Pop Culture
drorzel | January 3, 2013As I hinted obliquely a little while back, I don't have a terribly high opinion of Wall Street or Wall Street traders. Given that, I'm not the most obvious audience for a book titled The Physics of Wall Street, and truth be told, I wouldn't've picked it up on my own. The publisher sent me an advance copy back in August, though, and I had a plane trip coming up to go play golf with some guys who work in business, so I thought it might make a decent read and possible conversation topic, and took it along.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it contains much more physics than Wall…
drorzel | December 6, 2012I have made allusions to a work-in-progress at various points recently, but my general policy is not to reveal any details until things become official. Well, as you can see from the above photo of signed contracts, it's official: I sold the work-in-progress to Basic Books, my publisher for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. The contract calls for 70,000 words (which most likely means the first draft will clock in at 110,000...) of a work tentatively titled How to Think Like a Scientist (because I'm only allowed to publish books with "How to..." in the title...).
So, what is this? Well,…
drorzel | November 20, 2012I've got a bunch of browser tabs open on my various computers that have been there for weeks, one of which is Alastair Reynolds on writing science fiction. This is mostly a response to a not-terribly-interesting complaint that the science fiction genre has been "exhausted," but there was a bit in there that resonated with me, where Reynolds talks about how he started writing one of his books:
That reaction, for me, encapsulates something fairly central to my subsequent relationship with SF. I don't care for a lot of it. Never have done, never will. But at the same time, I doubt that I'd feel…
drorzel | November 16, 2012Over at Tor.com, Kate has begun a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Hobbit, and has some thoughts on Chapter 1. It's full of interesting commentary about characters and literary technique, but let's get right to the important bit: Physics!
Kate mentions in passing in the post that the Hobbit style round door with a knob in the middle seems a suboptimal design choice, however pretty it may look once Peter Jackson's set designers get done with it. This draws a couple of comments noting that the doorknob-in-the-middle thing is an English affectation, and pointing to the Prime Minister's…
drorzel | November 9, 2012In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes's much-discussed book.
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I don't read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They're usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a collection of recent events that are highly dependent on short-term context. They also tend to be much better at identifying problems than suggesting plausible solutions, coming off like that famous Sidney Harris cartoon with a bunch of equations on the left side of a…
drorzel | November 8, 2012Now that we've apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he's been overhyped. If you've somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo Montoya summing up is that Silver runs a blog predicting election results, which consistently showed Barack Obama with a high probability of winning. This didn't sit well with the pundit class, who mocked Silver in ways that made them look like a pack of ignorant yokels when Silver's projected electoral…
drorzel | October 26, 2012In which I discuss the manner in which and the degree to which Twitter is ruining the media.
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Yesterday, Kevin Drum posted saying that Twitter is ruining political journalism, calling out its role in solidifying media groupthink before events are even completed. That seemed like a pretty good criticism to me, but like a true squishy liberal, Kevin later retracted his comments in the face of criticism. I saw the second link come across Kevin's Twitter feed, and responded there, saying:
You were right the first time. But Twitter's only the latest step in the continuing degradation…
drorzel | October 25, 2012For various reasons I can't talk about, I'm not in a good mental place for deep and thoughtful blogging just at the moment. But prompted by yesterday's Surviving the World, I'll revisit a past post topic, and suggest some abstract ideas you could dress as for Halloween, if you're so inclined.
The Doppler Effect: Wear an outfit that's blue in the front and red on the back. Answer questions from people in front of you in a high-pitched voice, questions from people behind you in a deep voice. Bonus points if you carry small bottles of helium and sulfur hexafluoride to inhale for the appropriate…
drorzel | October 11, 2012It's a banner day for science explainer things I wrote, as a piece I wrote has just gone live at Tor.com:
Why Gandalf Is Wrong
Even as a kid, reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at the golden age of twelve or so, Gandalf’s response to Saruman never sat well with me. Splitting white light into its component colors is awesome, and taking things apart is the best way to learn how they work. Knowing how things work is the first step toward making them work better, a process that leads to the technologies that make modern life comfortable enough to, among other things, provide Oxford…
drorzel | September 20, 2012Having been on hiatus for a couple of months has made me forget my obligation for self-promotion via the blog, but I should note one fast approaching public appearance: I'll be at the University of Waterloo next weekend, where they are celebrating the opening of their shiny new Quantum and Nano Center with an Open House on Saturday, September 29, featuring a bunch of public events. Two of these involve me: first, at 12:30 pm, my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk:
Chad Orzel, author of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, will explore everything you — and your canine best…
drorzel | June 22, 2012In which I list some pop song lyrics for you to guess, because it's Friday and I'm tired.
