Category Archives: Books

A Brief History of Timekeeping: Resubmitted

It’s been exactly seven months since I last updated my progress on A Brief History of Timekeeping, with a report that I had submitted the complete manuscript last December. I have since gotten two rounds of editorial comments on it, and made corresponding revisions, and I sent my editor the (hopefully) (mostly) final versions of the figures yesterday, so it now moves off to the production team at BenBella; in a couple of weeks, I’ll get the joy of going over the copyedits…

In celebration of that, here’s the new and improved table of contents:

  • Introduction: A Clock Is a Thing That Ticks
  • Chapter 1: Sunrise
  • Chapter 2: The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars
  • Chapter 3: “Give Us Our Eleven Days!”
  • Chapter 4: The Apocalypse That Wasn’t
  • Chapter 5: Drips and Drops
  • Chapter 6: Ticks and Tocks
  • Chapter 7: Heavenly Wanderers
  • Chapter 8: Celestial Clockwork
  • Chapter 9: To the Moon . . .
  • Chapter 10: Watch This
  • Chapter 11: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
  • Chapter 12: The Measure of Spacetime
  • Chapter 13: Quantum Clocks
  • Chapter 14: Time and Gravity
  • Chapter 15: Time Enough for Everyone
  • Chapter 16: The Future of Time

And, up at the top, you see the US cover (there’s a UK cover as well, though I’m not sure that one’s officially released yet). It also has a release date (January 25, 2022), and can be pre-ordered at Amazon and B&N if you are the sort of wonderful person who likes to do that kind of thing (insert boilerplate here about how pre-ordering books is a tremendously good and important thing to do for your favorite authors, and greatly increases the book’s chances of success).

Finishing this one was a bit of a slog, what with the entire world deciding to go batshit crazy when I was four chapters into the first draft. I’m proud of the final product, though, and look forward to it being released to the wider world at last.

Pandemic Productivity

As noted a couple of days ago, I turned in the completed manuscript of A Brief History of Timekeeping this week, most of which was written under pandemic conditions. This was, to put it mildly, a bit of a slog, in ways that might be worth writing about a little bit.

Looking at the creation dates of the files in my book-in-progress folder, I had basically four chapters in early draft form before everything went pear-shaped back in March. Up to that point, we had a pretty solid routine established that worked well for me: I would get up at five-ish, eat breakfast and walk the dog, then wake The Pip up around 6:30 to get him started getting ready for school. Kate would get up at around that same time, and take charge of feeding the Little Dude and getting him outside to wait for the bus (which came around 7:30). At about 7am, I would decamp for the Starbucks in Niskayuna, stake out a spot at one end of the bar seating, and stay there working on the book until 9-ish.

This worked really well for a couple of reasons, the primary one being that since I work with earbuds in listening to music, Starbucks is actually a low-distraction environment for me. If I want snacks or another drink, I need to pay for it, which is a significant deterrent, and if anybody else wants something, it’s Not My Problem.

Everything closing down in March blew that right to hell, in a bunch of ways. The entirely predictable one is that having Kate and the kids home during the day adds a huge number of distractions– when the kids want something, it is my problem, and that makes it really hard to get into any kind of flow. This can be mitigated to some degree by using earbuds at my home desktop, but that brings in problems of its own, in that not being able to hear and respond to an initial request will sometimes escalate it to the status of Major Problem.

The less predictable problem is that The Pip turns out to be a Morning Person. In retrospect this is something we maybe should’ve expected, as he really only needed active waking on school days– on weekends, I could open his door and say quietly “If you want to watch cartoons, you can come downstairs now,” and he’d explode out of bed and beat me down the stairs. Once school shut down, every morning was a tv-watching morning, so he started getting up early without prompting. Nine months into this mess, if I wake up before 5, I stay in bed reading until I can’t stand it any more, because the second I get up and start moving around, The Pip is awake and raring to go.

(We had a period where we tried to enforce a 6am limit before he could come downstairs, in hopes that he would go back to sleep, but we gave that up when he was doing things like sitting at the top of the stairs waiting to hear the clock chime. Attempting to get him back to sleep just wasn’t working, and I’m up anyway, so he just comes downstairs whenever I do.)

This is, obviously, a bit of a problem from a get-work-done perspective, but we reached a sort of détente, where he gets to watch videos on his tablet with headphones on, and I provide the basics of breakfast then do my work. He’s independent enough now to go get some of the snack food he eats for himself, without needing my help for anything that isn’t on a really high shelf.

