How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update

I should probably start date-tagging these updates about miscellaneous How to Teach Physics to Your Dog news. I don’t really mean this to become a second daily links dump, but it’s kind of looking that way…

— As a general matter, it’s dangerous for authors to acknowledge the existence of Amazon customer reviews (acknowledgment leads to responding, responding leads to madness), but the half-dozen customer reviews already posted are really good. These three especially. There are also a couple that aren’t much more coherent than comment spam, so go figure.

— At the risk of setting up a positive feedback loop of endless references, I’ll note that Matt Springer (whose blog, Built On Facts, I’m always plugging here) has some comments on the general idea of the book. Matt’s another non-particle-physicist, so we tend to agree on the relative importance of high-energy and low-energy stuff, and I was consciously trying to avoid talking about particle physics when I wrote the book. I think there’s at least as much cool work going on involving whole atoms and molecules as there is in particle accelerators, and am trying to do my part to publicize it.

— The sales rank has been noodling around between 2,000-3,000 for the last couple of days, with occasional excursions above or below. At the time of this typing, it’s just over 2400 overall, and #17 in the Physics category. Annoyingly, the top-selling book classified as “Physics” on Amazon is something about “Intelligent Design,” which I won’t link to, because I don’t like to encourage charlatans. It’s one of three anti-science books in the top 25, which is kind of depressing, really.

And that’s this morning’s update. I have a phone interview with a reporter later this morning, and more pet pictures to add to the gallery, and I’m sure there will be another obsessive update in the future…