Pop Culture
drorzel | December 10, 2014So, you've picked up your copy of the just-released Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist-- you have bought a copy, right?-- and now you're thinking "I'd love to curl up and read this, but what should I listen to while I do that?"
Well, never fear, I'm here to help. Also, I'm really tired, and this seems like a quick and easy blog post... Anyway, here are some of the crucial records involved in the making of this book.
1) Teeth Dreams by the Hold Steady This was probably the most crucial album of the lot, because it came out just at the time I needed to power through a whole bunch of edits…
drorzel | December 9, 2014Today is the official release date for Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, so of course there are a bunch of exciting things happening:
-- There's a short excerpt at the Science of Us blog from New York Magazine. This is a chunk of the Introduction, about how scientists are smart, but not that smart.
-- I wrote a Big Idea essay at Whatever, talking about how this book is about the BIGGEST idea in the history of humanity. Which is only a tiny bit of hyperbole.
-- Rosemary Kirstein included Eureka as a gift suggestion, which is very cool, as she writes awesome books. You should check them…
drorzel | November 24, 2014Spent the weekend in Florida getting together with some friends from college, which was a much-needed recharge for me at the end of a brutal term. It's probably fitting to ease back into routine with a return to my blogging roots, and talk a bit about a book. Specifically, the new William Gibson novel, The Peripheral.
I haven't actually read any reviews of this, because I don't really need to read reviews to know that I want to read a new Gibson-- he's that significant a writer. His work needs the proper context, though-- while I technically started this a week or two ago as bedtime reading,…
drorzel | November 17, 2014The first time you hear about dark matter, it sounds kind of crazy-- asserting that we're surrounded by tons of invisible stuff is usually a good way to get locked up. But the process of its discovery is surprisingly ordinary: it's just what you do when you play cards.
Here's the second green-screen video I've done to promote Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, which comes out three weeks from tomorrow (but can be pre-ordered today!). This one is about card games, modern astrophysics, and why you probbaly shouldn't play bridge against Vera Rubin:
For those who dislike video, I'll put…
drorzel | November 10, 2014My new book comes out one month from yesterday, or four weeks from tomorrow. Of course, yesterday was Sunday, and tomorrow's a federal holiday, both lousy times for promotional posts, so I'll drop this in today instead. Here's a promotional video I put together, about how the history of quantum mechanics can be compared to working a crossword puzzle:
This is basically the talk I gave at TED@NYC last year, done in front of a green screen with slides edited in behind me for that An Inconvenient Truth vibe (Nobel committee, take note...). With some bonus cute kid photos and an explicit…
drorzel | November 9, 2014I'm teaching a Gen Ed course on relativity this term, which means I'm spending the last few weeks of the term discussing black holes. Which, in turn, means there was no way I couldn't use that story about Kip Thorne calculating the appearance of a black hole for the movie. Especially since I have the students reading Thorne's book.
And that, in turn, meant I needed to see the movie. So we got a sitter for the kids Saturday night, and went to the local theater to check it out. And, you know, it's pretty much what it's advertised as: A very pretty giant SF movie, with all that implies, both…
drorzel | October 29, 2014A fine if somewhat intermittent tradition hereabouts has been the offering of high-concept Halloween costumes for people interested in physics, surfacing in 2010, 2012, and 2013. I'm a little too fried right now to do anything all that deep, but I'll try to offer a few suggestions; see also these particle-physics suggestions from Symmetry magazine, who have an art staff to make animated GIFs of their ideas.
Sexy Tycho Brahe: Ruffled collar, magnificent mustache, a little gold paint on your nose. Critically important that you remember to go to the bathroom beforehand, though-- it's going to be…
drorzel | October 28, 2014As mentioned last week, I was the on-hand expert for the Secret Science Club's foray into Massachusetts, a screening of the movie Particle Fever held at MASS MoCA. This worked out nicely in a lot of respects-- it gave me an excuse to visit the newly renovated Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and check out the spiffy new library at Williams (where they have my second book on the shelves, but not my first; I may need to send them an author copy in lieu of a check this year...). I also did some random nostalgia things like grabbing dinner at Colonial Pizza (now in a strip mall halfway to…
drorzel | October 25, 2014I got the time for the regular hangout wrong, and then we had some weird computer difficulties, so we only had ten minutes for Uncertain Dots this week. Which was enough time for me to say disparaging things about comic book movies, so, you know, if that interests you...
Here's the making of Interstellar story about Kip Thorne.
Here's the Avengers 2 trailer.
Also, a program note: I will be at MASS MoCA tonight talking about Particle Fever, if you'd like to hear me talk about real physics on film, or just take issue with my slagging off comic-book movies in person...
drorzel | October 21, 2014That's "Mass" as in Massachusetts, not the stuff associated with the Higgs field... specifically, North Adams, MA, where I'll be this Saturday night, October 25th, at the Secret Science Club screening of Particle Fever. This will be at the MASS MoCA, tickets here.
