Pop Culture
drorzel | December 1, 2015I've been a little bad about self-promoting here of late, but I should definitely plug this: I'm speaking at the TEDxAlbany event this Thursday, December 3rd; I'm scheduled first, at 9:40 am. The title is "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning":
You might think that the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity– particles that are also waves, cats that are both alive and dead, clocks that run at different rates depending on how you’re moving– and only come into play in physics laboratories or near black holes. In fact, though, even the strangest features of modern physics…
drorzel | November 23, 2015The Pip is nute about superheros at the moment, primarily the Justice League, and particularly Batman. He's got quite the pile of toys around this theme, making for a decent photo subject:
The Pip's collection of superhero toys.
Technically, these aren't all Bat-Toys-- you can see a Spiderman Lego set in there (from some alternate universe in which Peter Parker got Tony Stark to buy him a Spider-Copter) and also a few Transformers. But Batman holds down a pretty solid plurality in the toy population.
The Bat-Boat that's front and center in this shot (which ended up in the bathtub shortly…
sa smith | November 17, 2015ERV-->TMZ?
No, this is an education and outreach opportunity, and I want to use it to the best of my ability as an HIV researcher.
1-- I am so glad Charlie Sheen got tested for HIV. Most people who should be, dont, because even faced with a treatable, deadly disease, denial is *incredibly* attractive. 'If I dont know, then it cant be real' is a tall hurdle *many* of us will have to clear for some reason, at some point in our lives. Sheen got tested, and that is the first step to stopping HIV.
2-- "I have to... I have to. I am here to admit, in fact, I am HIV positive."
*wince*
'Coming out…
drorzel | November 16, 2015So, a funny story about this. I posted a snippet of a fantasy story back in August, and enough people said nice things about it that I actually got off my ass and did some playing around to format the full story as an epub. This was, of course, complicated by the fact that computers are awful, but I think I finally got a version that doesn't have gibberish characters all over. At least, as long as you're not using the worthless free epub reader I initially downloaded, which makes a hash of even actual purchased professional ebook files.
I was all set to post that-- had the post all typed in,…
drorzel | November 10, 2015Over in Twitter-land, Rhett Allain drew my attention to this "Sports Science" clip from ESPN, about a wild 4th-and-25 play in the Arkansas-Ole Miss game. This is nominally because I've been writing about big hits and bouncing balls over at Forbes, but really, I think Rhett's just working on a "misery loves company" theory, here:
It's a cool play, but as science, this leaves a lot to be desired. It's less "sports science" than "sports technobabble"-- mostly, they seem to be going for a science-y air by quoting lots of largely irrelevant numbers. I'm not sure why it matters how far most of…
drorzel | November 6, 2015I've known this for a while now, but they just announced it officially: I'll be speaking at TEDxAlbany this year, on "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning":
You might think that the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity– particles that are also waves, cats that are both alive and dead, clocks that run at different rates depending on how you’re moving– and only come into play in physics laboratories or near black holes. In fact, though, even the strangest features of modern physics are essential for everything around us. The mundane process of getting up and getting…
drorzel | November 1, 2015The hot SF release of the fall is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy, concluding the Imperial Radch trilogy. The first of these, Ancillary Justice won a Hugo two years ago, and the second, Ancillary Sword should've won this past year, because I really didn't like the Three-Body Problem.
The release of Ancillary Mercy generated a ton of buzz, to the point where, as I remarked on Twitter, I felt as if I were letting down some ill-defined "side" by not being more excited about it. But while I liked Ancillary Justice quite a bit (it's the rare book I've voted for the Best Novel Hugo that's actually won…
drorzel | August 30, 2015So, the Hugo awards were handed out a little while ago, with half of the prose fiction categories going to "No Award" and the other half to works I voted below "No Award." Whee. I'm not really interested in rehashing the controversy, though I will note that Abigail Nussbaum's take is probably the one I most agree with.
With the release of the nominating stats, a number of people released "what might've been" ballots, stripping out the slate nominees-- Tobias Buckell's was the first I saw, so I'll link that. I saw a lot of people exclaiming over how awesome that would've been, and found myself…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
drorzel | August 12, 2015Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting question, since aside from the science section (and not even all of that), all of these apply to any other performance or production. So how do those people master all of those things? The short answer is that they don’t. Almost any production that requires a long, and more importantly disparate, set of…
drorzel | August 10, 2015I was staring out the diner window, watching it rain, when Jimmy the werewolf slid into the booth behind me. “We got trouble, boss,” he said, and I spilled coffee over the back of my hand.
“Asshole,” I said, not turning around. “How about a little warning next time?”
“Don’t want to let on I know you. Because of the trouble.”