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The other night, on Twitter, Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted a snippet of song lyrics with the hashtag "#greatestalbumsofalltime." I was bored and looking to kill time, so I followed up with a couple of my own, both of which happened to start with "She said..."
And I said to myself, "Ooh! There's an idea for a themed guess-the-lyrics blog post." Thus, this.
The following list is a set of phrases that immediately follow "She said..." (or "she says") in a pop song (or, in two cases, have "she…
drorzel | June 21, 2012In which celebrity culture comes to particle physics.
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It's been about six months since we had a big flurry of Higgs Boson stories, and as enjoyable as the relative quiet has been, it means we're due for another run. And, predictably enough, the usual suspects are stoking speculation about what, exactly, will be officially revealed in a few weeks at the summer particle physics meetings. This spilled over into the rest of the social media universe, with the joke hashtag #HiggsRumors becoming a trending topic on Twitter for a little while last night.
As is also sadly predictable,…
drorzel | June 20, 2012In which we look at how the Brave New Publishing World makes it really hard to find something good to read.
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In a recent links dump, I included a link to this post about the current state of publishing, which is a follow-up to an earlier post about the current state of publishing. Elsewhere in my social media universe, this has come in for a lot of derision from anti-publishing friends, particularly the bit where the author complains that there are too many books published. "How can there be such a thing?" is the basic thrust of the thing. "The more books, the better!"…
drorzel | June 18, 2012So, anyway, as of today, I'm apparently the same age as the Reverend D. Wayne Love in 1998 or thereabouts.
And the sound makes its way outta the window
Minglin' with the traffic noises outside, you know and
All of a sudden I'm overcome by a feelin' of brief mortality
'Cause I'm gettin' on in the world
Comin' up on forty-one years
Forty-one stony gray steps towards the grave
You know the box, awaits its grisly load
Now, I'm gonna be food for worms
(I'm not really that depressed about this birthday, but it's such a random age to be mentioned in a song, and it sticks in my head. And it's a…
drorzel | June 14, 2012Last night, as I was flying in to San Francisco, Matt Cain pitched the first perfect game in Giants history. Now, a casual observer might think these events were unrelated, but to ancient alien theorists, the connection between them could not be more obvious. Thus, you should come to Kepler's Books in Menlo Park this evening at 7pm, to see what amazing events will happen next.
Well, OK, the most that will probably happen is that I might read a bit from the How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in a silly voice. But you don't know that I won't use my awesome ancient alien magic to transmute lead…
drorzel | June 11, 2012Two How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog items:
First and foremost, I'll be appearing at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, CA, this Thursday, June 14 at 7:00pm. I'll probably read a bit of the book, so if you've ever wanted to hear me do the silly dog voice live, here's your chance. Provided, of course, that you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, or will be this Thursday night.
This will be my second trip to California in as many weeks, because all last week I was at DAMOP in Anaheim (the Chain-Restaurant-est Place on Earth). I spent a fair bit of time there explaining the whole talking-to-the-dog…
drorzel | May 29, 2012In which I talk about why it is that particle physics and cosmology are so over-represented in popular physics, and why my own books contribute to that.
[The too-short excerpts on the new front page are beyond my ability to change, so I'll be doing Victorian-style "In which..." summaries at the start of posts as a work-around, so a casual visitor has some idea what a psot is about before clicking through.]
One of the maddening things about the recent upgrade of the ScienceBlogs back end has been that a lot of things have been posted during that time that I wanted to respond to. Near the top…
drorzel | May 21, 2012I was going to post something noting that the great WordPress transition will begin at 7pm tonight, and comments after that time will be lost like Roy Batty's tears. However, I have much happier news: tomorrow's Science Times (available on the Web already) will include a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog!
I considered reading this book aloud to my dog, even though I doubted he would understand relativity, even as explained by the witty and clear-thinking Chad Orzel. Maxwell does seem to show some interest in Newton's first law: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in…
drorzel | May 18, 2012So, you find yourself living in the San Francisco Bay area, and you maybe have a dog who would like to know something about relativity, or you maybe want to someday have a dog who will want to know something about relativity, or you maybe want to know something more about relativity yourself, in case you ever find yourself cornered in a dark alley by a Rhodesian ridgeback who snarls "Explain time dilation to me, or I'll eat your face!" Well, in that case, you definitely want to be at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park on the evening of June 14th, when I'll be doing a book promotion thing for How to…
drorzel | May 17, 2012This has been out for a little while now, and Chris has been promoting it very heavily, and it's sort of interesting to see the reactions. It's really something of a Rorschach blot of a book, with a lot of what's been written about it telling you more about what the writer wants to be in the book than what's actually in it. A lot of conservative responses to it are basically case studies in the sort of motivated reasoning Chris is writing about, but I've even seen some liberals jumping on it as completely confirming their own pre-existing biases, for example, claiming that this means Chris…