Pop Culture
drorzel | October 8, 2010On the way to get SteelyKid from day care last night, I flipped on ESPN radio in the vain hope of getting a baseball score, but wound up listening to former Mets manager and freelance jackass Bobby Valentine talking about how difficult batting is, which included the statement:
And the whole thing is over in a mega-second!
A mega-second, of course, is 1,000,000 seconds, or a bit less than twelve days. That's awfully long for an at-bat in baseball, though it might not be unreasonable for cricket.
Subsequent comments made clear that Valentine was trying for "millisecond," though it remains…
drorzel | October 7, 2010I'm shamelessly stealing this question from James Nicoll, who asked it about science fiction. The question is a play on the famous comment that only of order a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but every one of them went on to start a band.
So, the question is, who is the Velvet Underground of science? That is, who is the best example of somebody whose work was only read by a tiny number of people, but ended up being incredibly influential on those people and subsequent generations?
The physics example that comes to mind immediately is Sadi Carnot. Carnot wrote a…
drorzel | October 7, 2010Between travel and general work craziness, I completely forgot to note that the UK version of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog has gone on sale:
The title for this edition is How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, and the vanity search keeps turning up mentions to it in the Guardian Bookshop, so I guess they like their dog physics with extra quantum in Britain. Anyway, if you've been waiting and wondering when there would be a version with fewer idiomatic Americanisms, it's here, and available from the usual sources.
This brings the in-print edition tally to five, that I know of: the…
drorzel | October 2, 2010A quick check-in from Tuscaloosa, where we're getting ready to head out for the football tailgating. While I've got a minute, though, here are the slides from my public lecture, via SlideShare:
What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
These are probably less comprehensible that some of my other talks, as I deliberately avoided putting much text on the slides, which I think works better for this kind of presentation. The down side, of course, is that it's not as obvious what some of the slides mean, if you don't know the intended flow of the…
drorzel | September 28, 2010I am in Alabama at the moment, the temporary owner of a ginormous Ford SUV and a hotel room that even I think is a little more air-conditioned than strictly necessary. Which means that it's time for the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog mini-tour of the Southland. On Wednesday, I'll be driving to and speaking at Berry College at 8pm, then on Thursday, I'll be driving across Alabama to speak at the University thereof at 7:30.
If you're within striking distance of either of those places, come on by and see the talk-- I've got an all-new public lecture for this trip, and I promise it will be…
drorzel | September 27, 2010It's that time of year again-- the Swedes will be handing out money to famous scientists, with the announcements of who's getting what starting one week from today. Thus, the traditional Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Picking Contest:
Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog.
The usual terms and conditions apply. If you don't have anything you'd like to guest-post about, you can exchange your guest post for a signed copy of How to Teach Physics…
drorzel | September 26, 2010I'm way, way behind the discussion of this week's story, but having read it, I thought I'd post a couple of comments. This will be short, because there isn't a lot to say.
This is a sort of alternate Christianity story, a story in which Jesus gave in to the temptations offered by the devil in the desert (the relevant passages from the Gospel of Luke, in three languages), and threw himself off the Temple to be caught by angels. Once the angels had appeared, he went the secular power route, and in the story an aging Balthasar, one of the magi who visited Jesus in the manger, makes a second…
drorzel | September 23, 2010One of the things I've been stressed about lately is next week, when I'm making a trip to the South, specifically Georgia and Alabama. As I mentioned here earlier, the original inspiration was a get-together with friends from college for the Florida-Alabama football game next Saturday, but it seems a shame to go all that way and not do something book-related, so I have arranged to give four talks in two days. Two of these are research colloquia, but the other two are public lectures that might be of interest to readers of this blog or How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
First, on Wednesday,…
drorzel | September 21, 2010Got a big box in the mail today, which included author copies of two Asian editions: the Japanese edition, which I had seen before, and this:
That is, obviously, the Chinese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I say "obviously" mostly because I know that edition was about ready to roll out-- I can't say anything about the actual characters on the cover, other than that they don't include any katakana, and thus it's not the Japanese edition, and they're not hangul characters, meaning it's not the Korean edition. Other than that, I got nothing.
If you can read Chinese, and provide a…
sa smith | September 19, 2010A Star is Burns:
Kent Brockman: [on TV] Tonight, we'll visit Springfield's answer to the Benidictine monks: the Rappin' Rabbis.
Rabbi: Don't eat pork, not even with a fork. [motions to cooked pig] Can't touch this!
Homer: Marge, are we Jewish?
Marge: No, Homer.
Homer: Woo hoo! [grabs a cooked pig, starts carving at it]
Kent: But first, we all stink! That's according to a national survey ranking Springfield as the least popular city in America. [cut to Skinner tied to a stake on top of a pyre] In science, dead last.
Skinner: I'm telling you people, the earth revolves around the sun!
Abe: Burn…
drorzel | September 18, 2010Hannu Ranjaniemi's The Quantrum Thief has generated a lot of buzz, but doesn't seem to be available on this side of the Atlantic (not without exorbitant shipping charges, anyway). As a result, I haven't read anything of his, so I was happy to see "Elegy for a Young Elk on the Short Story Club list.
