The Pip is nute about superheros at the moment, primarily the Justice League, and particularly Batman. He’s got quite the pile of toys around this theme, making for a decent photo subject: Technically, these aren’t all Bat-Toys– you can see a Spiderman Lego set in there (from some alternate universe in which Peter Parker got… Continue reading 083/366: Bat-Toys!
Category: Pop Culture
Wizard Trouble: Full Story
So, a funny story about this. I posted a snippet of a fantasy story back in August, and enough people said nice things about it that I actually got off my ass and did some playing around to format the full story as an epub. This was, of course, complicated by the fact that computers… Continue reading Wizard Trouble: Full Story
Sports Technobabble
Over in Twitter-land, Rhett Allain drew my attention to this “Sports Science” clip from ESPN, about a wild 4th-and-25 play in the Arkansas-Ole Miss game. This is nominally because I’ve been writing about big hits and bouncing balls over at Forbes, but really, I think Rhett’s just working on a “misery loves company” theory, here:… Continue reading Sports Technobabble
Speaking at TEDxAlbany, December 3
I’ve known this for a while now, but they just announced it officially: I’ll be speaking at TEDxAlbany this year, on “The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning”: You might think that the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity– particles that are also waves, cats that are both alive and dead, clocks that run… Continue reading Speaking at TEDxAlbany, December 3
Ancillary Trilogy [Library of Babel]
The hot SF release of the fall is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, concluding the Imperial Radch trilogy. The first of these, Ancillary Justice won a Hugo two years ago, and the second, Ancillary Sword should’ve won this past year, because I really didn’t like the Three-Body Problem. The release of Ancillary Mercy generated a ton… Continue reading Ancillary Trilogy [Library of Babel]
On the Need for “Short Story Club”
So, the Hugo awards were handed out a little while ago, with half of the prose fiction categories going to “No Award” and the other half to works I voted below “No Award.” Whee. I’m not really interested in rehashing the controversy, though I will note that Abigail Nussbaum’s take is probably the one I… Continue reading On the Need for “Short Story Club”
Physics Blogging Round-Up: Two Weeks’ Worth
I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes: — What ‘Ant-Man’ Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped… Continue reading Physics Blogging Round-Up: Two Weeks’ Worth
Science Talks and Pick-Up Hoops
Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It’s an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields: And that raises and interesting question, since aside… Continue reading Science Talks and Pick-Up Hoops
Wizard Trouble
I was staring out the diner window, watching it rain, when Jimmy the werewolf slid into the booth behind me. “We got trouble, boss,” he said, and I spilled coffee over the back of my hand. “Asshole,” I said, not turning around. “How about a little warning next time?” “Don’t want to let on I… Continue reading Wizard Trouble
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [Library of Babel]
Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book– 700-something “pages” in electronic form– and contains yet another bid for “best first paragraph ever”: The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12… Continue reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [Library of Babel]