Pop Culture
drorzel | March 8, 2011It's the last week of the winter term here, so here is a totally serious and important music-related poll question:
Which do you prefer?survey software
(OK, maybe the end-of-term craziness is making me just a tiny bit punchy...)
drorzel | March 4, 2011As has been mentioned numerous other places, ESPN is backing a new Bill Simmons project, which basically sounds like a pop-culture blog network kind of thing, headlined by Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. I saw this a while ago (I think I may have tagged a press release for a Links Dump), but was reminded of it yesterday when listening to Simmons's podcast fro ESPN, which was a monster two-part thing with Klosterman as the guest (part 1, part 2).
I'm not much of a podcast guy-- I listen to Simmons and Klosterman, and that's about it-- but this is right in my wheelhouse. It's two guys, both of…
drorzel | March 2, 2011Another shameless self-promotion post, but since I was confirming some arrangements this morning, I thought I'd throw up a post, so:
- On March 15, two weeks from yesterday, I will be giving a talk for the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association at 8pm on the campus of SUNY-New Paltz. If you're in the downstate NY sort of area, and want to know what your dog should know about quantum physics, stop on by.
- On March 19th, two weeks from this Saturday, I will be doing the same presentation at 9:30 am at the University of Toledo, as part of their Saturday Morning Science program (warning: PDF). If…
drorzel | February 28, 2011Every year, Kate runs a fundraiser to help support SF fans who want to attend Wiscon, which takes the form of an auction of various cool items, such as a signed book about quantum physics. You can find a big listing of everything at the Con or Bust community on LiveJournal, but some items of possible interest to readers of this blog include:
A sixpack of books from Small Beer Press
Homemade cookies
Math and/or science tutoring from an EE PhD student
Hand-spun yarn
Homeade truffles
A slightly used Sony Reader
One photo a week for a year
John M. Ford books
A signed set of Rosemary Kirstein's…
drorzel | February 18, 2011I'm leaving today for the AAAS meeting in DC, where I'll be through the weekend. The AAAS works much differently than the physics conferences I'm used to, most notably requiring speakers to upload their presentation several days ahead of time. This means that my usual night-before-a-talk process of fiddling with my slides is right out. I mean, I could fiddle with my slides, but any changes won't be reflected in the pre-uploaded ones I'll get to do the actual talk, so what would be the point?
This puts me in the unusual (recently) position of having some time available to read fiction. I'm 50-…
drorzel | February 13, 2011I picked up a few albums off "Best of 2010" list a few weeks ago, and have been listening to them on shuffle play a lot. These included Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Which is kind of a rough one for shuffle play with SteelyKid in the house-- I keep having to skip tracks when she comes into the room. And I eventually deleted whatever the track is with the interminable Chris Rock bit at the end, because, really, I don't need that.
Anyway, the observation promised in the title is this: Kanye West is a really good producer. As music, most of these tracks are really impressive--…
drorzel | February 9, 2011I haven't been as relentless about flogging How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now available in paperback!) as I was last year, because it gets kind of exhausting. I do have a vanity search set up on Google Reader that points me to the occasional review-- this one, for example, so I still see the occasional positive comment, which is good for a boost in a difficult week at work.
Of course, the vanity search is world wide, which means it also picks up mentions of the international editions, such as this Italian blog (oddly, it gets my employer wrong-- I should check the Italian edition and see…
drorzel | February 6, 2011I'm taking some flak in the comments to yesterday's book recommendation request post, so let me illustrate what I meant with an example. Lots of people recommended the Andrew Lang Fairy books, which are freely available online. I looked at the first story in the first book, which is plenty entertaining, but also has this bit that stopped me short:
Hardly had [an evil sorceror] reached his own house when, taking the ring, he said, "Bronze ring, obey thy master. I desire that the golden ship shall turn to black wood, and the crew to hideous negroes; that St. Nicholas shall leave the helm and…
drorzel | February 5, 2011One of the books in SteelyKid's regular rotation of books to read at naptime and bedtime is this book about a girl visiting characters from fairy tales to ask them what makes somebody happy ever after. It's not the greatest, but she enjoys it.
It occurs to me, though, that while the book references a couple of classic fairy tales-- the girl in the story visits the princess from "The Princess and the Pea" and the frog prince, and also a fairy godmother-- SteelyKid has never heard any of the original stories, and thus is unlikely to appreciate the references (even accounting for the fact that…
drorzel | February 3, 2011I make an effort to say nice things about pop-science books that I read, whether for book research or blog reviews. Every now and then, though, I hit a book that has enough problems that I have a hard time taking anything positive from it.
I got David Bodanis's E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation from Union's library because I like the subtitle, and plan to reference it in the relevant chapter of the book-in-progress. I figured that, if I'm going to swipe his subtitle, I should at least be able to say something substantive about the book.
