Pop Culture
drorzel | July 3, 2009I have a new appreciation for Cathy and Amanda and the rest of the infant room staff at the day care center, after two days of chasing a fully recovered SteelyKid around the house because she still had a couple of coxsackie virus blisters on her hands. They're earning the money we're paying them.
She's back in day care today, but my brains have turned to cheese, so here's a lyrics-guessing game. Same drill as before: each of these two-word phrases identifies a song; if you know it and want to guess, leave your guess in the comments, and include a two-word phrase from a different song for…
drorzel | July 3, 2009After a long baby-induced delay, we are finally ready to announce the winners of the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Caption Contest and Poetry Contest. I've obtained a few more copies of the bound galleys from the publisher, so we'll be giving two awards in each contest
category: one for each photo, one for Cuttlefish poetry, and one for non-Cuttlefish poetry.
And the winners are:
Photo 1: The award goes to Nick at #25:
Photo 2: The award goes to Eric Goebelbecer at #8:
Honorable Mention: Dave W. at #11 and Konrad at #30.
Let's ask the judges what they thought:
Chad: All three of the…
drorzel | July 2, 2009There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis. This mostly seems to be due to bad experiences with English Lit classes in high school and/or college, at least based on the long rants they used to uncork on Usenet, back in the day.
I suspect that it is this element of fandom that is responsible for godawful dreck like Mike Resnick's stories making it onto the Hugo Award ballot. Their rejection of the very idea of thinking about what's going on beneath the surface level of a story has left them incapable of…
drorzel | July 2, 2009Just a reminder, if you're someone who's eligible to vote for this year's Hugo Awards, the deadline to do so is tomorrow. Of course, you probably already know that-- they sent out reminder emails last night. They want me to vote so badly, in fact, that I got four reminder emails last night, two with my own member number and voting PIN, and two with somebody else's...
I sent my vote in this morning. Once again, this was a year in which there was a huge gap between the category winners and the next-best nominees. It was awkwardly large, in fact-- not quite big enough to put "No Award" second,…
drorzel | July 1, 2009The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I'm not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an online reading group.
I've been reading a bunch of the commentary that's already been posted (see here for an early round-up, and here for the thoughts of a bunch of political bloggers), and I have to admit, I find a lot of it baffling. There's a lot of hating on the footnotes, and while I will admit…
drorzel | June 29, 2009While I've seen him on tv a bunch of times (both on NOVA and on the Comedy Central fake-news shows), I have somehow managed not to read anything by Neil deGrasse Tyson before. I'm not sure how that happened. After his appearance on The Daily show last year, and especially after the Rubik's Cube thing the next day, I figured I needed to read something of his, so I picked up a copy of Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. Kate actually got to it before me (I was working on my own book, and didn't have much time for reading other people's non-fiction), but it's been serving as bedtime…
drorzel | June 28, 2009One of the fun thing about being at home for a weekend is that I get to see a close-up view of the death of the American newspaper. When I was a kid, Binghamton had two daily papers, the Sun-Bulletin and the Evening Press, published in the morning and evening, respectively (bet you couldn't've guessed that). They merged into the Press and Sun-Bulletin in the early 80's, and ave been declining ever since. These days, it takes about fifteen minutes to read the whole thing cover to cover. Twenty on Sunday.
Today's edition, though, includes a story on self-publishing, which is a sad reminder that…
drorzel | June 25, 2009Just a quick reminder post to note that you can win an advance proof copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in one of two ways:
By captioning pictures of the dog with physics apparatus
By writing short poems about dogs and physics
Regarding the last one, I'm thinking of adding a second poetry prize for "Best poem by somebody who isn't the Cuttlefish." So if you've been intimidated by squidly verse, don't be...
Entries for both contests are open through this Sunday, June 28th.
drorzel | June 25, 2009I've been reading a bunch of posts at Infinite summer lately, where they're planning to spend the summer (re)reading David Foster Wallaces most magnum of opuses, Infinite Jest. In a development that surely nobody could see coming, I've decided to spend some of my infinite (hah) free time re-reading it myself.
If you're not familiar with the book, this is not a trivial undertaking. The main text is some thing like 1000 pages, with an additional hundred-odd endnotes. Many of those endnotes are just names of drugs (this makes sense within the book), but a fair number of them contain information…
drorzel | June 23, 2009Kate's Tolkien re-read has reached Rohan, and her latest re-read post includes a reference to a comment I made about Legolas's improbable visual acuity:
Re: Legolas seeing the Riders: I have since been advised by the resident physicist that the size of a pupil is a limiting factor on the resolution possible--if I understood properly, basically it boils down to how much light can come in--and under the laws of physics as we know them, it is not actually physically possible for Legolas to have resolved that level of detail at 5 leagues, regardless of how good his brain is at decoding images or…
drorzel | June 22, 2009
There once was a dog from Niskayuna...
