A few weeks ago, I gave a talk based on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the University of Toledo’s Saturday Morning Science program. At that time, their local PBS affiliate recorded the talk, for use on their very nice streaming video site, Knowledgestream.org. My talk is now up, and the video is… Continue reading What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics, Now Streaming
Links for 2011-04-07
Revenue Streams 2010 « Whatever “In my continuing quest to demystify things related to the business of writing, at least inasmuch as they relate to me, today I am going to talk revenue streams. As many of you know, I am a huge proponent of writers having multiple revenue streams, so that when one of… Continue reading Links for 2011-04-07
“This Union, Is There Gonna Be Meetings?”
I’m deep in editing mode at the moment, and faintly depressed at the number of words I have managed to remove by changes like turning “was [verb]ing ” to “[verb]ed.” It’s a tedious and labor-intensive process that is weirdly exhausting– all I’m doing is sitting in a cafe somewhere reading text with a red pen… Continue reading “This Union, Is There Gonna Be Meetings?”
Links for 2011-04-06
The Blog : How to Get Your Book Published in 6 (Painful) Steps : Sam Harris “The process of getting a nonfiction book published by a mainstream publisher–as distinct from an academic press, or a smaller, independent publisher–is quite straightforward. This is not to say that most people understand this process, or that success is… Continue reading Links for 2011-04-06
Links for 2011-04-05
Surviving the World – Lesson 921 – Offense I’m offended. (tags: comics surviving-world pictures culture silly) The birth of electromagnetism (1820) | Skulls in the Stars “It is oddly fitting that the birth of electromagnetism, and an entirely new direction in physics, started with the tiniest twitch of a compass needle. In the year 1820,… Continue reading Links for 2011-04-05
Does the Regular Season Matter?
This past weekend, I ended up hearing sports-radio pinheads holding forth proudly about their ignorance of college basketball. The justification for this is that “the regular season doesn’t matter,” since the NCAA tournament is single-elimination, and lesser-known teams keep ending up making big runs in the tournament. Since there’s apparently no way in their world… Continue reading Does the Regular Season Matter?
Links for 2011-04-03
Jonah Lehrer on Problems With SATs, GREs, the NFL Combine and Other Performance Tests | Head Case – WSJ.com “We live in a society obsessed with maximum performance. Think of exams like the SAT and the GRE. Though these tests take only a few hours, they’re supposed to give schools and companies a snapshot of… Continue reading Links for 2011-04-03
Biomedicine: The English Literature of the Sciences?
Thursday’s post about the troubles of biomedical scientists drew a response from Mad Mike saying that, no, biomedical science Ph.D.’s really don’t have any career options outside of academia, and pointing to Jessica Palmer’s post on the same subject for corroboration. Jessica writes: This is something I’ve tried to explain many times to nonscientists: most… Continue reading Biomedicine: The English Literature of the Sciences?
Advancing by Subtracting
I’ve got draft versions of all the chapters of the book-in-progress now, which is great. Of course, when you add up all the words in those chapters, it comes to 92,000, when the contract calls for 70,000. Which means I’ve entered the part of the writing process where progress is measured not by how many… Continue reading Advancing by Subtracting
Weather Poll: White Stuff
Another day, another snowfall. Sigh. Thus, a poll: Snow on April 1 is:online survey Snow, even in springtime, is depressingly, boringly, classical, so you may choose one and only one option, not a quantum superposition of multiple answers.