Bodanis takes pains to say that…
drorzel | February 1, 2011the Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a profile of college basketball analyst Bill Raftery and how he prepares to call games. This would be nothing more than Links Dump material, save for the fact that bits of it appear to have been written for the benefit of visiting aliens who have never seen televised basketball before:
Over the years, the exercise evolved into the intricate system he uses today. On the far left side of the page, Mr. Raftery writes down each player's name and number. Next are the player's habits and tendencies, as few as three or as many as seven. This season's…
drorzel | January 31, 2011This is a difficult book to review, which is probably fitting, because it's a very personal book. My reaction to it is largely personal as well, and may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Given the surprising number of people who had Opinions regarding my recollections of telecommunications, I almost think I might be better off not saying anything, but it's going to nag at me unless I write something about it, so what the hell...
So. Among Others is the story of Morwenna "Mori" Markova (previously Phelps), a girl from Wales who sees fairies and whose mother is an evil witch. Literally.…
drorzel | January 28, 2011A somewhat surprising number of people asked for a return of the guess-the-lyrics posts in the who are you? thread, and it seems like a good Friday activity. So, as with the previous rounds, each of the following gives a pair of rhyming (or at least intended-to-rhyme) phrases from a pop music song in my collection. Some of these are very recent, some go back a ways; some are pretty obvious, others kind of obscure. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to guess the song from which I took the rhyming phrase.
1) mountain of rocks/ Cracker Jack box
2) by the wrist/ amethyst
3) CD…
drorzel | January 27, 2011Subtitled "Understanding Einstein's Relativity," David Mermin's It's About Time is another book (like An Illustrated Guide to Relativity) that grew out of a non-majors course on physics that Mermin offers at Cornell. It's also an almost-forty-years-later update of an earlier book he wrote on the same subject. And it's been a really good resource for writing the book-in-progress, which I ought to repay by reviewing it here.
Like the Illustrated Guide, this is a book that aims to teach students something about how relativistic kinematics actually works. Unlike the Illustrated Guide though, this…
drorzel | January 26, 2011I'm about halfway through Jo Walton's Among Others, a fantasy novel set in Britain in 1979, featuring an unhappy teenage girl who finds relief in reading science fiction and fantasy, and becoming involved with SF fandom. It's getting rave reviews from a lot of the usual sources, and the concept sounded interesting, so I grabbed it right after it came out.
It's an easy read in a lot of ways, but also an odd one. In particular, I keep having trouble remembering when it's set. Despite the frequent reminders that it's set in an era I lived through (it's written as a diary, and every entry…
ksnyder | January 24, 2011Earlier this month, BNL physicist Peter Takacs told you about his progress in resurrecting one of the world's first video games. And you wanted to know, "How do I do that?"
Based on feedback from that post, we've uploaded the original high-resolution schematics for Tennis for Two to the end of this story on Brookhaven's website.
An original schematic for Tennis for Two
We've also included notes from the game's inventor, William Higinbotham, as well as the deposition he gave during a legal battle over the first video game patent (held by Magnavox). So start searching for an analog…
drorzel | January 22, 2011Last year, Kate was one of the people who helped organize a fundraising auction to send a few people to Wiscon. It's that time again, and she's seeking donations for the auction:
Last year, Con or Bust raised $6,183.89 and helped thirteen people of color attend WisCon. We weren't able to meet all the requests for assistance, however, so I'm tentatively setting this year's auction goal at $7,000. Bidding on the auction will start Monday, February 21, 2011, at 12:01 a.m. EST (GMT -5) and end Sunday, March 6, 2011, at 11:59 p.m. EST. You may post auction offers and make donations now.
If you're…
drorzel | January 20, 2011I gave a talk today on blogs as a tool for science communication (basically the same as this one, with a few minor updates), and got asked "Aren't the people who read science blogs mostly scientists already?" Which reminded me that it's been a while since I did a "Who are you people?" post.
So, if you've got a minute, leave a comment to this post, telling me something about who you are and how you got here. And if you want to throw in something about what you particularly like to read, or would like to see more of here, that sort of feedback is always helpful.
Thanks in advance.
drorzel | January 17, 2011Part of this past weekend's meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public was to evaluate 100+ proposals for "mini-grants" of up to $10,000 for new outreach activities. It wouldn't be appropriate to go into detail about any of the proposals or what we decided (the PI's of the proposals we decided to fund will be notified soon), but there was one issue that came up again and again that I think is appropriate for the blog, which is what should be considered as a successful effort, particularly in the online world.
A large number of the proposals we were considering had "new media" components…
drorzel | January 14, 2011The physics book generating the most bloggy buzz in the latter part of 2010 would have to be Ian Sample's Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science, about the as yet undetected particle known as the Higgs boson. Detecting the Hiigs is the most immediate goal of the Large Hadron Collider, so it's a topic that's in the air at the moment, so this book was inevitable-- in fact, the publisher sent me not one but two review copies. I gave one away, but that makes me feel even more guilty for taking months to get around to reviewing it.
This is, basically, a concise…