Pop Culture
drorzel | June 16, 2009Female Science Professor is revisiting an old topic, namely, the academic novel:
I was thinking about the general topic of academic novels because I was looking for some books to read and was looking through the lists in the links above. And then I wondered: Why do I want to read an academic novel during the summer? Why do I want to read an academic novel at all? What is it that I like about (some of) them?
This seems like a good opportunity to both have a discussion and do some science. There are three steps to the experiment:
Leave a comment here saying what your favorite academic novel…
sa smith | June 14, 2009Season 2 of True Blood starts tonight.
Excuse me for a moment.
*ahem* EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! *giddyclappingandgiggling*
Now before you roll your eyes and ask 'What the hell is up with vampires these days? Is 'True Blood' just a slightly less pathetic version of 'Twilight' shit?', watch this PR clip created by 'The Fellowship of the Sun'.
Reverend Steve Newlin, pastor of the Fellowship of the Sun congregation, one of the fastest growing pro-living evangelical movements in the world, today announced his campaign to Save Human Marriage.
"There is a new storm gathering," Newlin said in…
drorzel | June 12, 2009Tom Levenson has another post up in his ongoing series about the writing and publishing process of his new book, this one about generating publicity. At this point, he's gone past what I've experienced so far, but this is fortuitously timed, as I got a note from my editor yesterday saying that the bound galleys are in. Woo-hoo!
There will be pictures and so on when I get my copies (probably next week). This seems kind of early-- the book itself won't be out for another six months-- but I assume that the folks at Scribner know what they're doing. Anyway, I eagerly await Tom's next installment…
drorzel | June 12, 2009There's a nice write-up about the World Science Festival in the New York Times today:
The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at Lincoln Center Wednesday night. Over the next three days the curious will have to make painful choices: attend an investigation of the effects of music on the brain with a performance by Bobby McFerrin, or join a quest for a long-lost…
drorzel | June 11, 2009A little while ago, I griped about the Short Story nominees for this year's Hugo Awards. I've now finished the nominees in the Novella and Novelette categories, so I thought I'd comment on them as well.
As a general matter, I'd just about be willing to contribute money toward a fund to buy supporting memberships for fans who can't generally afford Worldcon, in hopes of getting fewer nominees that suck. Seriously. It only takes 20-ish nominations to get a story on the ballot in one of the short fiction categories, and this would be a worthy project if it meant not having to read another…
drorzel | June 8, 2009Two things that are worth a plug beyond the Links Dump level:
1) Over at the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum wants you to look at pictures of people kissing. This is for Science, so stop giggling, and tell her what you think of the pictures.
2) There's a new blog, Ecocomics, dedicated to exploring the burning questions of how the principles of economics play out in superhero comics. This is both more and less silly than that description makes it sound. If you'd like a participatory entry to parallel Sheril's kissing survey, they're asking readers who's the richest character in comics.
drorzel | June 4, 2009Tom Levenson has another excellent piece in his series on the writing of his forthcoming book on Newton, this one on hitting a wall:
The one bit of history specific to the Newton and the Counterfeiter project came when I hit a wall. I had written about a quarter of the manuscript by the autumn of 2006 - I'd even submitted a chunk of it to the departmental committee pondering my tenure case, which is as those of you in the academy will know, something of a fraught moment.
But as I tried to make the turn out of what was in essence back-story, my account of Newton's life up to the point of his…
drorzel | June 4, 2009When this first came out, I didn't pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn't really think I'd be interested in reading a whole book on the subject.
I saw Jennifer and Diandra on Bloggingheads a little while back, and she made it sound pretty interesting. And then I saw that she was giving a public lecture at DAMOP, and figured it would be good for airplane reading on the way down and back.
The Preface gives a nice description of how she came to write the book:…
drorzel | June 3, 2009For reasons that don't really matter, I learned yesterday that there is a marathon in Antarctica:
On December 12th, 2009, the fifth Antarctic Ice Marathon will take place at 80 Degrees South, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole at the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains. This race presents a truly formidable and genuine Antarctic challenge with underfoot conditions comprising snow and ice throughout, an average windchill temperature of -20C, and the possibility of strong Katabatic winds to contend with. Furthermore, the event takes place at an altitude of 3,000 feet.
That's one of the…
sa smith | June 2, 20091. The new Sookie Stackhouse book came out a few weeks ago, 'Dead and Gone'. I didnt blag about it because it sucked donkey balls. The general consensus is that it reads like someone other than Charlaine Harris wrote it. Someone who hadnt read the first eight books very well... if at all. Im not mad, though, as long as she recovers. One clunker out of nine aint bad at all.
Get it at the library, or wait till paperback if your collection must be complete.
2. Season 2 of 'True Blood' starts in eleven days. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! *giddy clapping*
You can try to win Season 1 DVDs or…
drorzel | June 2, 2009I'm eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, as a paid-up member of Anticipation. As such, I got the free packet of nominated works that they put together for the voters, and have started working my way through the short fiction (I've read all the novel nominees that I'm going to). Whether you're eligible to vote or not, you can get links to most of the nominated works here.
