Comments on: Fan-Dancing Quarks Are Seen Half Naked

By: Drog

Drog — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 08:08:26 +0000

Maybe you could write a daily syndicated science column for newspapers. Or a weekly/monthly one for magazines. You have a real talent for expressing complicated scientific concepts in a refreshing manner that is both easy to understand and witty. I would think a lot of newspapers and magazines would be interested, Ricky. If you emailed the editors of all the major U.S. newspapers (and perhaps even foreign ones in Canada, UK and Australia), giving them examples of some of your best stories and telling them where to read all the rest of them, I’m willing to bet you’ll get some responses. And judging by how quickly you are able to write, you may be able to still keep your day job while being rewarded monetarily for being a science writer. Eventually, you may be able to make enough money to be a science writer full-time, and parlay your fame into a book deal.

By: Alan Von Fan

Alan Von Fan — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 05:02:26 +0000

Salary-wise I don’t know, but wait a year or so for SFT to get the recognition it deserves and use the fame and glory attached to your name(!) to produce an eclectic collection of scientific articles with hot naked chicks thrown in. That’s more or less how the guys at The Onion sold collections of rehashed stories from their site. Maybe it isn’t quite that easy, but when you consider some of the boring collections of Internet stories/articles/’wit!’ that slide from the shelves to the Christmas tree each year, you’ve got to be in with a chance.

By: rickyjames

rickyjames — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 03:40:17 +0000

…to make what I’m making now salary-wise as an aerospace engineer and I will chain myself to the science journalism keyboard. Actually, my SFT experiences have shown me I COULD write a book if I wanted to, which I’m always saying to myself I do. Now if only I could find a topic I’m willing to stick with for a whole year; SFT is cool because I get to butterfly.

By: Alan Von Fan

Alan Von Fan — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 02:55:44 +0000

Actually you did a very nice job of getting the story across, skating around the edges of entendres and bringing it back. When I said I wouldn’t like all SFT stories to be like this, it’s because sex-jokes can soon wear thin, as well as because I already enjoy the factual style mixed with a little quirkiness that Drog and yourself (as well as others) have presented us with to date. Any thoughts on going into sci-journalism full-time? (by which I mean getting paid for it; your output is already larger than a lot of professionals).

By: Sweetwind

Sweetwind — Wed, 09 Apr 2003 09:01:51 +0000

...you'd read the posting advice at Teemings and decided to give it a try... :-)

(loved your teasers about the links, though, and what they actually pointed to! Great for a one-time joke.)

By: Alan Von Fan

Alan Von Fan — Wed, 09 Apr 2003 07:45:55 +0000

Fascinating to know that hadrons jet all over the place; though I can’t wait to see how many feminsts, purists, anti-child-pornists and other -ists take umbrage at this one. Personally I enjoyed the tone of the article (and learned something too), although I don’t suppose I would want all SFT stories to be delivered in the same style. My favourite description of the evolution of particle theory is still the few words at the beginning of my childhood copy of Superman: Last Son of Krypton. I don’t remember the quote exactly, but it went something like: “Once men thought God’s love move the stars and the planets, and everything on them. Then the atom was discovered and it was evident that everything was ordered by the interaction of those atoms. The behaviour of atoms was discovered to be dictated by the behaviour of sub-atomic particles, which acted entirely at random. God’s love moved the sub-atomic particles.” Corny I know, but the back to square-one, still don’t know what we’re doing, aspect appeals to my twisted mind.

By: rickyjames

rickyjames — Wed, 09 Apr 2003 04:58:32 +0000

Did you see she was in fact a scientific intellectual? She did her own R&D to develop the balloons for her bubble dance – no small feat in the 1930s – and she lectured at Harvard. Obviously a well-rounded (ahem) individual who would no doubt have been a daily SFT reader herself.

By: rickyjames

rickyjames — Wed, 09 Apr 2003 04:48:01 +0000

We’ve been getting a LOT of hits (tens of thousands) in the past couple of weeks from the somewhat irreverent news site called Fark, which I had never heard of and which linked to our weird finch and squid stories. They have a news column called “boobies”, you figure it out. We’ve also been getting hundreds of hits on the April Fools Ridge Ashcroft satire from a site run by a guy named Orling Grabb who is apparently an ex-CIA guy running a daily Tom-Clancy style news site with a – how shall I say this – unique editorial layout. These recent new revelations to me about alternative news presentation styles made me comment to Drog in an email that maybe SFT should add a soft porn angle to boost readership…I was joking, just kidding, don’t panic…which got me to thinking….I recently just got thru reading one of Max Allen Collins’ historical murder mysteries with Nathan Heller where he routinely meets all the famous people from the 1930s, including you guessed it, Miss Rand…

Sweetwind? Alan? Tongue-In-Cheek thoughts?

OK, OK, back to my usual staid boring science lecture style…

By: apsmith

apsmith — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 20:38:13 +0000

Hey ricky, I know physicists are generally the life of the party, but you don’t have to exaggerate, you know :) Quarks are interesting enough without having to dress them up, so to speak…

Reminds me of a friend of mine who innocently titled a paper “interacting hard core dirty bosons”…