Brief items + the March APS Meeting

This has been an absurdly busy period for the last few weeks; hence my lower rate of posting.  I hope that this will resolve itself relatively soon, but you never know.  I am going to the first three days of the March APS meeting, and will try to blog about what I see and learn there, as I have in past years.

In the meantime, a handful of items that have cropped up:

• If you go to the APS meeting, you can swing by the Cambridge University Press table, and pre-order my nano textbook for a mere $64.  It's more than 600 pages with color figures - that's a pretty good deal.  They will have a couple of bound proof copies, so you can see what it looks like, to a good approximation.  If you teach a senior undergrad or first-year grad sequence on this stuff and think you might have an interest in trying this out as a text, please drop me an email and I can see about getting you a copy.  (My editor tells me that the best way to boost readership of the book is to get a decent number of [hopefully positive] reviews on Amazon....)
• On a related note, you should really swing by the Cambridge table to order yourself a copy of the 19-years-in-the-making third edition of Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics.  I haven't seen it yet, but I have every reason to think that it's going to be absolutely fantastic.  Seriously, from the experimental physics side, this is a huge deal.
• This is a fun video, showing a "motor" made from an alkaline battery, a couple of metal-coated rare-earth magnets, and a coil of uninsulated wire.  It's not that crazy to see broadly how it works (think inhomogeneous fields from a finite solenoid + large magnetic moment), but it's cool nonetheless.
• Here's an article (pdf) that's very much worth reading about the importance of government funding of basic research.  It was favorably referenced here by that (sarcasm mode = on) notorious socialist organization (/sarcasm), the American Enterprise Institute.