Pop Culture
drorzel | November 18, 2009It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.
So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:
The educational trends…
drorzel | November 17, 2009There's been an independent rediscovery of the notion of using dogs to explain physics, as you can see in this YouTube video of Golden Retrievers explaining the structure of atoms:
Emmy thinks she should get royalties, in the form of cheese. But then, she thinks that about everything...
drorzel | November 16, 2009Blogging has been light of late because I was in the Houston area for the weekend, at the annual meeting of Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society (think Phi Beta Kappa, but for science nerds). Every chapter is required to send a representative to the annual meeting at least once every three years, and as I'm the current president of the Union chapter, I got to go this year.
In a lot of ways, the meeting was more Boskone than DAMOP, and I'm not just saying that because there were little ribbons for everybody's badges. This is an obvious consequence of the fact that it was mostly a…
drorzel | November 12, 2009SteelyKid had a check-up yesterday, and got three shots (chicken pox, MMR, and seasonal flu). This may or may not be related to her high fever and general misery last night; whatever the cause, she was not a happy camper.
Since she can't very well go to day care like that, I'm staying home with her this morning. I'm also leaving for the Sigma Xi meeting this afternoon, which is outside Houston, so I'm going to go from dealing with an unwell toddler to feeling like an unwell toddler as I deal with the air travel system. Whee!
In honor of spending the morning trying to distract an unhappy…
drorzel | November 11, 2009I've gradually gotten used to the idea that as a semi-pro blogger, I will occasionally be sent review copies of books I've never heard of. These are generally physics books, and I have a stack of them sitting next to the bed at the moment, not being read nearly fast enough.
It's only recently that I realized that, having written a book in which I explain quantum mechanics through conversations with my dog, I'll probably start getting dog books as well. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind-- we like free books, here in Chateau Steelypips-- but it's going to be a significant change.…
drorzel | November 11, 2009If you want to be a musician, there are some simple rules you must follow:
And now you know...
(The squeaky toy noises in the early part of this drive Emmy nuts...)
drorzel | November 10, 2009I failed to write something on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall yesterday, partly because I think the other six million blog posts on the subject had it pretty well covered. Another factor, though, was the fact that I don't have the sort of crystal-clear recollection of where I was and what I was doing on that night. I can reconstruct where I must've been-- I was a college freshman, so I would've watched it in the tv room on the second floor of Fayerweather-- but I don't clearly recall the event itself. It's all mixed together with the endless discussions of What It All Meant…
drorzel | November 9, 2009There's a nice post over at "The World in a Satin Bag" on the important things editors do. The emphasis is on fiction publishing, but most of it applies to non-fiction as well:
Editors make you into a better writer. Emphasis on better. They don't make you into the greatest writer ever, but they certainly teach you a few things. Ask anyone published by a major publisher or even a small press. Ask them if their editor taught them anything. They did, didn't they? I thought so.
This won't make any impact on the "Blogs Rule, Olde Media Drool" crowd, but it's always nice to see somebody else who…
drorzel | November 8, 2009Via somebody on a mailing list, Eric Whiteacre's virtual choir:
The post I got this from doesn't contain any details, nor does it contain useful links to the making of this particular video, but looking around the top level of the blog it's fairly clear that this was put together from a large number of individual videos of people singing just one part of the song. He's got another piece underway, and you can see some of the individual parts.
This is one of those really cool and impossible-to-predict things you get with the modern Internet. And I think this stuff is ultimately a lot cooler…
drorzel | November 7, 2009We subscribe to Locus, the SF review and news magazine, and every month when it arrives, I flip through it quickly to look at the ads. This is a useful guide to what's coming out from various publishers, but it's also kind of fascinating to see how the different publishers market their stuff.
In particular, it's interesting to see how Baen pitches their books, because they are aimed with laser-like precision at people who aren't me. I'm sure their ads work very well for their target audience, but they make their forthcoming books sound absolutely horrifying to me. This month's ad may be the…
drorzel | November 4, 2009There are at least as many ways to write really interesting essays as there are people writing really interesting essays, but for the most part, they break down into two broad types. There are the ones that completely change the way you look at some subject you thought you knew about, forcing you to change your opinion of it; and there are the ones that explain some subject in such a clear and compelling way that they change the way you think about it (even if you don't change your opinion of the subject).