Starting in early July, the kids went to a pandemic version of the day camp at the JCC that they’ve been going to forever, which got them out of the house. Kate’s office re-opened in a complicated manner (she goes in person Monday-Thursday every other week and works from home the other weeks and every Friday), and in September the schools reopened also in a complicated way (The Pip goes in person every day; SteelyKid is in person every other day, and doing remote school the other days). We’ve settled into a reasonably successful new routine as a result.

These days, I come downstairs around 5:30, get The Pip and Charlie the pupper fed, and take Charlie for a walk. That usually gets me home around 7am, and The Pip and I will wait outside for his bus, which comes around 7:20. After that, I run over to Starbucks to pick up my usual order (not because it’s stunningly high-quality tea, or because I think Starbucks the corporation needs my help to survive, but because I like the people who run that particular store, and want to support them), then settle in with earbuds to write. Kate takes care of getting SteelyKid up and downstairs for breakfast (this can be a MAJOR PROJECT; SteelyKid is very much not a Morning Person). If Kate’s working from home, she deals with getting SteelyKid out the door (middle school starts at 9:45) or logged into remote school; if it’s an office week for Kate, I take over once SteelyKid is downstairs.

That gets me a couple of hours of Writing Time at around the same time of day as the prior schedule, but it’s not quite as productive as my Starbucks time used to be. On days when I’m responsible for SteelyKid, that breaks things up a lot, but even when I’m the only human at home, Charlie the pupper is here. Like a lot of dogs, Charlie thinks work-from-home is the Greatest! Thing! EVER!, because he has at least one human around at all times. Which means a lot of chances to come over and alert me to the insolent squirrels in the back yard who urgently need to be chased, like, right now.

And then, of course, there’s the question of food. I do almost all of the meal prep in Chateau Steelypips, so if either of the kids is home, I’m the one in charge of making lunch. Which is not all bad– when I can get SteelyKid to come downstairs, we have some fun conversations at lunchtime– but does break things up. More than that, though, all the snacks in the house have already been paid for, so when I get hungry, it’s really hard not to just go into the kitchen and grab something to eat. And Charlie takes that as a sign that it’s time for an Insolent Squirrel sweep of the back yard, which sometimes takes a while, so everything is broken up way more than it used to be when I could go to a space that wasn’t mine.

(I could go to my office on campus, at least starting in September, but that means being around people, and while I’m not super paranoid about the virus, that doesn’t mean I want to spend long periods of time breathing shared air unless I absolutely have to.)

At the other end of the day, there’s a hard stop around 3pm; on in-person days, SteelyKid gets home around 3:15, and The Pip wants to be picked up from the after-school program at the JCC around 3:45. I usually feed the two of them dinner at about 5pm (if it’s an in-office week for Kate, adult dinner gets held until she gets home), which means starting food prep around 4:30, so that hour’s kind of useless. I’m also trying to be good and fit in an hour-ish of exercise a day (mostly biking or shooting hoops at a park when the weather was nicer) because when I don’t I get to feeling fat and sluggish and am even less able to get shit done than I would be if I tried to not carve out that time.

So, as I said, kind of a slog. Plus the general miasma of News all over everything all the time– the pandemic, the election, the pandemic’s effect on the election, the election’s effect on the pandemic, everybody’s blisteringly stupid Takes on the election and the pandemic and how they affect one another, and on and on. It’s been incredibly hard to focus these last nine months of March, 2020. Back at the beginning of the year, I thought the book was going to cruise to completion in the early fall, giving me a couple of months to do final tweaks and make figures and all that fiddly stuff; as it was, the last chapter or two were slightly stressful, and a bunch of the figures in the submitted draft are place-holders I grabbed off one website or another.

But, it’s done, on time and off to my editor. Which, alas, doesn’t mean a real vacation– I have a partial deadline for another thing in a couple of weeks, and I’ll be team-teaching a course on quantum computing starting in January, which will require some significant prep time. But after a bunch of flailing around, I’ve found something that mostly works to get stuff done in spite of, you know,… everything.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIMEKEEPING: Submitted

Today is my contractual deadline for submitting the manuscript of A Brief History of Timekeeping. I’m not sure this counts as the formal changeover from book-in-progress to book-in-process– I think that may actually be when the edits are finished and it goes off to the production team– but it’s definitely an inflection point. Here’s the table of contents as it currently exists (numbers in parentheses are word counts from Google Docs), with a brief description to unpack my cryptic chapter titles:

