S.L. Huang's Blog, page 9

Twas The Night Before Christmas, Writer Style

(With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore, whom I have shamelessly ripped off).

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the land,

Writers were all cursing, “I do not understand!”
The Shark says to query, but Bookends says no,
How am I supposed to know when to hit go?

All year I have edited, polished each word,
December is awful for queries I’ve heard.
With so much NaNo nonsense hitting agents desks,
Each new one is looking more and more Kafkaesque.

Then comes Christmas time, and so many will s...

Cover reveal, HALF LIFE: The Sequel to Zero Sum Game! Coming by the end of the year!

Half Life (Russell’s Attic Book #2)

Cas Russell is back — and so is her deadly supermath.

Cas may be an antisocial mercenary who uses her instant calculating skills to mow down enemies, but she’s trying hard to build up a handful of morals. So when she’s hired by an anguished father to rescue his kid from an evil tech conglomerate, itseems like the perfect job to use for ethics practice.

Then she finds her client’s daughter . . . who is a robot.

The researchers who own the ’bot will stop at nothin...

#ICantBreathe

On Twitter, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has been trending for a while now, only to be rebutted by hashtags like #AllLivesMatter.

#AllLivesMatter completely misses the point of #BlackLivesMatter. It snatches away the attention from the problem and makes it sound as though non-Black people go through the same treatment that Black people do. It’s pretty much the equivalent of #NotAllMen in answer to the #YesAllWomen campaign.

As a cow of Asian descent, I don’t live in fear that I might one day b...

Tools for Self-Publishing: KDP VAT Calculator

Starting January 1, 2015, Amazon KDP isswitching to making all self-publishers include VAT for all Amazon stores in EU countries. In other words, we have to add the tax into our list price for any sales in the European Union, or the tax will be deducted from the listed price and our actual sale (and royalties) will be based on a price lower than what we listed. See here for more information(click on EU VAT on the left).

Since the VAT rate is different in all European countries, this is a pain,...

ZERO SUM GAME now in paperback!

I said it would happen eventually . . . and it has! ZERO SUM GAME is now available in paperback! It is here on Amazon and willbe popping up on other retailers in the upcoming weeks asthe publish order flitsthrough the internets.

This bookis a work of art, folks. My paperback interior designer did a ridiculous, stunning, jaw-dropping job, and my cover designer wrapped it all up in a masterpiece. It’s so pretty I want people to buy it not to read it but to see how pretty it is. Ha! The finished...

Ferguson: I don’t know what to say.

I had a book news post scheduled to go up today, but I’ve delayed it till next week.

Last night, the grand jury returned a decision saying they were refraining from indicting the police officer who killed Mike Brown. This means there will not be a trial.

More protests are breaking out. People are angry, heartbroken, ashamed of the system we live under.

I’ve tried to think of something to say and I have nothing. The grief I’m seeing, not juststemming fromthis one decision, but woven of the fabric...

The End of a Blog and the Start of a New One

Hullo hullo, lovely readers!

I’m very pleased to announce that I’m going to be moving my blogging activities!  Some friends and I decided to start a new group blog together.  It’s called Bad Menagerie, and I’ll be blogging there henceforth.

This is quite exciting, and I hope you’ll enjoy the new content just as much as I will — many of the people I’m blogging with are far funnier than I am!  (Also, there will be comics and other art.  There already is.  It’s da bomb.)

We started the blog Monday, and have three posts up so far:

Introducing the Menagerie
A Typical Writing Day for the Cow (
20 Little Details If You Want to Set a Story in Los Angeles (

IT’S ALL SHINY AND NEW I AM SO EXCITED GUYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, what will happen over here?  I’m not going to delete the archives of this blog, obviously — all the permalinks will remain intact.  I will be freezing user registration and commenting here in the near future, though, and resetting my top menu to show the old blog archives (here) and the new blog (where I’m actually blogging).  The rest of this site will remain active as my author website.