The previous post announced a photo caption contest for a chance to win an advance proof copy of my book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, six(-ish) months before it's available for purchase. I thought I should include something for the less visually inclined, though, and I do have two extra galley proofs, so...
Announcing the Official How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Poetry contest. The idea is simple: write a short poem involving both dogs and physics in one of the usual short verse forms (haiku, limerick, double dactyl, whatever, as long as it has…
drorzel | June 22, 2009
Today is six months to the day from the official release date of my book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It feels like I ought to do something promotion-like to mark this date, and I have a couple of extra bound galley proofs (seen above with Emmy), sooo.....
I hereby announce the first of two contests giving you, the blog reader, a chance to win an uncorrected galley proof copy of the book six months (ish) before you can buy it. The idea is simple: below the fold are two pictures that just cry out for amusing captions of some sort. The person who comes up with the best caption will get…
drorzel | June 22, 2009In a comment to Friday's classical music post, Chris Evo recommended a TED talk by Benjamin Zander that has the goal of convincing his audience that they love classical music:
If you're not able or inclined to watch it, he goes through a Chopin piano piece in detail, and explains how it plays off our expectation of a particular chord sequence. He's a charismatic guy, and it's a great presentation.
It does not, however, convince me that I love classical music.
This isn't a problem that's limited to music, of course. As a general matter, a lot of people confuse lack of enjoyment with lack of…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2009I thought I'd share a snapshot of my morning with you. For some reason, the internet seems like a good place for it.
The paper promised to be about the evaluation of evidence in understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What follows are the notes I took during the approximately 25 minute conference presentation, edited to clean up typos. I'm not naming names; Google will provide if you really need to know.
The speaker is going to apply the principles of abductive reasoning to see what can be concluded about the assassination of JFK.
Evidence -- all the available, relevant…
drorzel | June 20, 2009It's been a while since I did a straight-up booklog post here, but most of what I've been reading lately hasn't really demanded one. I picked this up the other day after seeing a pile of them in the front of a Barnes & Noble, though, and it does deserve comment.
Dog On It is a twist on a hard-boiled private eye story: It's narrated by Chet, a former police dog cadet now owned by Bernie Little, a down-on-his-luck private detective in the Southwest somewhere (it's not entirely clear where-- Chet's a little fuzzy on geography). Really, how could I pass up a book by a talking dog.
Obviously,…
drorzel | June 19, 2009There's an interesting discussion going on in a place I can't link to, spinning off a comment to the NEA post from the other day:
The point is that the amount of people who see value in or are trained to appreciate more esoteric, more difficult, less accessible music **may** have dropped.
The basic idea is that the decline in the audience for "high art" forms of music may be attributed to cutbacks in musical education in schools. People just aren't educated enough to know that they ought to like classical music, or some such.
This led to a discussion of people's experience with music…
drorzel | June 19, 2009Tom Levenson's series about the writing of his Newton and the Counterfeiter continues with a piece on the getting of blurbs for the cover:
Newton and the Counterfeiter (Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound) is by far my best-blurbed book, boasting enthusiastic and generous praise from a very diverse crew of luminaries — (David Bodanis, Junot DÃaz, Timothy Ferris, Brian Greene, Walter Isaacson, Sylvia Nasar, and Neal Stephenson).
This follows, as I wrote last time, a much sparser field of those who promoted my three previous books. How — and why — did I go for this level of long-…
drorzel | June 17, 2009Over at Tor.com, they've unveiled the new Tor.com store, enabling you to buy your books via your favorite SF publisher. It's pretty bare-bones at the moment, so the most worthwhile feature is probably the special picks feature, where they collect together lists of books recommended by their most popular bloggers. Such as, for example, Kate's Lord of the Rings related recommendation list.
In a similar vein, something I only noticed today (via an ad on my own blog) that may have been around for a while is the Seed store, collecting all the books reviewed by the Corporate Masters over the past…
drorzel | June 17, 2009One of the PDF-only studies that I complained about earlier is a hand-wringing report from the NEA on how public appreciation of art is on the decline. As summarized by Inside Higher Ed:
Compared to the NEA's 1982 survey, the steepest decline was in ballet, which that year was seen by 11.0 percent of college-educated adults, but in 2008 was seen by only 6.3 percent. Declines were seen in every type of art considered: jazz (from 19.4 percent to 14.9 percent); classical music (33.1 percent to 20.1 percent); opera (8.0 percent to 5.2 percent); musicals (40.5 percent to 32.7 percent); non-…
drorzel | June 17, 2009There have been a half-dozen stories in the past few weeks that looked interesting, but didn't even make it into the Links Dump for the day. Why not? Because the stories or studies were only available as PDF files.
I have no idea if this is actually getting worse, but I'm finding this more irritating than ever. It's particularly annoying as there's usually no good reason for presenting the information in question in PDF form-- you could perfectly well present it as an easily linkable and quotable HTML page. Take, for example, this NEA report on the arts-- the one-paragraph note on Inside…