I've only read the Short Story nominees so far, and I have to say, I would vote for "No Award" five times if it was a choice between that and "Article of Faith" winning. I really could've sworn that this vein of crap was…
drorzel | June 1, 2009Two noteworthy things in the meta-blog category:
1) The 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prize nominations are up, and it's a great list of sciencey bloggy goodness. If you're looking for a way to procrastinate, you could kill several days reading all 171 entries.
Once you're done reading them, go vote for your favorite. The top 20 vote-getters will be the shortlist given to Steven Pinker to choose the winners from.
2) Not on the list yet, but sure to provide some quality entries next year is the brand new X-Change Files blog from the Science and Entertainment Exchange. They're providing…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2009On Saturday, the Free-Ride family went to the Maker Faire.
The place was abuzz with things to do and see and hear (and taste and feel), so we'll just give you the snapshot.
There were fabulous arty and tech-y (and arty/tech-y) items on display, including a giant assembly of 2 liter soda bottles, spinning bike wheels onto which our drawings were projected in lights, and the obligatory giant Lego castle/cake thingy:
We also saw and heard a beautiful automated music-playing dealie created by Ranjit Bhatnagar, a friend of mine from geek camp years ago.
And, there was a cool Wimshurst machine (…
jstemwedel | May 28, 2009There's an interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune on the "Oprah effect". The upshot is that products or people who Oprah deigns to grace with airtime tend to find enormous public acceptance.
While this is well and good if the product is a novel or the person is a television chef, it's less clear that the Oprah effect is benign in the case of people without medical expertise offering medical advice.
From the article:
In May, Winfrey, whose contract for "The Oprah Winfrey Show" expires in 2011, struck a deal with actress, author and Chicago native Jenny McCarthy, who emerged as an autism…
drorzel | May 25, 2009Over at the Inverse Square Blog, Tom Levenson is doing a series of blog posts walking through the steps involved in getting a book published. Unfortunately, there isn't a compact way to link to the whole series, but the posts to date are:
Part 0: Introduction to the Series
Part 1.0: The Proposal (with an example to look at)
Part 2.0: Agents
Part 2.5: Agents and Publishers
I'm not all the way through the publishing process for my first book yet, and my path into the whole business was sufficiently idiosyncratic that I'm not all that comfortable giving advice, but I don't have any hesitation…
jstemwedel | May 20, 2009At White Coat Underground, PalMD explores the question of what kind of responsibilities might fall on celebrities, especially those who use their soapboxes in a way that exceeds the tether of their expertise. The particular celebrities under examination are Jenny McCarthy, who has used her celebrity to spread her views on the proper treatment and prevention of autism, and Oprah Winfrey, who has used her media empire to give McCarthy a soapbox with more reach.
Pal writes:
Jenny claims an expertise based on her personal experience. Whether one views themselves as an expert is largely…
drorzel | May 14, 2009I watched Jonah Lehrer on the Colbert Report a few months ago, and thought he did a really good job. So, when we were offered free copies of his new book, How We Decide, I asked for one, even though it's not my usual sort of thing.
The main point of the book is that what you think you know about thinking is wrong. Through both interesting historical anecdotes and summaries of the latest in cognitive science research, Lehrer shows that our usual decision-making process is nowhere near as rational as we would like to believe. And, moreover, that's not such a bad thing-- without contributions…
drorzel | May 14, 2009I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen bloggers commenting on Tom Hanks's appearance on The Daily Show, in which he talks about CERN:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Tom Hanks
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
Political Humor
Everything he says is pretty much true, but garbled and exaggerated for comic effect. People at CERN have to be shaking their heads, though. Or maybe they don't bother watching the interview segments...
At any rate, it's not nearly as good as their earlier segment with John Oliver at CERN
The Daily Show…
drorzel | May 12, 2009As you can guess from the title, I've done this twice before when I had stuff to do that precluded quality blogging. Kate's in Rochester for a court appearance, leaving me home with SteelyKid, so this seems like a perfect occasion for a third go-round.
The pairs of words in the following list are consecutive words from pop songs that I think might be identifiable given just those two words.The songs range from kind of obvious to impossibly obscure. If you think you know the answer, post a comment completing the line, and then suggest your own two-word phrase from a different song for other…
drorzel | May 8, 2009I get sent a lot of publicity material by people hoping I'll mention it on the blog, but because I'm a terrible person, very little of it actually gets used. One thing that shouldn't be allowed to slip through the cracks, though, is the announcement of the program for the 2009 World Science Festival, June 11-14 in New York City.
There's a lot of interesting stuff there. The emails I got specifically mentioned the Opening Gala, which I suspect is likely to be a little more expensive than I'd like. Unless some New York based science magazine were willing to cough up some, let's call it "seed…