Those two types account for most of the interesting essays out there, but don't cover…
drorzel | November 3, 2009Over at the Mid-Majority, Kyle Whelliston (formerly of espn.com) has a great essay on the "Sportz" phenomenon:
Sports are great. Actual participation is awesome, but watching other people do sports can still be pretty good too. These days, people can watch sports anytime, anywhere and in whatever state of undress they choose. These are truly the days of miracles and wonders! All thanks to the Sports-Industrial Complex, which brought you mantertainment, lite beer and the Sports Bubble.
When sports became industrialized in the latter part of the 20th Century, the S.I.C. became the conduit…
drorzel | October 30, 2009No, this is not a reference to the National Academy of Sciences report from a few years ago. This has to do with the newest Wheel of Time book, because while I'm a long distance removed from my Usenet days, some habits die hard.
If you haven't read the previous eleven books, none of what follows will make any sense. If you haven't read the latest volume, don't click below the fold unless you want everything spoiled for you.
So, how does Brandon Sanderson do at filling Robert Jordan's shoes?
The short answer is: Pretty darn good. He doesn't exactly match the style of the earlier books, but he…
drorzel | October 30, 2009It's fall, which means that the major American sports are all ramping up (baseball is in its brief period of being interesting, the NFL is nearing the middle of its season, the NBA has just gotten underway, which means that real basketball will start soon). This also means that the major advertisers have rolled out the commercial that will be annoying the hell out of everybody for the next several months.
Sports are really the only place that I see commercials-- I tend to watch sporting events live, but use the DVR to time-shift other programming, allowing me to fast-forward through the ads.…
drorzel | October 29, 2009Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled "7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School," which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty:
What is good writing?
Ask an English teacher, and they'll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They'll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they're really honest, they'll admit it has a scholarly tone -- prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could've been written by Willie…
drorzel | October 27, 2009There's a new release today that everyone's talking about. A perfect topic for a poll:
New Jordan book by Sanderson! Your reaction?(survey)
Your opinion is important to us, so please choose carefully.
You think I'm kidding about the ruptured disc thing? Look at the size of this thing:
Today's depressing thought: The Eye of the World is copyright 1990. Which means I've been reading this series for longer than some of my students have been alive.
Sadly, I'm not able to do the full-on "party like it's 1995" thing-- I think the college would frown on my sleeping in and skipping class because I…
drorzel | October 26, 2009I'm kind of in a fog today, which I'm choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can't be jet lag, because I didn't change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students in my classes have taken ill with flu-like symptoms, and been sent home or quarantined). I have too much to do to bag the whole day, though, so I'm going to resort to stealing a blog post topic from Chuck Klosterman.
In one of the essays in his new book Eating the Dinosaur, he writes:
Here's a…
drorzel | October 22, 2009I've been up late all this week grading things, and I have lab all morning, so I'm not going to do any detailed blogging about subtle aspects of physics. So here's something from the pop culture side: I was listening to Bill Simmons's ESPN podcast with Chuck Klosterman yesterday, and at one point, they talk about the question of what modern act will be deemed sufficiently old and safe to play the Super Bowl halftime show. Klosterman has some amusing things to say, but this also seems like a perfect topic for a blog poll:
Who will play the Super Bowl halftime show in 2020?(polls)
Klosterman…
drorzel | October 20, 2009I was up until almost midnight grading labs, and I have forty-odd grant proposals to read today, so I'm going to be unplugging from the Internet and working on, well, work. For entertainment while I'm paying for my procrastination, here's another two-word lyrics quiz. These two-word phrases each uniquely identify a pop song (I hope). If you know the song from the phrase, leave the answer in the commnets, and add a two-word phrase of your own for other people to guess.
The first three are left over from the last round:
up drivel
town predicts
wicked strict
unlovable hand
NYPD choir
stained-…
drorzel | October 16, 2009I've watched the first few episodes of "Flash Forward" more or less as they aired-- I've been DVR-ing them, but watching not long after they start, so I can fast-forward through the commercials, and still see it. I could just let them sit on the DVR, but at least for me, the DVR tends to be a sort of television graveyard-- I have a whole bunch of Nova episodes saved up that I never quite get around to watching. Watching them the same night helps me remember to watch them, rather than just piling them up.
Anyway, I've been watching, and I have to say, I'm really not blown away at this point.…