Wandering around my local Barnes & Noble, I noticed several copies of Chad Orzel's new book How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. As it happens, I've known Chad for decades, about one and a half of them. Not that he knows me, or would recognize me if he ran into me (not something you want to happen to you, by the way - he is a really big guy).

Before there were blogs, before the intertubes had been animated by the web, there was Usenet. Usenet, if I remember correctly, was sort of a collection of global bulletin boards, used mostly to post porn, but also for various useful purposes like discussing science fantasy or theoretical physics. (It was on the latter that I first encountered Lumo). Chad was one of the demigods of the group rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan devoted to the Wheel of Time fantasy series of the late Robert Jordan. The group itself was perhaps one of greatest wastes of human brainpower since theology.

Chad is now a physics prof with a popular blog called Uncertain Principles, but in those days he was but a humble - strike that - Chad has never appeared humble - graduate student. He was, to be sure, rather arrogant and obnoxious toward the humbler folk like your genuinely humble correspondent, or at least those of us with uppity behavior (who, me?), but he was and remains damn funny and an excellent writer.

So I picked up his book and looked it over. Unfortunately, I don't have a dog, but the book gets good reviews on Amazon even from people.

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