Tom 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,… Continue reading The Dark Art of Blurbing
Month: June 2009
links for 2009-06-19
DNA Evidence Frees Man From Zoo | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source "Shortly after the findings were revealed, Phoenix Zoo staff tranquilized, crated, and transported Panovich by helicopter to his Mesa, AZ home, where he was released into his front yard and reintroduced to his mate and two young." (tags: onion silly animals)… Continue reading links for 2009-06-19
Thursday Baby Blogging, Daddy’s Birthday Edition
Another arbitrary numerical signifier for Daddy! Yay! Not the best Appa-for-scale picture, so here’s one from earlier this morning:
So, About This “Twitter” Thing…
If I were to start using Twitter, what’s the best way to go about that? That is, what interface to the service makes it the least annoying to use? It would be a nice bonus if the package in question could handle multiple accounts, too. I will probably sign up as myself to try things… Continue reading So, About This “Twitter” Thing…
Charter School Study Oddities
Kevin Drum commented on a charter school study a couple of days ago, which made me go look through the report (available from this ultra-minimalist page— seriously, you can’t even be bothered to cut and paste some of your introductory boilerplate into an HTML file to give people an idea of what’s behind those PDF… Continue reading Charter School Study Oddities
Inflatable Space Elevator, Eh
(Alternate post title: “Hey to James Nicoll”) Via John Dupuis, our clever neighbors to the North has come up with a possible (partial) alternative to rockets: “For decades, scientists have been grappling to find a more efficient means of getting payloads into space,” says Brendan Quine (right), professor of space physics and engineering in York’s… Continue reading Inflatable Space Elevator, Eh
links for 2009-06-18
Miracle Diet Through Physics! : Built on Facts "This immediately suggests a tempting diet plan, if not a very lucrative one: drink lots of cold water. Your body burns calories warming up the H2O, you lose weight without much effort. Plausible?" (tags: science food blogs physics built-on-facts) Career Advice: Fast Tracking a Ph.D. – Inside… Continue reading links for 2009-06-18
New Adventures in Retail
Over 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… Continue reading New Adventures in Retail
New Grants Program for Solar Energy
Whether because I’m a blogger, or because I’m a previous recipient of their money (I suspect the latter), I recently got email from the Research Corporation announcing their new Scialog 2009: Solar Energy Conversion program: Scialog will focus on funding early career scientists and building research teams to undertake groundbreaking studies in solar energy conversion.… Continue reading New Grants Program for Solar Energy
If It’s Not Boring, It’s Not Art
One 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… Continue reading If It’s Not Boring, It’s Not Art