One of the photo caption contest winners, Nick O’Neill, has finished his galley proof, and posted an early review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Casual physics intro books are quite possibly the hardest subgenre of physics books to write. Textbooks and further upper-level reading have expectations both of what you already know… Continue reading Early Review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog
Category: Pop Culture
Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock [Library of Babel]
Over at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, they have a nice post about the Darwin movie, which also appears in today’s Links Dump, with John Scalzi addressing the putative controversy about the movie’s distribution. John’s suggestion for how to attract major US distribution– Will Smith, explosions, and Jennifer Connelly’s breasts– reminded me of The Life… Continue reading Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock [Library of Babel]
The Endnoting of Michael Pemulis
Via the Infinite summer roundup, Infinite Detox has a post about the novel’s treatment of my favorite supporting character, whose title I have shamelessly stolen: The problem I have is that from a dramatic standpoint, the wave of Pemulis-bashing that gathers force on p. 774 and crests in endnote 332 isn’t convincing to me. For… Continue reading The Endnoting of Michael Pemulis
Two-Word Lyrics Quiz #6
(I think that’s the right number…) I’ve got a ton of stuff to do today, and it’s the last Friday of summer, so here’s a little light entertainment. As in previous editions, each of the two-word phrases on the list below should hopefully uniquely identify one pop song. If you think you recognize the song,… Continue reading Two-Word Lyrics Quiz #6
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest [Library of Babel]
I finished re-reading Infinite Jest this week. I’m a few weeks ahead of the Infinite Summer crowd, which is a little frustrating, because I really want to see what they say about the later bits, but they won’t get there for a while yet. Anyway, this is a tough book to summarize, because it’s both… Continue reading David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest [Library of Babel]
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, SPAC 8/25/09
For my birthday, my parents got me two tickets to see Bruce Springsteen play in Saratoga Springs last night. The idea was that Kate and I would go, and they would come up and spend an evening with the grandbaby. Unfortunately, Kate had some sort of intestinal bug (which I now have, joy), and couldn’t… Continue reading Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, SPAC 8/25/09
Karl Schroeder, The Sunless Countries [Library of Babel]
Jo Walton has a very nice review of Karl Schroeder’s Permanence over at Tor.com, which contains a terrific summary of what makes Schroeder great: The problem with talking about Permanence (2002), or any of Schroeder’s work really, is that it’s too easy to get caught up in talking about the wonderful ideas and backgrounds and… Continue reading Karl Schroeder, The Sunless Countries [Library of Babel]
What’s Missing From This Art Project?
Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here’s what you get if you put my name in: You can click on it for a bigger image, that… Continue reading What’s Missing From This Art Project?
The Importance of Distraction
Kate recently signed up for Facebook, and I was talking to her earlier about some of the options for wasting tons of time entertaining yourself with Facebook, and mentioned the ever-popular trivia quizzes and “personality tests” and the like. Of course, I had to caution her that most of the quizzes are really lame, because… Continue reading The Importance of Distraction
Hooray for Tom Doherty
Tor Books founder and publisher Tom Doherty is one of the several Guests of Honor Who Aren’t Neil Gaiman at this year’s worldcon, and as such there was a panel titled “Locus interviews Tom Doherty.” Which might better have been titled “Tom Doherty Tells Cool Stories About His Career in Publishing, with Occasional Prompting from… Continue reading Hooray for Tom Doherty