“How can we be in trouble? We haven’t done anything yet. What kind of trouble?” I probably sounded a little petulant, but I was annoyed about the coffee.
“Wizard trouble.” That’s a whole lot worse than spilled coffee.
“Where?”
“Across the street, bus stop.” I did my best…
drorzel | July 4, 2015Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book-- 700-something "pages" in electronic form-- and contains yet another bid for "best first paragraph ever":
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
The rest of the book involves what follows on from that. Namely, the destruction of basically all life on Earth.
I should say up front that this was, on the whole, a very enjoyable book. In a lot of ways, it's what I…
drorzel | June 28, 2015This went around a different corner of my social-media universe while I was off in Waterloo, away from my iTunes. I was curious about it, though, so looked at the contents of the "25 Most Played" playlist, and having done that, I might as well post them here (the number in parentheses is the number of times it's been played according to iTunes):
Beautiful Wreck," Shawn Mullins, (280)
"In The Mood," Glenn Miller And His Orchestra, (279)
"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," Darlene Love, (278)
"Almost Saturday Night," John Fogerty, (277)
"Shake It Up," The Cars, (275)
"Sunblock," Emmet…
drorzel | June 5, 2015I'm massively short on sleep today, and wasn't going to blog until I saw somebody on Facebook mention that June 5th 1995 is the date of record for the first Bose-Einstein condensate at JILA in Boulder. I couldn't let that pass, so I wrote it up for Forbes:
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1995, I was a young grad student having just finished my second year at Maryland, and one morning I packed into the conference room at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg (where I worked in the group of Bill Phillips) with most of the rest of the Atomic Physics…
drorzel | May 30, 2015As much for my own future reference as anything else, some thoughts on the bits of the Hugo ballot that aren't Best Novel (which I've already talked about). At this point, I've probably read as much of the voter packet as I'm going to (though if I've left out something actually good, I could go back and pick it up...). That doesn't mean I've read everything-- there are quite a few things on there I'm not going to bother with because, you know, life is just too short-- but I've read those that seemed worth a shot.
In the short fiction categories, two of the longer nominees were weirdly…
drorzel | May 24, 2015As the Hugo nomination debacle unfolded, one of the few bright spots was the replacement of Marko Kloos's novel with The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, who is apparently a Big Name in SF in China. This got a good deal of buzz when it was released in the US, and I've sorta-kinda been meaning to read it for a while. Having it move onto the Hugo ballot provided a great excuse to finally crack it open. And given that I wasn't blown away by the other two non-Puppy nominees on the slate, or the one Puppy book that I had already read, I had great hopes this would redeem the category.
Alas, it was…
drorzel | May 6, 2015A week or so ago, this statistical analysis of listening trends in pop music got a bunch of play on Twitter and Facebook, but I was too busy to do anything with it. The headline result, reported with all the accuracy you should expect of such things is people stop listening to popular music at 33.
By coincidence, in another part of the social-media universe, some friends were sneering at Top 40 music by way of highlighting a list of the current Top 40 chart to show how little of it they knew. As I'm currently marking time until I can call my doctor to get some help with what I suspect is a…
drorzel | May 5, 2015I'm still in the late stages of an awful cold, but shook it off a bit to write a new conversation with Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna over at Forbes:
“HEY! YOU POODLES! STAY OFFA MY LAWN!”
“Emmy! Stop barking!” I sit up. She’s at the gap between the fences, where she can see into the front yard.
“But, those poodles..”
“We’ve had this conversation. It’s a public street, other dogs are allowed to walk on it. No barking.” She comes over, sheepishly. “Why can’t you just lie down and enjoy the nice day, hmm?”
“Well, I would. But, you know… Quantum.”
“What?”
“I would love to just lie in the sun, but…
drorzel | May 3, 2015So, Kate and I hired a babysitter last night, and went to see the new Avengers movie. You might not have heard of it, it's kind of obscure...
(There will be some mild SPOILERS below; if you're intensely opposed to that sort of thing, don't read the rest of this...)
So, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a big mistake to watch this excellent video about Jackie Chan's style yesterday morning:
(in a sorta-kinda related vein, this Max Gladstone blog post is also very interesting...)
Having watched that video in the morning, and its discussion of how Jackie Chan's fight choreography and…
drorzel | May 2, 2015A month or so back, when I went to Vanderbilt to give a talk, I met Robert Scherrer, the department chair down there, who mentioned he was starting a blog soon. That blog is Cosmic Yarns, and has now been live for a while, but I've been too busy to do a proper link. He's using it to look at the science of science fiction, and has a bunch of nice posts up, including a good explanation of why you don't need to worry about giant ants:
Has this ever happened to you? While you are enjoying a relaxing picnic in the New Mexican desert, your lunch is overrun by ants: not ordinary ants, but 12-foot…