Pop Culture
drorzel | January 24, 2009Via a bunch of people, but most directly Matt Ruff, the Guardian has published a list of "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read". Which has triggered the usual flurry of procrastinatory blog posts indicating which books from the science fiction and fantasy sub-list one has and hasn't read.
I have other things I really ought to be doing, so of course, I had to follow suit. Below the fold is my list, following Matt's convention of marking in bold face those books that I've read all the way through, and putting an asterisk (*) after books I've started or skimmed, but never fully read.
The Hitchhikers…
drorzel | January 21, 2009Lots of people are giving Obama props for the shout-out to atheists in his inaugural address, but I'm deeply concerned about what he said. Or, rather, what he didn't say:
We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers.
Where are the Buddhists? He left out a major world religion!
"Oh, well, what harm can it do?" you may be thinking. "There aren't that many Buddhists in the US, after all, and they're not really concerned with worldly things." This is a dangerously naive view of the world.
If pop culture teaches us anything, it's don't mess with the Buddhists.…
drorzel | January 18, 2009Arts & Letters Daily has an item announcing the death of Andrew Wyeth (the link goes to the New York Times obit). This is noteworthy to me because he's one of a very few artists whose work (in poster form) has ever hung on my wall. Specifically, this painting, titled "Soaring":
I picked it up at a poster sale when I was in college, because I needed something to cover the institutional grey wallpaper in my dorm room, and I wanted something different from the standard-issue Dali posters. I liked the general look, but what sold me on it was realizing that the birds in the picture are…
drorzel | January 5, 2009As Kate notes, I am a paid-up member of this year's Worldcon, and thus entitled to nominate works for the Hugo Awards. Of course, there are a zillion categories, and I'm not entirely sure what to nominate for any of them.
So, if you are a reader or watcher of science fiction and/or fantasy, this is your opportunity to influence my nominations. If there's a book, story, tv show, movie, editor, or artist that you really, really want to see on the ballot, drop me a comment and let me know. I'll look at the work, if I have time, and give it proper consideration.
If you are a person who cares…
drorzel | January 5, 2009Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel is another book in the Great Discoveries series of short books by noted authors about important moments in the history of science, and the people behind them. Previous volumes include Everything and More and A Force of Nature, both of which were excellent in their own way, and Incompleteness fits right in there with them.
As the subtitle makes clear, this is a book about Kurt Gödel's famous Incompleteness Theorem, which shows that any formal logical system complex enough to describe arithmetic must allow the formation of…
drorzel | January 4, 2009Fannish regions of the Internet are all abuzz today, with the introduction of Matt Smith as the next actor to play the lead role in Doctor Who. Sadly, this is not the Matt Smith I went to college with (who would've been a really unusual choice for the part...)-- he's still comfortably obscure to anyone not receiving fundraising letters from the Class of '93.
This is probably as good an occasion as any to make an admission/ provocative statement: I don't get Doctor Who. Probably to an even greater extent than I don't get Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've watched it on occasion since the days when…
drorzel | December 31, 2008Terry Pratchett knighted:
Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld series of novels that have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide, said he was "stunned, in a good way" after receiving a knighthood in the New Year's Honours List.
The 60-year-old writer, below, whose first book was published in 1971, told The Independent last night: "I'm having difficulty fitting it into my head. I'm very pleased indeed. It cheers me up no end." He added: "It will also impress some of my American friends, who started calling me 'Sir' after I received my MBE, which was a little embarrassing."
[...] "I…
jstemwedel | December 25, 2008In an earlier post, I neglected to mention that Uncle Fishy and RMD engaged a party bus to transport revelers to and from the dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barn. Conditions on the roads were icy and treacherous, which means the trip took longer than it might have. Also, there was a wine pairing for each course of the dinner.
So, on the way back, there was singing on the bus. A lot of singing. There were folks on the bus who knew every word to Christmas songs I didn't even know existed. For example, "Dominic the Donkey":
And, owing to David Sedaris, I knew about "I Want a Hippopotamus for…
jstemwedel | December 24, 2008I was presented with this picture by the younger Free-Ride offspring.
I'm not entirely sure whether it's more accurate to describe it as a map or a process diagram. However, this being December 24th, it is timely.
Here is what I can glean from the various pieces of the diagram:
Elves' working stadium.
Of course, the elves are the backbone of Santa's work force. It's never clear to me that they are happy workers.
I hear occasional rumors that the elves have tried to organize a union, only to be thwarted by the man in red.