This is a story in the trendy posthuman post-apocalypse genre. The main character, Kosonen, is a former poet living a rustic existence on an Earth largely devoid of humans after some sort of past catastrophe that has left most animals sentient (his best friend is a talking bear, and he has to…
drorzel | September 14, 2010Via Tom, the folks pushing for a Stephen Colbert rally on the Mall in DC (because if a clown like Glen Beck can do it, why not an actual comedian?) have found a uniquely useful way to try to boost their signal: encouraging charitable donations:
See, anyone can join a reddit or Facebook group or sign a petition. It takes, like, one minute and doesn't demonstrate much effort. So the rally movement has been looking for ways to show that they're serious, that they're willing to lift a finger to make this happen. And an idea has just been hatched: pony up some cash to one of Stephen's favorite…
drorzel | September 13, 2010I needed a band-aid this morning, and when I was getting it out, it occurred to me that there are some subtle details of packaging technology that pretty clearly mark this as the future, not the past. I'm not sure when the transition was, but if you're around my age or older, you can probably remember the useless little red strings that used to be an integral part of the band-aid packaging. In theory, you were supposed to pull on the string, and use it to tear the paper wrapper around the bandage, but in practice, the damn thing always just pulled straight out of the package, and you ended up…
drorzel | September 12, 2010I do intend to keep reading and commenting on the stories for Torque Control's Short Story Club, but I missed last week's because I couldn't really think of anything to say about it. The story was nicely written, and all, but it's just kind of... there.
This week's post was delayed by my annual day of blog silence, so it will probably miss inclusion in the discussion post, but that's okay, as this is another one where my reaction will be dominated by my own idiosyncratic reactions. This is the type of story where the real point is just to introduce the richly detailed world in which it takes…
drorzel | September 6, 2010The AV Club offers a list of 28 gleeful breakup songs, a category that includes some great tunes. The comments contain some good additional suggestions, and they still missed one of my all-time favorites, "Bye, Bye" by the Subdudes (if that link won't play, you can get a cell-phone camera live version on YouTube-- skip the first 0:50 or so). I'm sure there are plenty of other good ones missing as well.
Of course, the real gem of the article is this charming little tune from Cee-Lo Green:
That's spectacular. Apparently this was a viral Internet smash-- the sort of thing that gets a song…
drorzel | September 5, 2010The 2010 Hugo Award Winners were announced on Sunday night. Of course, this being a science fiction award, it's only appropriate that they be announced from THE FUTURE, so the results were available early this morning, US time.
It turns out that I voted for 1.5 of the fiction award winners: China Mieville's The City and The City shared the Best Novel award with Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, and I also voted for the Charlie Stross novella. The other two categories, I'm basically OK with-- I "NO AWARD"-ed "Bridsicle," but that whole category was pretty weak, and it wasn't as awful as "…
drorzel | September 2, 2010"Hey, dude, whatcha doin'?"
"Signing these contracts. I'm not sure why they need four copies, but they do."
"Contracts for what?"
"The new book. Remmeber, the one we've been talking about these last few weeks? Sequel-of-sorts to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog? About relativity?"
"Oh, yeah, that's right! We're doing another book! Where do I sign?"
"What do you mean, 'Where do I sign?' You're a dog."
"I could, you know, put a paw print on the line, or something."
"I suppose you could, but it wouldn't be legally binding. Dogs aren't allowed to sign contracts."
"You know that's horribly…
drorzel | September 1, 2010Rubber dino, you're the one,
You make bathtime lots of fun
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
Doo-doo doo-de-doo
Rubber dino, fearsome roar,
Good thing you're a herbivore
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
doo-doo doo-de-doo
Every day when I,
get undressed next to the sink,
I find a
Little fella who's,
cute and yellow and extinct
When I squeeze you, water squirts,
Then I giggle, 'til it hurts
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of you
Doo-doo doo-de-doo
You're my favorite bathtime toy,
Watch out for that asteroid!
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of
Rubber dino, I'm awfully fond of,
Rubber dino…
drorzel | September 1, 2010Prompted by an off-line conversation, a question about the magnum opus of Jim Steinman and Marvin Lee Aday:
Playing "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" at a wedding reception is:online surveys
I'm sure you can come up with lots of songs that would be even less appropriate. Feel free to leave them in the comments.
drorzel | August 31, 2010Sunday was a really long day around Chateau Steelypips, and I couldn't see staying awake to watch the premiere of Phil Plait's Bad Universe on the Discovery Channel, so I'm way late in writing about it. I DVRed it, though, and watched it last night.
The theme of the premiere/ pilot was killer rocks from out of space, and focused on Phil getting his MythBusters on to test various ideas about asteroid or comet impacts and how to stop them. They blew up a scale model, shot projectiles into various types of rock to simulate nuclear bombs or kinetic impacts, all in the name of testing what would…