Benford’s Law of Amazon Rankings

Late last year, Matthew Beckler was nice enough to make a sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Changes in the Amazon page format made it stop working a while ago, though, and now Amazon reports roughly equivalent data via its AuthorCentral feature, with the added bonus of BookScan sales figures. […]

Links for 2010-12-31

Christopher Guest | Film | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club “No comic filmmaker is more intimately associated with improvisation than Christopher Guest, an alum of The National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live who made his name as a filmmaker co-writing, directing, and co-starring in improvised films riffing loosely on show business […]

Thursday Toddler Blogging 123010

I nearly forgot to post tonight’s Toddler Blogging photos, which would’ve been a Bad Thing, as you can tell from this picture. Toddler Blogging is Serious Business: That’s not the best Appa-for-scale picture, but I love the intense look on her face. This was taken in our spiffy, newly refinished basement, which is the new […]

Best Music of 2010

I’ve shifted the iTunes shuffle from the Christmas-music playlist over to the top-rated songs of the year playlist because, well, it’s the time of year when anybody with any pretension of writing about pop culture does some sort of Top N list to wrap up the year. And, since I’ve got “pop culture” right up […]

Links for 2010-12-30

slacktivist: Excruciating “The work of a senator doesn’t have to be so painful. If you find yourself complaining because you’re being forced to defend indefensible positions by voting on them, it might be that the problem doesn’t lie with those forcing you to cast a vote and take a stand. It seems more likely that […]

The Status of Simulations

Most of what would ordinarily be blogging time this morning got used up writing a response to a question at the Physics Stack Exchange. But having put all that effort in over there, I might as well put it to use here, too… The question comes from a person who did a poster on terminology […]

SteelyKid, Railroad Tycoon

I’m slowly sifting through the Christmas pictures, many of which were rendered blurry by SteelyKid’s constant motion, but there are some good shots in there: This one shows her playing with the wooden train set she got from Grandma and Grandpa (the same gauge as the Thomas branded ones they have set up at Barnes […]

Poll: Top Physics Story of 2010?

It’s the last week of the (calendar) year, which means it’s a good time to recap the previous twelve months worth of scientific news. Typically, publications like Physics World will publish a list of top ten physics stories of 2010, but we’re all Web 2.0 these days, so it seems more appropriate to put this […]

Links for 2010-12-28

Do dogs need sweaters when it’s cold? Plus: Is road salt edible? – By Brian Palmer – Slate Magazine “A major blizzard dropped 20 inches of snow on New York City on Sunday night as it made its way up the East Coast. Monday-morning dog-walkers had their animals decked out in sweaters and booties to […]