  • Intro: A Clock Is a Thing That Ticks (2563) Basic set-up of the book and the recurring themes
  • Chapter 1: Sunrise (5261) Motion of the Sun through the day and through the year, ancient solstice markers like Newgrange and Stonehenge
  • Chapter 2: The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (8196) The yearly motion of the Sun against the background of stars, the phases of the Moon, and calendar systems from the Middle East and Europe
  • Chapter 3: The Maya (7077)  Everybody’s favorite Mesoamerican civilization, and [Jesse Ventura voice] the planet Venus.
  • Chapter 4: Drips and Drops (5864) The history of water clocks and sandglasses.
  • Chapter 5: Ticks and Tocks (8059) The basics of mechanical clocks and the physics of the pendulum
  • Chapter 6: Heavenly Wanderers (9355) Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and the origins of the modern solar system.
  • Chapter 7: Longitude (6929) The method of lunar distances and mechanical clocks for shipboard use.
  • Chapter 8: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? (4794) The introduction of time zones thanks to railroads and telegraphs
  • Chapter 9: The Measure of Spacetime (9042) The origins of Special Relativity in the physics of synchronizing clocks
  • Chapter 10: Quantum Clocks (9311) The basics of cesium atomic clocks and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
  • Chapter 11: Time and Gravity (4836) The origins of General Relativity and how it affects time
  • Chapter 12: The Future of Time (6187) Next-generation atomic clocks, including both trapped ions and optical lattice clocks
  • Conclusion: Time Enough for Everyone (2696) Quartz oscillators and the democratization of timekeeping.

This totals a hair over 90,000 words, which is a bit more than the contract called for. Oops. Of course, many of these will turn out to be the wrong words once my editor takes a look at it, so that’s definitely going to change…

I wish I had a cover image to put at the top of this post, but that hasn’t been decided yet (sometime in January). I do know that there are two top candidates, either of which I would be very happy with, so that’s good, and I look forward to being able to show off whichever one the sales team likes the best.

I say this about every book, but in a lot of ways this was the hardest to write so far, because it covers so many different subjects. Most of these I knew a bit about already because I’ve taught a class based on this general topic, but knowing enough to do a ten-week survey course and knowing enough to write a full book on a topic and get the details right are two very different things. I’ve got probably 100 pounds of books from Union’s library stacked in various places around the house, and a huge number of PDF papers in my references folder. There were more than a few points in this process where I found myself wishing I was more willing to run with the colorful but thinly sourced anecdotes I see in a lot of other pop-science writing, but I’m just not, which made a lot more work for me. (Thanks, also to Thony Christie and Tom Swanson for checking my work in a couple of chapters.) I’m reasonably proud of how it’s come out– when I did the full read-through these last couple of weeks, I didn’t hate it, and that’s a good sign at this stage.

And, of course, there was this whole global pandemic thing that forced me out of my happy writing place at the end of the counter in the Niskayuna Starbucks, and the sheer weight of pandemic and election news that made it super difficult to write anything at all.

At any rate, this first draft is officially complete, and the folder with all the chapter files is being shared with my editor today. Sadly, I don’t get much time to celebrate, as I’ve got a couple of day-job meetings today and a deadline for a different side hustle (no, it’s not a podcast) in two weeks. The fun just never ends in Chateau Steelypips.

The important thing is: the first draft of the book is complete: calloo, callay, and all that.

Announcing “A Brief History of Timekeeping”

The contract for my next book, working title “A Brief History of Timekeeping”

I mentioned some time back that it was feeling weird to not have an official Next Project to be working on. That, of course, led to coming up with some options for a Next Project, and starting those on their slow way through the system. Which has led to today: This morning, I officially signed the contract to write a new book.

The working title is A Brief History of Timekeeping, which long-time readers of my stuff might recognize as the title of a course I’ve offered a few times at Union, on the science and technology of keeping track of time passing. This is a really rich subject, and spans several millennia: the proposal has the subtitle “The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks.” I was a little surprised, back when I started working on the class, to find that nobody had written a book on this topic. Particularly with that semi-joking title just sitting there. Anyway, I made a mental note of this as a thing to pursue down the road, and, well, here we are…

The focus of the book will be on the technology of keeping time, not the more abstract physics of time-as-a-component-of-spacetime. This will be mostly physics, because that’s my home field, but there are also some fascinating sidelines into history and culture thanks to all the different schemes people have devised through human history for marking time.

