drorzel | January 2, 2009Many years ago, when I was a kid growing up, I used to be a regular at the Mary Wilcox Memorial Library in town, and tore through most of their kids' books before mounting an assault on the adult section. The librarian at the time, Mrs. Sinclair, was a terrific woman who knew pretty much everybody in town, and what they liked to read.
One time when I went in to look for new stuff, she handed me a copy of Castle in the Air by Donald E. Westlake. "I think you'll like this," she said, "He's really funny."
She was right, and over the twenty-ish years since then, I've read dozens of his books.…
drorzel | December 31, 2008Terry Pratchett knighted:
Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld series of novels that have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide, said he was "stunned, in a good way" after receiving a knighthood in the New Year's Honours List.
The 60-year-old writer, below, whose first book was published in 1971, told The Independent last night: "I'm having difficulty fitting it into my head. I'm very pleased indeed. It cheers me up no end." He added: "It will also impress some of my American friends, who started calling me 'Sir' after I received my MBE, which was a little embarrassing."
[...] "I…
drorzel | December 22, 2008I was up late watching my Giants play the Carolina Panthers (they won in OT-- now you see the importance of Brandon Jacobs), and today is a Baby Day, so I have no deep thoughts to blog. So here are some quick comments on recent reading:
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. This is the concluding volume of the Mistborn trilogy, and reading it confirms that he was the right choice to finish the Wheel of Time. This book takes a huge, complicated plot, and brings all the various pieces together for a satisfying conclusion. He also does a nice job of complicating the set-up from the original…