The Secret Science Club is a regular gathering in New York City featuring mind-bending lectures, volatile experiments, and thematic chemical libations (special cocktails, that is). It’s like the coolest science class you’ve ever been to, but with drinks and a DJ. SSC rockets into MASS MoCA with a special screening of Particle Fever…
sa smith | October 20, 2014October 2012, I got to see Nightwish at a small venue in OKC.
1-- This was one of the first nights Floor Jansen was officially the New Singer for Nightwish. She blew me away.
2-- This was a *tiny* venue. Nightwish fills huge stadiums and auditoriums all over the world, but OKC? Teeny venue. And that band played for us the same way they would have played for an audience of thousands. They *WAILED*.
3-- It was my partners birthday, and while the security guys couldnt let us backstage, he did get us an autographed poster:
They are an extremely talented group of musicians and singers, and just…
drorzel | October 16, 2014I enjoyed Caleb Scharf's previous book, Gravity's Engines a good deal, so I was happy to get email from a publicist offering me his latest. I'm a little afraid that my extreme distraction of late hasn't really treated it fairly, but then again, the fact that I finished it at all in my current state of frazzlement may be the best testament I can offer to its quality. This is a sweeping survey of what we've learned about our place in the universe over the last five hundred years or so.
Now, a grandiose description like that often portends a bunch of wifty philosophizing that poses grand…
drorzel | October 6, 2014With this morning's announcement of the 2014 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine, the annual Nobel season is upon us. I didn't do a betting pool post this year, because when I announced last year's winner, I was reminded that I had never paid off the prize to the previous year's winner. So I think I just don't have the time to manage that contest right now...
Anyway, the Physics prize will be announced tomorrow, and while I'm not going to host a contest, I did want to offer some space for speculation about what might win. Unlike last year, when the suspense was mostly about which subset of…
drorzel | October 5, 2014Saturday afternoon, I drove down to the city to see the reunited Afghan Whigs play the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. I saw them years and years ago in DC, around 1996 or so on the tour for Black Love, and that was a great show. They've always been one of my favorite bands, so it was great to get another chance to see them live again.
Of course, the passage of 18 years has wrought some changes, most significantly a different lineup for the band. They never had much luck keeping drummers around, but this time they've also lost original guitarist Rick McCollum. This has both good and…
drorzel | October 4, 2014The exciting news of the week: Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has gotten a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Woo-hoo!
They've said nice things about my previous two books, but getting the star is a big deal. And it's a really good capsule description of the book, with a great pull quote in the last sentence:
This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe.
Really, I can't ask for better than that.
I found out this was coming at the end of last week, where it was an absolute life-saver after some sanity-threatening stuff…
drorzel | October 1, 2014Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has officially been sent to the printers, so we're at the phase of things where I don't have anything to do but think about publicity. There are some reviews forthcoming, at least one of which I'm very happy about, but I'll share more about that when it becomes public. I've also picked up some nice blurbs from very smart folks:
"I know, I know, you think you're just not smart enough to be a scientist. Chad Orzel might convince you otherwise with Eureka. Drawing on basketball, stamp collecting, Angry Birds, Iron Chef, and Antiques Roadshow among his…
drorzel | September 30, 2014Two language-related items crossed in the Information Supercollider today: the first was Tom's commentary on an opinion piece by Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, the second Steven Pinker on the badness of academic writing.
All of them are worth reading, and I only have small dissents to offer here. One is that, unlike Tom and Crease and Goldhaber, I'm actually just fine with the popular usage of "quantum leap" for a particularly dramatic change. Yes, I realize that the canonical "quantum jump" is the smallest possible change, but I think that's putting too much emphasis on only one aspect…
drorzel | September 22, 2014I get a fair number of books to review, but I'm often pretty bad about writing them up in a timely manner. Of course, most of them are well over 70 pages long, which is why I've managed to turn around Roberto Trotta's The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is in the course of a weekend.
As you can probably get from the title, this is a book about astronomy written in Up Goer Five style, using only the thousand most common English words (which are helpfully listed near the start of the book, in case you want to check whether he cheated...), plus proper names. And there'…
drorzel | September 22, 2014The AV Club had a Q&A last week asking "What would be your entrance music?" As a music fan and a sports junkie this is, of course, a nearly irresistable question, though a lot of other things got in the way before I could get around to typing up an answer.
I've always kind of thought that Superchunk's "Hyper Enough" would be fantastic entrance music for somebody:
Of course, that somebody wouldn't really be me, as I'm not especially hyper. If I were going to be running out onto a stadium floor for some sporting purpose, I would need something more in line with my actual speed. Maybe a…
drorzel | September 21, 2014My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Steven Gould's Exo (excerpt at Tor). This is the fourth book in the Jumper series (not counting the movie tie-in novel), and ordinarily wouldn't be worth much of a review, because if you haven't read the first three, this book won't make a lick of sense. If you have read the others, it's a worthy sequel, but three earlier books makes for a lot of backstory to explain in writing the book up.
It's worth noting, though, because it belongs to a sort of unofficial subgenre: books about Working Things Through. The story includes a huge amount of…