The contract is with BenBella Books, publishers of Breakfast with Einstein. They were very good to work with on that book, and both sides are pleased with how it’s done since it came out in December. So, I’m looking forward to working with them again, and as always at the start of a new book project, I have high hopes for it.

Due date for the manuscript is December 2020, publication roughly a year later. And you can expect a lot of odd tweets and blog posts about stuff relating to time and timekeeping over the next year-and-a-bit as writing this consumes most of my attention…

Good Omens, The Show

The book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is one of my all-time favorites. I used to keep a battered paperback copy in my car as emergency reading material (I have a much nicer hardback that I keep on the shelves at home…), because there’s almost no mood in which I wouldn’t be willing to read bits of it more or less at random.

I was a little nervous when I heard it was being adapted for the screen, but, you know, we’re endlessly hearing about how this is a Golden Age of Prestige Television, and Amazon clearly threw some money at it, so I was somewhat hopeful. Also, I have Amazon Prime already, so I didn’t have to make any special effort to see this, but could stream it in between dinner and bedtime.

Anyway, I’ve now watched it, and… it’s fine. There are bits that work, and bits that don’t, and on balance, it’s perfectly enjoyable but not brilliant. Explaining more than that, though, will require spoilers, so here’s some space to protect the eyes of anybody who’s watching this more slowly than I am.

SPOILERS
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So, the fundamental problem with this show is the change of medium from book to screen. The book is, well, very much a book, and takes advantage of its book-ness to do a lot of things that are awkward on screen: it jumps around to visit lots of places for brief jokes, it depends fairly heavily on describing people’s internal mental states, and many of its best lines are asides from the narrative voice (which, as with pretty much all of Pratchett’s books, is one of its most charming features, but not a specifically identifiable character).

The adaptation was done by Gaiman himself, and it’s hard to tell whether the problems are in spite of or because of that. The show tries to keep the narrative asides by adding a voiceover narrator (Frances McDormand, who explicitly self-identifies as God at one point, which is its own problem), but that’s a really awkward device in a visual medium. While the narration does allow them to do more jumping around than otherwise, it often feels like it’s working WAY too hard to hang onto particularly beloved bits of description from the book. That undercuts the effect quite a bit.

It occurs to me as I’m writing this that there’s probably an instructive contrast to be drawn between Gaiman adapting this and William Goldman’s script for the Princess Bride adapting his own novel. The movie keeps the spirit of the book, but radically restructures it in a lot of ways to get that spirit on screen in a way that’s true to the medium. It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but I recall noticing that a number of jokes that, in the book, are part of the narrative frame get into the movie by becoming lines of dialogue. The “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” bit from the movie is the example that sticks in my mind.

Gaiman isn’t Goldman. Which, you know, isn’t actually that surprising, because Goldman was insanely good his craft, so “Not as good as William Goldman” covers the vast majority of people ever to try their hand at writing for the screen. But the transition between media takes a lot of the narration from “charming” to “clunky,” and I can’t help wishing they’d found another way.

The other, related issue has to do with the Them. A lot of the book centers around Adam Young, the mislaid Antichrist, and his gang of friends, all of whom are about the age that SteelyKid is right now. This stuff works very well in the book, capturing the energy and inventiveness of a bunch of idealized eleven-year-olds, with bonus dryly amused adult commentary from the aforementioned narrator. (Admittedly, I haven’t re-read it since SteelyKid moved into this sort of age group, but my memory of the adventures of the Them maps pretty well onto the experience of having SteelyKid and The Pip in the house…)

This works well on the page, because a book doesn’t need to involve any actual children. The descriptions of the Them and their adventures can remain a bit vague, and the reader can fill in the details. On screen, though, you need actual kids to play those roles, and then you run into the problem that it’s really hard to find child actors who can do scripted dialogue and make it feel natural. I mean it’s hard to find adults who can do this, too, but there’s at least a larger pool to draw from if you need an actor to play somebody between 20 and 50 than if you want a pre-teen, and time for them to build a resume that can tell you if they’ll fit.

Which is not to say that the kids are bad as child actors go. They’re just a little stiff, which is probably inevitable given how much of those scenes depend on very precise turns of phrase that work a lot better when you’re reading them and can imagine the proper inflection than when you have to memorize them and say them on cue. Everything feels very rehearsed, and that contrasts very sharply with some of the adult performances.

