Pop Culture
drorzel | March 25, 2012I had a signing yesterday at the Barnes & Noble in Vestal, NY, which drew a smallish crowd mostly of friends and family. SteelyKid came, of course, and while she spent most of her time bopping about other parts of the store, she came over to the signing area while I was signing books for people after reading a bit. They had a big stack of copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, and she started picking them up and handing them to me.
"No, honey," I said, "Those are for other people. Give them to somebody else." So she happily ran one over to my mother. And then to one of my aunts.…
sa smith | March 23, 2012This is an... odd... educational opportunity...
Anne Bass' boyfriend mesmerized jury with frightening account of Connecticut mansion invasion:
He said, "I love you, Anne" -- then prepared to die.
Wealthy philanthropist Anne Bass' boyfriend yesterday mesmerized a jury with a frightening account of how three armed men "dressed like ninjas" invaded her Connecticut mansion with a "war cry," tied them up -- and then injected them with a purported "virus" that would kill them within 24 hours unless Bass coughed up $8.5 million.
...
One of the knife-toting thugs then announced: "Now here's the thing…
drorzel | March 23, 2012The quick publicity items for this weekend:
1) I will be on the Science Fantastic radio show either Saturday or Sunday, depending on when your local affiliate runs it (or when you choose to livestream it over the Internet). The interview has already been recorded, which leaves me free for:
2) I will be signing and possibly reading from the new book at the Barnes and Noble store in Vestal, NY at 2pm on Saturday. If you're fortunate enough to live in the Southern Tier, stop by and say hi.
drorzel | March 20, 2012So, this is the new book from the authors of Why Does E=mc2?, covering quantum mechanics in a roughly similar manner. This book, or, rather, Brian Cox talking about some material from this book, created a bit of controversy recently, as previously discussed. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
The big hook here is that they set out to discuss quantum mechanics for a popular audience using a Feynman-type picture from the very beginning. This is an intriguing idea, and sort of appealing in the same basic way that Sakurai's famous graduate text in quantum mechanics and…
drorzel | March 20, 2012A couple of cool items in the promotion of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
-- A little while back, I spoke to Alan Boyle, who writes the Cosmic Log blog for MSNBC, who posted a very nice story about the book last night. Mainstream media, baby!
It also uses this very cool picture of Emmy and me in my lab:
(Many thanks to Matt Milless for taking that and a bunch of others.)
-- This weekend (either Saturday or Sunday, depending on where you are), I'll be on the Science Fantastic radio show, talking about relativity with Michio Kaku. There's a lsit of stations that carry it linked from that…
drorzel | March 19, 2012I'm trying not to obsessively check and re-check the Dog Physics Sales Rank Tracker, with limited success. One thing that jumped out at me from the recent data, though, is the big gap between the book and Kindle rankings over the weekend. The book sales rank dropped (indicating increased sales, probably a result of the podcast interview), while the Kindle rank went up dramatically. This suggests that people who listen to that particular podcast are less likely to buy new books on the Kindle than new books on paper.
This got me wondering, though, whether this was an anomaly, or a general truth…
drorzel | March 13, 2012The thoroughly loathesome Rush Limbaugh is reaping the whirlwind from his latest gaffe (defined, of course, as any instance where a political figure shares his actual opinion with the public), with advertisers fleeing in droves. This has led to a good deal of chortling among the liberal types in my social media universe, but Kevin Drum finds a cloud to go with that silver lining:
And yet....there's an obvious slippery slope here. Lots of advertisers already shy away from political shows of every stripe, and this episode could begin to drive them all away. Why take the chance, even on a host…
drorzel | March 10, 2012I've gotten out of the habit of booklogging recently, which is sort of a shame, because it means I've also gone back to the problem that led Kate and me to start booklogs in the first place: people ask what I've been reading recently, and I can't remember... As a sort of corrective to this, though, here's a post lumping together short comments on my three most recent reads: Karl Schroeder's Ashes of Candesce (excerpt at Tor.com), Tobias Buckell's Arctic Rising (excerpt at Tor.com), and Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point (which isn't a Tor book, so they didn't do an excerpt).
Ashes of…
drorzel | March 8, 2012Yesterday was a really grueling day, and I'm home with The Pip today, so no substantive blogging. But here's a song about the universe, written and performed by one of my colleagues:
If this becomes the next LHC Rap, remember you heard it here first.
By a weird coincidence, we've been watching our Animaniacs DVD's with SteelyKid, and just a couple of days ago got to this one:
So that's not one, but two songs about the universe. Which ought to be enough to keep you entertained for the day.
drorzel | March 6, 2012The new book is out, which means it's time for lots of promotional efforts and links to radio shows and news articles and that sort of thing. Such as this one: I'll be talking about relativity and dog physics tomorrow night, Wednesday the 7th, on the Big Science radio program(me) at 9pm London time (in the frame of reference in which London is at rest, anyway). This'll be the first radio show for the new book, though I've done a few phone interviews for print publications (links as they become available...).