Thank you for reading and following my journey here.  I truly hope you all will enjoy the new blog as much as I think you will.

The Theoretical Minimum: Interlude 1, Spaces, Trigonometry, and Vectors + Lecture 2, Motion + Interlude 2, Integral Calculus

This is part of my series of commentary on the physics book The Theoretical Minimum.

I’m lumping this all together because they’re all math background.

I read through these sections without skipping anything even though I didn’t have to, because, you know, math; I can literally do this stuff in my sleep (by which I mean I have successfully done calculus after being up for more than 40 hours).  But it was very interesting to read the authors’ crash course in single-variable calc — the angle they came from was informative, and I picked up a few pleasing pedagogical tricks that I may use with some of my own students at some point.

Yay calculus!

Notable Quotes

That’s basically all there is to differential calculus. (p. 36)

This made me howl in amusement.  Not because the book is wrong — it’s not!  And they did a great job on teaching calculus in ten pages! — but because I imagined telling my high school students that.  (To be clear, for a book on physics that is aimed at people who know calculus but may need a refresher, it was excellently done IMO.)

The fundamental theorem of calculus is one of the simplest and most beautiful results in mathematics. (p. 50)

Agreed!

There are some tricks to doing integrals.  One trick is to look them up in a table of integrals.  Another is to learn to use Mathematica.  But if you’re on your own and you don’t recognize the integral, the oldest trick in the book is integration by parts. (p. 55)

This perspective is fascinating to me, and I suspect it’s one of those mathematician/physicist divides that made me twitch in my physics lectures in undergrad (and my friends would all roll their eyes and laugh at me).  Because I would never consider either tables or Mathematica to qualify as actually “doing” integrals!

I was also surprised at the weight given to integration by parts as “the” basic integration tool.  To me substitution is the most basic (and is a backwards chain rule rather than a backwards product rule) and is the first go-to.  Integration by parts feels to me on the level of partial fractions or trig substitutions — useful for its own specific subset of problems, but hardly the broad skeleton key the book seems to imply.  I do wonder if this is another mathematics/physics difference — if the vast majority of integrals physicists deal with happen to fall into the type that are solvable by parts, it makes perfect sense that it would be considered the basic tool of the trade.

Thinky Thoughts

I liked the framing of an indefinite integral as a definite integral with a variable limit — I hadn’t seen it explained in quite that way before.

Also, I knew integration by parts came straight out of the product rule, but I’ve been doing it for so long that a layer of abstraction had built up and I’d forgotten!  Always good to be reminded of these connections. :)

Worked Problems
Exercise 4: Prove the product rule and the chain rule.

I know I’ve done these proofs before, but it’s been long enough that I didn’t remember how they went, so I figured why not.  My blog is being difficult about Latex formatting for some reason, so I’ll just give the gist.

Product rule: Add and subtract the appropriate quantity, and it all falls out very nicely.

Chain rule: Realize that g + Δg = g (t + Δt).  This is easy to intuit via a visualization of a t versus g graph, with points marked (t, g(t)) and (t + Δt, g(t + Δt)).  The gap between g(t) and g(t + Δt) becomes Δg, and voila.

Things to Consider When Starting a Group Blog

First of all, I have exciting news!  Which is . . . this blog is moving soon!

Yes, this IS exciting.  I’m much more excited about blogging as part of a group, and everyone I’m going to be blogging with is fascinating and funny (most of them much funnier than I am), as well as being very smart people with excellent experiences and perspectives to share.  I’ll be making an announcement when the switchover happens, and I hope you’ll all continue to follow me there!  (The archives here will remain in existence.)

Now, this post might have been better saved for the group blog, but I felt like writing it now.  We’re working through many of the minutiae of how we want to run it, and I thought this information might be useful to others.