(Also, the sequences with the Them have a very stage-y feel, like they were shooting in extremely limited space, forcing kids who in the book are very high-energy to stand eerily still most of the time. They’re also altogether too clean and put-together for the sort of kids they’re supposed to be, especially Brian.)

(Also, just as an aside, the costumer isn’t doing England any favors. Until a late bit of narration, I had forgotten that the whole thing takes place in summer, largely because everyone is wearing layers upon layers of clothes. I mean, I’ve been in London in August, and the climate isn’t that dreary…)

These points are driven home a bit by the very best sequences of the show, which are original to the adaptation and thus written expressly for the screen. They also primarily involve the adult characters, and the acting performances there are very good to excellent. The very best bit is the opening of the third episode, an extended sequence following Crowley and Aziraphale through the centuries, from Biblical events up through recent human history. David Tennant and Michael Sheen are terrific together, and make even the more absurd moments of their respective plots feel natural. There’s also some good stuff by Michael McKean as Shadwell, Miranda Richardson as Madame Tracey, and especially Jon Hamm’s archangel Gabriel (whose whole plot line is great, and almost entirely original to the show).

So, you know, as I said above, it’s… fine. It’s a very competent adaptation of a difficult-to-adapt work, which works well in places, less well in others, and has a few really entertaining performances. It was a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours, even if it doesn’t do full justice to (my memory of) the book.

The Power of Print

As noted in a previous post, Breakfast with Einstein was featured in a book review in the New York Times. This was, obviously, a pretty exciting development for me; it’s also a chance to poke at numbers a bit and get a sense of the power of different kinds of media.

The screen shot above is from Amazon’s “Author Central” service, and shows the Amazon sales rank for Breakfast with Einstein over the last month. This is an imperfect measure of sales, but one that’s immediately available (they also provide real-ish sales numbers from BookScan, but those have a delay of at least a week).

Immediately after release, the book shot up to a pretty respectable Sales Rank in the low five digits (I think the peak was around 11,000, but it was between 10,000 and 20,000 for most of December). Since then, it dropped off, as naturally happens, and was bouncing around between 50,000 and 100,000 for the last few weeks.

The NYT review went live online on Tuesday, probably because it’s a review of three science books, and that synched up with the “Science Times” section on Tuesday. As you can see in the graph, this immediately sent the Sales Rank back up to near its release-week peak, in the 10,000-15,000 range. I thought that was pretty nice.

That was more or less what I was expecting. I was not, however, expecting the next jump, which started on Saturday, when I checked in and was surprised to find the Sales Rank in the 5,000 range. On Sunday, it rocketed up into the three-digit range, peaking at 517 according to the Amazon tracker. It stayed above 1,000 for about a day, and has dropped back into the low four digits now.

This, of course, reflects the fact that the review was in the Sunday Book Review section, and those Sunday supplements are often distributed on Saturday afternoon. And the huge peak lines up with people getting the Sunday paper on, you know, Sunday. It probably didn’t hurt that, as noted on Twitter the review was teased on page A3.

This is, obviously, very nice from a selling-books-to-people standpoint; it’s also a nice reminder of the enormous scale and reach of the New York Times. For all that people bang on about “legacy media” and the death of newspapers at the hands of the Web and social media and all that, the review in the Sunday print edition was vastly more effective than the exact same review posted online on Tuesday, which in turn was all by itself as effective as everything we did to hype the book around its launch date.

(There’s probably also a comparison to be made between the effect of the Sunday Book Review and a review in the Science Times, which How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog got back in 2012. I’ll wait until the BookScan sales numbers are in to do that, though…)

Anyway, it’s been a fun week here, as you can probably tell…

BREAKFAST WITH EINSTEIN in the New York times

I heard this was coming a couple of weeks ago (though not exactly when it would run): the New York Times has run a review of Breakfast with Einstein, together with two other books featuring Einstein’s name in the title: From Black Holes to Breakfast, Three Books Show How Einstein’s Legacy Lives On:

Using his morning routine as an example, Orzel sets out to show the reader how quantum physics is a part of our everyday lives, and he largely succeeds in this informative and friendly book. He gives clear, detailed explanations of a wide variety of quotidian physical phenomena and how we came to understand them. Indeed, the book is largely dedicated to revealing that the quantum is ordinary, that there is magic in the mundane.

