Saturday Eye Candy

Slow blogging this weekend — swift West Coast trip necessitated by the happy occasion of my nephew’s bar mitzvah (he did great, thanks, w. a drash on the fourth commandment in which he managed to bring Mark Twain to bear on Maimonides).  So, for your viewing pleasure, this, via Kos diarist Occams Hatchet:

Friday Wordfun: Antonyms for Empathy/Sotomayor edition

I haven’t had anything to add to the Sotomayor nomination.  I’m not a lawyer, I don’t follow the circuit courts, and there are plenty of places to get both real insight and delightful snark/schadenfreude. But it did occur to me on this jetlagged Friday afternoon to do just the first scratch of the surface word [...]

Diary of A Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) 5.0: Editors and your (dis)Contents

Going back to a little chronology in this series.  Idea – proposal – agent…what happens next is (a) some editor or editors at major houses cannot resist the idea, bid on it, and leave one with a choice:  who (and why).  And even if no auction occurs to propel one (me, oh why not me?) [...]

A Quick Kindle Bleg Before Getting Back To Serious (ish) Stuff

Anyone out there have one?  Use it? Thoughts.  Does the large one make sense if the major intended use is books?  (I.e. — I can see how more real estate is better for magazine and newspaper reading, but what do folks think about the limits to portability in their experience w. the little one). Finally [...]

Holiday Post: Anti-personnel Food.

Ex food network via Hulu, this has to be a dish that only an out-of-work cardiologist could love. (h/t brer Richard). Image:  Hieronymus Bosch, “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things – Gluttony” (1485, oil on panel).

Diary of a Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) 4.0: Those low-life, bottom-dwelling, horn-swaggling, no-goods who do wrong by their review copies.

It’s been a couple of days since I got to this series, and in that time I’ve been doing (a) my day job, including a quick trip to talk to folks at the Rochester Institute of Technology about their very ambitious plans to incorporate writing into a range of endeavors there, and (b) obsessively doing [...]

Sunday Link Fest 2: The Links! (What a radical notion)

As promised. 1.  Grand snark about self-aggrandizing musicologists.  My question?  If physicists can figure out arXiv and if PL0S-ONE provides a pre and post-hoc review model for scientific publishing, why can’t those musicologists shut out of the charmed circle come up with  new-era publication model of their own? 2.  Fun you-are-there tale about a curator [...]

Sunday Link Fest 1: Stuff I meant to blog about but didn’t — well not quite.

I don’t know how my comrades-in-blog deal with this one, but in my surfing through the days (and weeks and months) I come across tons of interesting items that seems obviously blog prompts.¤* ¤This post has just succumbed to the impulse that overcame a marvellous old Journal of Irreproducible Results article on a theory of [...]

Newton and the Counterfeiter: more reviews

They’re starting to come in, with all the existential dread that each one offers in prospect.  It’s both exciting and terrifying to let the outcome of one’s intense effort for years go out, undefended onto the sea of critical review. I’ll talk a bit about this part of the experience in the next Diary of [...]

For a Good Time in Rochester: First Book Talk department

If you happen to be in Rochester (NY, not MN) this afternoon, I’ll be doing a public event talking about Newton and the Counterfeiter and the future of science writing (so they tell me) at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  This will take place in the College of Liberal Arts Faculty Commons (Building 6 on this [...]