I'm not even sure Santa pays the elves, and they seem to…
drorzel | December 22, 2008I was up late watching my Giants play the Carolina Panthers (they won in OT-- now you see the importance of Brandon Jacobs), and today is a Baby Day, so I have no deep thoughts to blog. So here are some quick comments on recent reading:
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. This is the concluding volume of the Mistborn trilogy, and reading it confirms that he was the right choice to finish the Wheel of Time. This book takes a huge, complicated plot, and brings all the various pieces together for a satisfying conclusion. He also does a nice job of complicating the set-up from the original…
drorzel | December 20, 2008I've said a number of harsh things here about the bad attitude of people who consider themselve Intellectuals toward math and science. After reading this New Yorker discussion about a Young Adult novel, I may need to change my stance a bit.
It's not that they're better than expected when it comes to math and science-- the subject never comes up. The mind-changing thing is their really appalling ignorance of and attitude toward YA books. It's really pretty amazing. And if somebody said things in public that were half as insulting to teenage girls as what they say about teenage boys, they'd be…
drorzel | December 11, 2008I'm beat, and I have a ton of stuff to do today, so here's some seasonally-appropriate filler. I spent a while in a big chain bookstore's cafe area yesterday, doing some edits on the book-in-progress (I can't do this effectively anywhere where I have Internet access), and was stuck listening to some sort of "quirky" piped-in Christmas music-- "O Holy Night" played on a banjo, or some such.
So, here, as a palette cleanser of sorts, is the official list of Christmas songs that don't suck, as determined by me. These are the four- and five-star rated songs from my iTunes Christmas playlist (there…
drorzel | December 8, 2008I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of Competence Fiction), and a pop-science book titled The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Came of Age by Louisa Gilder, because it looked fairly relevant to my own book-in-progress.
Amusingly, my RSS feeds yesterday brought me the latest in a series of posts in which ZapperZ waxes peevish about the book…
drorzel | December 3, 2008Last year, around this time, I posted a rant about the lack of science books in the New York Times's "Notable Books of 2007." While I was out of town last week, they posted this year's list. So, have things improved?
Yes and no. They do, in fact, have two books that are unquestionably science books on the list: THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow (which I also reviewed), and THE SUPERORGANISM: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson.
By my count, they list 52 non-fiction titles, meaning that a whole 3.8…
drorzel | December 2, 2008A while back, Kate started doing a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Lord of the Rings on her LiveJournal. Life intervened, though, and the project fell by the wayside.
She's re-started it, this time as part of the Tor media empire. So far, there's an introductory post and a discussion of the foreword and prologue, with Chapter 1 to come next week. If they're conscientious about their use of tags, the whole thing should be at this link.
So there's yet one more reason to subscribe to Tor's RSS feed.
drorzel | November 30, 2008I've gotten out of the book-logging habit, but Spaceman Blues is good enough that I feel compelled to write about it. I had heard of the book some time back-- I believe I recall Patrick Nielsen Hayden saying nice things about it at some con or another-- but the packaging didn't really give me a clear idea of what it was like, so I never got around to buying it until Tor offered it as a free e-book. I'll buy a paper copy soon, though, and probably pick up his new book as well.
It's hard to fault the copy writer, though. This is a really difficult book to describe. The promotional site name-…
jstemwedel | November 25, 2008Another "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question has been posed:
What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any?
For an answer to the question as asked, what Isis said. Also, what Scicurious said about a bunch of related questions.
Myself, I think science fiction could do more than make non-scientists excited about science and the cool things science can (or might someday) do. I think science fiction has the potential to help us make better science.
I don't mean that works of science fiction should create the wish-list of technologies for scientists and engineers to bring…
drorzel | November 24, 2008The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a
ScienceBlogger question, and this one's right up my alley:
What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any?
If you look over in the left sidebar, you'll see a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/principles/sf/">SF category, which
is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read a lot of SF,
regularly attend Boskone (a Boston-based convention), and we scheduled
our big Japan trip to coincide with the Worldcon in Yokohama. So,
yeah, this is a question I can spend a little time on...
The short version of the answer is…
jstemwedel | November 21, 2008Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll gets us an imaginary audience with Les Moonves (President and CEO of CBS) to pitch a new TV show about science:
You have thirty seconds -- which, as this blog is still a text-based medium, we'll approximate as strictly 100 words or less -- to pitch your idea for a new TV show that is based on science. It can be an hour drama, a half-hour sitcom, a reality show, game show, documentary, science fiction, whatever you like ...
Most importantly: Les Moonves's goal in life is not to make science look good. It's to make money. So don't pitch that this show…
drorzel | November 18, 2008The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn't have time to post.
The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his "miracle year" in 1905, to 1922 or so, when Einstein received his Nobel Prize. This was his most fertile period, scientifically, and they did a fairly comprehensive job of covering his life during this time, including his struggles for acceptance and his complicated personal life.
There were, of course, some…