Pop Culture
drorzel | June 13, 2011Right around the time I sent in the manuscript for my own book explaining relativity to Emmy, I got an email offering me a review copy of The Manga Guide to Relativity, part of a series of English translations of Japanese comic books explaining complicated concepts in a friendly way. That was clearly too good a wind-down read to pass up.
Like other books in the series, this sets up a manga-type plot that just happens to require introducing relativity. In this case, on the last day of school at Taigai Academy, headmaster Rase Iyaga makes a surprise announcement: that he will throw a dart at…
drorzel | June 12, 2011I've heard a lot of buzz about The Quantum Thief-- see, for example, this enthusiastic review from Gary K. Wolfe, so I was psyched when it finally became available in the US a little while back. Of course, the down side of this sort of buzz is that it's almost impossible to live up to the promise.
the thief of the title is one Jen Le Flambeur, who is in prison when the novel starts. But not an ordinary prison-- the Dilemma Prison, in which infinite replicas of the minds of the imprisoned find themselves in little glass cells which open to reveal one other prisoner. Each of the prisoners has…
drorzel | June 10, 2011If you look at the schedule of events for DAMOP next week, you will see that there is a movie showing scheduled for Tuesday night: Real Genius. This seems like an excellent excuse to run a poll:
Real Genius is:survey software
While the meeting will largely involve quantum mechanics, this is a purely classical poll, so you can choose only one answer, not a superposition of multiple answers.
drorzel | June 9, 2011While it is not yet officially summer, according to astronomers and horologists, it was approximately the temperature of the Sun here in Niskayuna yesterday, so de facto summer has begun. Accordingly, we have acquired a pool:
Of course, one of the main things you do with a pool is to sit next to it and read in the sun (note the conveniently positioned chair). Of course, then the question becomes "What do you read?
While the obvious answer is How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now in paperback!), we got a good thread out of non-obvious suggestions for science-related "beach reading" last year…
drorzel | June 6, 2011One of the tabs I opened last week and didn't have time to get to was this Clastic Detritus post about what it takes to get science stories in the media, which is (quoting Michael Lemonick):
I get it that a stories involving science need a little something extra to make it in a magazine like Time or even near the front pages of a mainstream newspaper. Or, put another way:
It should be surprising, important -- or weird and fun, failing the important.
I get it that the average non-scientist out there isn't going to take the time to read an article about "ordinary" science. I get it. Our…
drorzel | June 4, 2011In past years, I have griped at length about the awful, maudlin dreck that Mike Resnick keeps putting on the Hugo ballot-- see this 2009 post for example. I think Abigail Nussbaum put it very well back in 2009, when she wrote of Resnick's "Article of Faith" from that year's short story ballot that "his greatest failing is and has always been the one encapsulated by "Article of Faith"--his ability to take a subject that underpins some of science fiction's seminal works, write his own spin on it which is neither innovative nor unusual nor particularly good, and send it out into the world…
drorzel | May 31, 2011I heard David Kaiser talk about the history of quantum foundations work back in 2008 at the Perimeter Institute, and while I didn't agree with everything he said, I found it fascinating. So when I heard that he had a book coming out about this stuff, How the Hippies Saved Physics, I jumped at the chance to get a review copy.
This is, in essence, a book-length argument that I owe Frijtof "Tao of Physics" Capra, Gary "Dancing Wu Li Masters" Zukav, and even J*ck S*rf*tt* a beer.
The book expands on things that Kaiser said in that PI talk (which was really good-- you could do worse than to spend…
drorzel | May 30, 2011I had intended last Wednesday's post on the Many-Worlds variant in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity to be followed by a post on the other things I said when I did a guest lecture on it for an English class. What with one thing and another, though, I got a little distracted, and I'm only getting around to it now.
Anyway, this was a guest lecture for a class on Science Fiction taught by a friend in the English department. To give you an idea of the stuff they covered, here's the "required books" list from the syllabus:
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (VBFSF)…
drorzel | May 28, 2011Kij Johnson's "Ponies" is the second on Locus's Short Story Club list of award-nominated stories. More than that, though, it's an actuall award winner, having claimed a share of the Nebula for Best Short Story.
I enjoyed Johnson's two novels, The Fox Woman and Fudoki quite a bit, so I'm happy to see her doing well, with award-nominated short stories the last two years. The problem is, like last's year's "Spar," which was up for the Hugo, my primary reaction to this story is "Oh, ick."
The set-up is simple and heavy-handed: like all young girls, Barbara has a Pony, some sort of artificial…
drorzel | May 25, 2011I learned today that the National Georgraphic Channel video I mentioned last week has actually already aired on the network. It was last week's episode of the series "Naked Science," titled Living in a Parallel Universe.
