I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil’s Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of… Continue reading The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder
Category: Pop Culture
Science: 3.8% Notable
Last year, around this time, I posted a rant about the lack of science books in the New York Times‘s “Notable Books of 2007.” While I was out of town last week, they posted this year’s list. So, have things improved? Yes and no. They do, in fact, have two books that are unquestionably science… Continue reading Science: 3.8% Notable
Re-Reading Tolkien at Tor
A while back, Kate started doing a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Lord of the Rings on her LiveJournal. Life intervened, though, and the project fell by the wayside. She’s re-started it, this time as part of the Tor media empire. So far, there’s an introductory post and a discussion of the foreword and prologue, with… Continue reading Re-Reading Tolkien at Tor
Spaceman Blues, by Brian Francis Slattery [Library of Babel]
I’ve gotten out of the book-logging habit, but Spaceman Blues is good enough that I feel compelled to write about it. I had heard of the book some time back– I believe I recall Patrick Nielsen Hayden saying nice things about it at some con or another– but the packaging didn’t really give me a… Continue reading Spaceman Blues, by Brian Francis Slattery [Library of Babel]
Ask a ScienceBlogger: Science Fiction Promotes Science?
The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a ScienceBlogger question, and this one’s right up my alley: What do you see as science fiction’s role in promoting science, if any? If you look over in the left sidebar, you’ll see a SF category, which is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read… Continue reading Ask a ScienceBlogger: Science Fiction Promotes Science?
Einstein on TV
The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn’t have time to post. The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his “miracle year” in 1905, to… Continue reading Einstein on TV
Strain to SEE
When I’m in the right mood, I’m a sucker for really awful sci-fi movies. For example, Saturday night I stayed up far too late to watch the end of the tv-movie version of The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by the prolific and recently deceased Luddite Fiction writer Michael Crichton. It’s been twenty-plus years… Continue reading Strain to SEE
Me On TV (On the Internet)
As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here: This was the first time I’ve done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
Many-World vs. Multiverse
In the recent discussion of Many-Worlds and making universes, Jonathan Vos Post asked what science fiction treatments of the idea I like. The answer is pretty much “none,” because most SF treatments are distractingly bad. For example, last night I finished Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, a whopping huge brick of a book setting up an incredibly… Continue reading Many-World vs. Multiverse
The DiVincenzo Code
If, like me, you have long thought that the world needs more thrillers based on quantum physics, the students and post-docs of the Ultrafast Group at Oxford have got a short film for you: The DiVincenzo Code, in six parts on YouTube. It doesn’t make any less sense than a Dan Brown novel, and the… Continue reading The DiVincenzo Code