Pop Culture
drorzel | December 4, 2010It feels a little weird not to be doing a Short Story Club entry, so here's a different sort of pop culture item: Over at EphBlog, my classmate Derek Catsam has decided to break up the carnival of reactionary politics by commenting on great albums, jumping off from Spin's Top 125 of the Last 25 Years. Which is always a fun game, so let's roll with that.
25 years goes back to 1985, which is right around the time I started buying albums, so this covers most of my pop music lifetime. Which is convenient, because pretty much anything I can remember buying new is eligible...
In making their list,…
drorzel | December 3, 2010Lance Mannion has a good post on the fake outrage of the moment in sports, where Derek Anderson, the terrible quarterback of the godawful Arizona Cardinals, was caught on camera maybe laughing with one of his receivers during their drubbing by the not at all good San francisco 49ers. When questioned about it at a press conference afterwards, Anderson blew his stack at a reporter, then stormed out of the room.
The whole thing is pretty farcical. As Mannion notes:
Listen. Soldiers under fire laugh. Sailors going down with the ship laugh. Pilots watching engines fail laugh. Firefighters,…
drorzel | December 1, 2010I hadn't heard anything about Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation before it turned up in my mailbox, courtesy of some kind publicist at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, otherwise I would've been eagerly anticipating it. Anton Zeilinger is a name to conjure with in quantum optics, having built an impressive career out of doing laboratory demonstrations of weird quantum phenomena. He shared the Wolf Prize earlier this year with John Clauser and Alain Aspect, and the three of them are in a small set of people who probably ought to get a Nobel at some point in the near future…
drorzel | November 26, 2010Today is "Black Friday," the semi-ironic name given to the day after Thanksgiving when major retailers roll out Incredible! Deals! to draw shoppers in at an ungodly early hour. Personally, I don't plan to come within a mile of a mall today, but if that's what floats your boat...
Of course, if you're thinking of gifts for a person interested in science (and if you're reading this, you ought to be...), you could do a lot worse than to look at this list from GeekDad at Wired, which I'm sure you'll be shocked to notice includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If your holiday shopping takes you…
drorzel | November 26, 2010The first rule of Short Story Club is that you must talk about Short Story Club...
So, the Short Story Club run by Niall Harrison over at Torque Control is finished, and Niall's asking for concluding thoughts. I meant to write this up last night, but SteelyKid had a major meltdown just before bedtime, so everything got scrambled.
A perennial topic of discussion in science fiction and fantasy fandom is "the death of the magazines," with lots of hand-wringing about how nobody reads short fiction any more, and short fiction is where the novelists of tomorrow hone their craft, etc. This never…
drorzel | November 22, 2010I don't think this one requires any explanation:
Hello:customer surveys
Staying up watching the Giants game last night was not conducive to getting anything useful done this morning.
drorzel | November 20, 2010The final Short Story Club story is "Throwing Stones" by Mishell Baker. Once again, I find myself without a whole lot to say about it.
This is a gender-reversed Asian-flavored fantasy story. The nameless narrator lives in a city with canals and teahouses in an Empire with rigid class and gender roles, a writing system based on ideograms, and a system of temple examinations that offer the narrator a way out of low station. The big difference between this and other fantasy derived from Asian sources is that the gender roles are flipped: women hold all the positions of power, and a man's "only…
drorzel | November 20, 2010Here's the clip from my live-via-Skype appearance on tv in Sacramento this morning. Unfortunately, the Chateau Steelypips Internet connection slowed way down for some reason, and Skype froze up then dropped the call. But we did get a few minutes of me talking about Goodnight Moon and SteelyKid.
The field of view is oddly cropped, so I keep disappearing behind their chyron, but it was still fun to talk to them. And they did show the cover of the book after we got cut off, so that's all to the good...
drorzel | November 19, 2010I keep forgetting to mention this here, but a while back I was contacted by a tv host in California about the Goodnight Moon post. Anyway, I will be appearing via Skype tomorrow morning at 9:20 my time on the Good Day Sacramento program, to talk about bedtime stories, dog physics, and such things. Internet fame continues weird.
So, if you're an insomniac in central California, looking for something to do at 6:20 in the morning, tune in. I believe it's also available via live streaming, if you're not in the Sacramento area and want to see it live.
I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to…
drorzel | November 19, 2010Miscellaneous pop-culture items from the last couple of weeks:
-- I'm apparently a sucker for half-finished music, as I bought Dylan's Witmark Demos album a week or so ago, and Springsteen's The Promise, a collection of stuff recorded between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, last night. The Springsteen stuff is more polished, but I haven't listened to it as much (obviously).
-- Also in the recent-purchases shuffle play: Guster, Old 97's, the Thermals, Kings of Leon, and Cee Lo Green. This is, as you might imagine, not the most consistent listening experience.