Questions You’ll Have to Decide On if You Want to Start Blogging With a Group

What are everyone’s goals with the blog?  What would everyone like to get out of it?
What level of commitment will you require from each other, if any?
Will the blog have some sort of theme when it comes to content?
Will there be a general tone you want to strive for?
What about strong opinion posts that the other contributors might not agree with, such as political posts?  Will they be permitted on the group blog?  Should there be a disclaimer?  Should the other contributors get to approve them?
What about dark or controversial subjects, or angry rants?  Is everyone involved okay with those types of posts?
Will there be content guidelines as to posts being substantive?
Will there be content guidelines as to profanity, sexual suggestivity, or anything else?
What if a member of the group blog would like to leave the group blog, or just not contribute for a while?
How will you decide on name, theme, colors, static pages, etc.?  (With a large group a good procedure for collating opinions was not immediately obvious.  We sort of had to feel it out.)
Who will be responsible for the domain name and hosting?
Who will be responsible for blog chores like moderating comments and ensuring consistency of tagging and categorization?
How will you schedule posts?

My Advice

Do this with people you already know well and are very sure you want to (a) work with, and (b) be associated with in people’s minds online.
Realize that with a large-ish group, there may not always be a unanimous favorite on things like names, wording, or aesthetic decisions.  This is okay!  Take everyone’s opinions into account and aim for decisions that everyone’s good with, even if they’re not everyone’s first choice.
Be flexible.  Expect compromise.  If you want control over every little thing, a group blog is probably not the best thing for you.  The point of a group blog is to do it as a group.
Group decisions on major things (like the domain name) are important, but they take a lot of time.  With any minor changes during construction of the blog that are not irreversible, don’t bog down the process by checking in with the whole group about everything.  Let people move forward with the work and update others on their progress, and everyone can discuss or edit each other if they don’t like something.
Let people edit each others’ typos in general.  (This was suggested by one of our members who’s part of another group blog, and we thought it was a great idea.)
Find a theme and plugins that help support a multi-author blog.  It will make your life easier.

I’m sure I’ll learn even more once we all start blogging together.  Anybody else have advice?  We’re still in the constructing stages so I’d certainly love to hear it!

The Theoretical Minimum: Lecture 1, The Nature of Classical Physics

This is part of my series of commentary on the physics book The Theoretical Minimum.

Notable Quotes

The job of classical mechanics is to predict the future. (p. 1)

I love this.

The rule that dynamical laws must be deterministic and reversible is so central to classical physics that we sometimes forget to mention it when teaching the subject.  In fact, it doesn’t even have a name.  We could call it the first law, but unfortunately there are already two first laws — Newton’s and the first law of thermodynamics.  There is even a zeroth law of thermodynamics.  So we have to go back to a minus-first law to gain priority for what is undoubtedly the most fundamental of all physical laws . . . (p. 9)

As a number-lover, this sort of thing just makes me all kind of amused.

But there is another element that [Laplace] may have underestimated [when he said the laws of physics could theoretically predict the whole future]: the ability to know the initial conditions with almost perfect precision. [...] The ability to distinguish the neighboring values of these numbers is called “resolving power” of any experiment, and for any real observer it is limited.  In principle we cannot know the initial conditions with infinite precision. [...] Perfect predictability is not achievable, simply because we are limited in our resolving power. (p. 14)

This concept, I am keenly aware, is what makes my Russell’s Attic books science fiction.  My main character is only able to do the calculations she can on the world around her because I permit her to have indefinitely good resolving power.  It’s kind of a required secondary power for what she does.  And reading this section, it completely tickled me that it has a name!

Thinky Thoughts

I’ve said before that I reduce all physics to doing math.  I felt like I was cheating a bit in this section, because saying a system is deterministic and reversible is the same as saying you can model it with a one-to-one function.  So I bopped along just thinking of the functional invertibility of the the rules, most of which I knew off the top of my head.

Sigh.  You can take the mathematician out of mathematics . . .