If you're in London, and have nothing better to do, tune in. (We are, after all, more…
drorzel | March 5, 2012The birth of The Pip required converting our spare bedroom into a nursery, which is a small price to pay for such a cute little dude. Other than the fact that we were using that room to store a lot of our paper books. Which means those need to move somewhere else, somewhere that is not inside our house.
The bulk of them will undoubtedly end up being donated to the local library book sale, but we are willing to ship them to good homes, homes that are willing to pay the cost of shipping. Kate has the details, and a list of the books being purged.
If you'd like some cheap books, mostly genre…
drorzel | February 29, 2012The Subject: header pretty much says it all: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is reviewed in Nature Physics. I am inordinately pleased with the existence of this-- not because I expect it to sell a significant number of books, but because a serious technical publication recognized it as worth writing up, despite the silly title.
Of course, Nature being Nature, it's paywalled, so you can only read the full thing via the above link if you have institutional access, or know a nice person who will email you a copy when you ask for it on Twitter. The review itself is about what I would expect…
drorzel | February 29, 2012One of the big stories in genre Internet news was Seanan McGuire's post last week, about reactions to the early release of some copies of her book, and the hateful garbage thrown her way by people outraged that the ebook didn't slip out early as well. And let me state right up front that the people who wrote her those things are lower than the slime that pond scum scrapes off its shoes. That's absolutely unconscionable behavior, and has no place in civilized society.
That said, Andrew Wheeler picked up on something that also struck me as odd, namely the way McGuire was so upset about paper…
drorzel | February 28, 2012I'm home with The Pip today, so no extended typing for me, but I pre[ared for this by typing something up ahead of time, and getting John Scalzi to post it for me, as part of his Big Idea series:
In a way, a book about Einstein's theory of relativity is uniquely suited to a series about Big Ideas. Relativity, at its heart, is a theory built on a single Big Idea:
The laws of physics do not depend on how you're moving.
For all its fearsome reputation, everything stems from that single,simple idea. Whether you're moving or standing still, floating in space or on the surface of a planet, you…
drorzel | February 28, 2012The Pip says, "Hi, folks. My daddy's book is released today, and he's shameless enough to use me to promote it:"
"I can't read it yet, because I'm just a baby, but I can report that it was very satisfying to drool on. So you should definitely buy a copy, maybe two."
"Also, dig the awesome stuffed alligator toy I got from my Aunt Erin and Aunt 'Stasia. It crackles, and it has a mirror! It's so cool!"
drorzel | February 27, 2012If you're allergic to hype, you might want to tune this blog out for the next couple of days, because How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is officially released tomorrow, so it's all I'm going to talk about for a little while. Because, well, I'm pretty excited.
And tonight's exciting finding is that it's mentioned in the Washington Post:
If "Physics for Dummies" left you baffled, maybe it's time to go a step further: Why not physics for pets? In "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog," physics professor Chad Orzel attempts to explain Einstein's theory of relativity via a dialogue with his dog,…
drorzel | February 26, 2012Hey, you might not know this, but I wrote a book...
The official release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog isn't until Tuesday, but a friend reported buying a copy in Missouri, so when I was headed out to do some work this afternoon, I went to the cafe at the local Barnes&Noble so I could check for myself, and there it was:
That's How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog spotted in the wild. I'm not going to say "in its natural habitat," because it's really a domestic animal, which belongs in a loving home, with people to care for it. Copies in the bookstore are feral editions,…
drorzel | February 23, 2012I'm grading exam papers at the dining room table when Emmy trots in. "Hey, dude," she says. "Where do we keep the superconducting wire?"
I'm not really paying attention, so I start to answer before I understand the question. "Hmm? Wire is in the basement, next to the--wait, what?"
"The superconducting wire. Where do we keep it?"
"We don't have any superconducting wire. And you're a dog. What do you need superconducting wire for, anyway?"
"I'm building a particle collider! I need superconducting wire for the beam-steering magnets."
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog goes on sale next Tuesday…
drorzel | February 22, 2012A correspondent from the UK sends along this picture from the Waterstones outlet in Heathrow airport:
As you can see, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is #55 on their bestseller rack, just ahead of Confessions of a London Call Girl. I'm not sure what this says about London call girls, but I'm pretty psyched that it's still selling well over there.
On this side of the Atlantic, I got a note from my editor at Scribner the other day that they've just printed another batch of the US paperback of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is also good news. There's probably a blog post in…
drorzel | February 18, 2012I'm at Boskone this weekend, and this morning went to a fairly frustrating panel on "SF/F/H As a Mirror on Society," described thusly:
It's simplistic to say genre fiction maps to current politics. Vampires are bankers, zombies are the revengeful victimized classes, and werewolves are the media in feeding frenzy? C'mon. But did we write more optimistic SF when the space race was young? Or victorious spacewar stories when we were losing Vietnam? If fiction in any way reflects societal anxieties or moods, what do we make of steampunk, or sparkly vamps, or dystopian YA, or upticks in stories…