-- I kind of hate…
drorzel | November 17, 2010So, if you look at this picture:
You might be asking yourself "Why does Debbie Harry rate Secret Service protection?" But no, this isn't a photo from some alternate universe where the lead singer of Blondie went on to become leader of the free world, it's part of the Rock Stars of Science campaign by the Geoffrey Beene Foundation. They've just rolled out a new campaign in GQ magazine, putting seventeen prominent biomedical researchers in fancy photo spreads with eight different musicians. It's part of an initiative to raise the profile of science by portraying scientists in a more glamorous…
drorzel | November 15, 2010The other night at dinner, SteelyKid kept demanding that we sing. As there's only so many times you can sing the alphabet in a row, I decided to mix it up a little, and sang her the first verse and the chorus of "The Wild Rover" (these lyrics are close to the ones I know, and here's a YouTube version).
After I finished, she smiled and started babbling, and it quickly became clear that she thought it was about Grover the Muppet. We've got a bunch of old Sesame Street clips that we play for her on the computer, in which Grover waits on an angry blue Muppet.
Thanks to that, I got this idea stuck…
drorzel | November 14, 2010I just realized that I haven't posted anything about this week's Short Story Club entry, "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" by Paul M. Berger.This is largely because I don't have a great deal to say about it.
This is another "After the magic apocalypse" story, only this time the magic apocalypse takes the form of a return by conquering armies of Elves. The story is set a couple of generations after the human resistance was crushed at the Gray Fort, which was the final holdout of the human resistance, and recounts the visit to the fort by an Elf who fought in the war and…
drorzel | November 13, 2010SteelyKid and I are currently on our second pass through the Winnie-the-Pooh book my parents got her (which is identical to the one I had as a kid). We read one story every time she goes to bed, so that's one every night, and one at weekend nap times. She only sort of pays attention to the details of the stories, but she likes pointing to the occasional pictures, and waving her stuffed Pooh and Piglet around.
I wouldn't mind some more variety, though I'm not entirely sure what the options are for read-aloud books at the appropriate level (she's two-and-a-quarter). But that's what the Internet…
pgenzer | November 10, 2010It was July 1976. The nation was busy celebrating its bicentennial, a gallon of gas cost 60 cents, and the Yankees were heading for their first postseason in 12 years, but the real action was at Brookhaven National Laboratory, scene of a life-and-death battle between Spiderman, Doctor Octopus, and the Ghost of Hammerhead.
That's right, The Amazing Spider-Man #158 was set at Brookhaven, as the reader is informed, "on Long Island's thriving North Shore: Usually these quiet buildings are merely devoted to extensive research in the field of atomic energy, but today they are an arena, a…
drorzel | November 9, 2010I haven't been doing these as regularly as I was earlier in the year, but here are a few interesting bits of news about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
LA FISICA SPIEGATA AL MIO CANE, is now available. That's the Italian edition, which Google translates to something like "Explaining Physics to My Dog." Emmy is disappointed in that translation-- she was hoping it had something to do with spaghetti, preferably with meat.
This appears to be a review of the Chinese edition, though I can't read a word of it, and Google Translate isn't really up to the task, rendering one whole paragraph as "…
drorzel | November 8, 2010Last week's guess-the-number contest for my spare copy of Massive by Ian Sample generated over 150 comments. So, who won? Well, I said at the time:
I am thinking of an integer between 0 and 1000 (inclusive). The person who comes closest to guessing the number by midnight Eastern time Friday, November 5 wins a copy of Massive.
The number I was thinking of when I typed that was 137. Which, interestingly, was guess by two nearly simultaneous comments, numbers 10 and 11, by Nathan and Derek R. Clearly, these two know their physicist psychology-- 137 is a weirdly important number in physics, as…
drorzel | November 7, 2010I bought the Witmark Demos a week or so ago, because I could always use another 50 Bob Dylan songs, and listening to them on shuffle play has managed to earworm me with one song in particular, "I Shall Be Free", which it occurs to me has great current relevance:
Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It's President Kennedy callin' me up
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"
I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg
Sophia Loren"
You might think Dylan's plan for prosperity through importing attractive foreign women is a little fanciful, but it's…
drorzel | November 6, 2010This week's Short Story Club story is "The Heart of a Mouse" by K. J. Bishop, from Subterranean Press (which means I'm faintly surprised not to have to pay $15 for it). I recognize Bishop's name, and think I have a copy of The Etched City upstairs that I've never gotten around to reading, but don't think I've read anything of hers before.
This is an after-the-magic Apocalypse story. Some time before the start of the story, there was a dramatic and magic change in the world, with basically all high technology disappearing, and people being turned into anthropomorphic animals. Most people…
drorzel | November 4, 2010I can't resist interrupting the relatively productive day I'm having working on the new book to point you to Conversación de fÃsica con mi perro, the Spanish-language edtion of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which sports this spiffy cover:
I haven't seen a physical copy of this yet, but the vanity search turned up this blog post, which just reproduces the cover copy, but does offer a sample chapter as a PDF. So, you know, if you want to try it before you buy it, there you go...
This also explains the phone call I got yesterday from a journalist in Spain, who wanted to ask me about…