I haven't seen it, obviously, but it's running again, tomorrow (the 26th), at 4pm (Eastern (US) time). Set your DVR accordingly.
(I'm also very pleased to have learned of the air date via email from Alan Guth...)
drorzel | May 23, 2011As I have admitted previously, I have a fondness for tv shows about UFO's, the loonier the better. So, when I learned that there was a show called When Aliens Attack airing last night on the National Geographic channel, I was all over that. I'm happy to report that it did not disappoint-- it brought the crazy, in exactly the manner I was hoping for.
The premise of the show is a look at what would happen if aliens turned up on Earth, and turned out to be hostile. It claims to be a look at military contingency plans for dealing with an alien invasion, though the "plans" in question seem to be…
drorzel | May 21, 2011As mentioned a little while ago, Locus is running a Short Story Club to discuss the award-nominated stories that are available online. First up is Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow". Like her novels and other notable short fiction, this has a Central American theme, though it's alternate-history SF rather than fantasy.
This is a sort of caper story, set in a high-tech Mexica empire, where the elite order of Jaguar Knights are the only survivors of a bloody purge instigated by the new emperor, which has wiped out all the other orders. Xochitl, a young-ish female knight started a…
drorzel | May 17, 2011Well, on video over the web, anyway... If you look at the Featured Videos on the National Geographic Channel web page, or, hopefully, in the embedded video below:
You'll see a short video clip of a program about quantum physics, that includes me and Emmy among the experts on camera. I'm pretty psyched, though I'm not sure what Alan Guth and Lawrence Krauss will think about sharing the bill with my dog...
This is from a show, tentatively titled "Parallel Universes," which is why I went to Buffalo back in October. Most of the scenes in that clip were shot in the abandoned railway station in…
drorzel | May 17, 2011For both of the readers who enjoyed last fall's Short Story Club, there's another round starting up soon, this time run by Locus, featuring award-nominated works. I'm busier now than I was in the fall, so I'm not sure I'll be able to participate in all of these, but then, I've already read two of the five stories, so that makes it a little easier...
Also in short fiction news, I have to do a guest lecture on Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity" for an English class on science fiction this Friday. Which means I probably ought to find some time to figure out what I'm going to say about…
drorzel | May 12, 2011The title is a .signature line that somebody-- Emmet O'Brien, I think, but I'm not sure-- used to use on Usenet, back in the mid-to-late 90's, when some people referred to the Internet as the "Information Superhighway." I've always thought it was pretty apt, especially as I've moved into blogdom, where a lot of what I spend time on involves the nearly random collisions of different articles and blog posts and so on. It's also as good a title as any for this tab-clearing post, which consists of pointing out two pairs of articles that, in my mind at least, seem to have something to say about…
drorzel | May 11, 2011While Kenneth Ford's 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a "state of motion?" When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then writes:
An object brought to an absolute zero of temperature would have zero-point energy and nothing else. Because of zero-point energy, there is indeed such a thing as perpetual motion.
This is really the only objectionable content in the book, but he certainly made up in quality what it lacks in…
drorzel | May 10, 2011If I get a review copy of a book that sounded interesting from a publicist, but it turns out I kind of hate the book, am I still obliged to read it and write it up for the blog? I'm not talking about the totally unsolicited review copies that turn up unannounced in my mail-- I feel no obligation to read those at all-- but a book where I replied to an email to specifically request a copy.
On the one hand, they did send me something free, expecting some publicity in return. On the other, I suspect they'd be just as happy having me not post a review saying "The first three pages of this made me…
drorzel | May 10, 2011When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday's Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow-- the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is usually a staple of biography, probably because Rutherford was happily married for umpteen years-- but he's an experimentalist, and you don't see that many high-profile biographies of experimental physicists.
When you run down the list of famous and relatively modern scientists who have books written…
drorzel | May 9, 2011While I've got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss's Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, part of Norton's Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I'm a fan of the series-- past entries reviewed here include Richard Reeves's biography of Rutherford, Rebecca Goldstein's biography of Goedel, and David Foster Wallace on Cantor's work on infinity (which is less of a biography than the others). I'm not a huge reader of biographies, but I've liked all the books from this series that…
drorzel | May 8, 2011One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It's one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of my colleagues on the other side of campus. And it frequently undermines reviews of books that I've already read.
A couple of good examples come from this Paul Di Filippo column for Barnes and Noble, where he reviews two books I've read, and one I haven't. I haven't actually read his comments on the…