(That’s the second paragraph; you can click through to read the whole thing…)

This is the second of my books to make an appearance in the Paper of Record– How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog made it a few years back– so obviously, I’m pretty excited to have the recognition. Definitely a nice discovery as I sat down at my computer with my breakfast…

BREAKFAST WITH EINSTEIN Release Week

The US edition of Breakfast with Einstein officially came out this past Tuesday, and while it’s not quite the same thrill as the release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog was, nigh on ten years ago, it’s always exciting when a book comes out. And, of course, there’s new stuff out there to try to convince you to buy it:

— This video trailer for the book, with me narrating a cartoon from SugarShack Animation has been in the works for a little while, but finally came out:

— On Wednesday, I did a talk for the Secret Science Club, which drew a pretty good crowd to the Bell House in Brooklyn (which is in a neighborhood that looks like the setting for a Hold Steady song)

Photo of the crowd at the Bell House

They were a great audience, laughing at the places they were supposed to and not when they weren’t, and asked a ton of good questions afterwards. I signed books (and answered more questions) afterwards, and generally enjoyed myself quite a bit.

— If you’re within visiting distance of Schenectady, I’m doing a signing at the Open Door tomorrow afternoon. No formal talk at this one, but I’m happy to answer questions and chat for a bit, and it supports a store full of really nice people.

— Various and sundry media items keep trickling out, including this review of a bunch of recent releases that includes some nice words about my book.

— When I was at the NASW meeting in October, I sat down for a bit with David Voss from APS News, who published a brief interview about the book and writing generally in this month’s issue.

— For the first time, I was thwarted in my attempt to see the book on a store shelf on release day– the closest big-box store didn’t have it, though it was in stock at their Saratoga branch, and neither of the local indie stores had copies out on Tuesday. That was kind of a bummer.

— While I’m still waiting for the first review on Amazon, it is selling at least some copies, because it manages to be near the top of a couple of their weirdly specific categories. The audio edition is actually slightly higher in their rankings, which surprised me, but then what do I know? Anyway, I’m temporarily enjoying looking at the Amazon rankings; I don’t have a sense of the sales yet, and won’t for another week or so.

That’s where things stand for now. There are at least two other podcast interviews that I’ve recorded that have not been released yet; you can be sure I’ll promote those when they drop. And I will, of course, continue to monitor all manner of media for reviews…

BREAKFAST WITH EINSTEIN Events and Publicity

Breakfast with Einstein will be released tomorrow in the US, which means there are a bunch of things to report on the promotional front. First, a couple of events:

— I’m going to be doing the Secret Science Club bar night this Wednesday, the 12th, at 8pm at the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY. I did an event with them a few years ago at MassMOCA, which was good fun, and this time I’ll be on their home turf. If you’re in The City and would like to hear a bit about how weird quantum phenomena manifest in your morning routine, and maybe have a specialty cocktail, come on by.

— More local (to me), I’ll be doing a signing at our local indie bookstore, the Open Door on Saturday afternoon from 1-2:30 pm. They’re good people and these are always low-key, so if you’re in the Capital District and have time, come say hi.

Also, some virtual stuff that’s already happened:

— I did an interview with the Late Drinkers podcast, based out of Ireland, if you’d like to hear me interviewed by somebody with a much cooler accent than mine. This covered a lot of non-book territory relating to science communication more generally.

— I was interviewed for the People Behind the Science podcast, which covered a lot of my career history, in addition to the obligatory stuff about the forthcoming book. I had a good time talking about old times, here.

— A bit farther back, I recorded an interview with the Australian podcast Sci-gasm. This was the first interview I’ve done where I was encouraged to curse on the air– they explained that it’s considered polite in Australia to slip in a bit of profanity now and again.

A couple of others have been recorded, and will presumably be out sometime in the near future; I’ll share links when I have them.

BREAKFAST WITH EINSTEIN in the Sunday Times

Cover for the UK edition of BREAKFAST WITH EINSTEIN.

It was a long holiday weekend in the US, but that didn’t stop fun news from coming in from overseas: The UK edition of Breakfast with Einstein made the Times of London’s list of Best Science Books of 2018!

The article is paywalled, alas, so you can’t easily read the whole thing unless you’re a subscriber, but the pull quote calls it a “fine example of scientific passion.” You can see the key passage as a screencap in this tweet from Oneworld.

If you’re in the UK, you can get the UK edition wherever you like to buy books; if you’re in the US you have to wait a bit before the US edition shows up in stores, but don’t let that stop you from pre-ordering copies to take care of all your winter solstice gift-giving needs…