February 8, 2010 by skullsinthestars
Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a Comment »
February 7, 2010 by skullsinthestars
Searching through old journals results in wonderfully serendipitous moments. I originally started searching through the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for articles by Lord Kelvin, but along the way have found all sorts of interesting and thought-provoking papers.
A few weeks ago I noted that one article, “On the bursting of firearms when the muzzle is closed by snow, earth, grease, &c.”, foreshadowed later attempts by the MythBusters to test whether the barrel of a gun will “banana peel” when fired with a plug in it. About the same time, however, and in an earlier volume of the Proceedings, I found an article with the title, “On the burning mirrors of Archimedes, and on the Concentration of light produced by reflectors,” by John Scott. This article is also an investigation of a myth that would be tackled some 130 years later by the MythBusters! Apparently the 1870s-1880s were a good era for ‘busting!
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Posted in History of science | 6 Comments »
February 3, 2010 by skullsinthestars
I really vowed that I would never “tweet”, but I seem to have found myself with a Twitter account anyway! I can be found “tweeting” as drskyskull, if anyone is interested in following.
I’ve been part of a group in my department brainstorming ideas for internet outreach and communications. Since I suggested that a department Twitter feed might be a helpful possibility, I thought I should get some experience with the medium.
I’m not sure how much I’ll be “tweeting”; this is a bit of an unknown quantity to me. I’ll have to see how it goes…
P.S. Any iPhone Twitterers out there that can recommend a good iPhone Twitter app?
Posted in Personal | 4 Comments »
February 3, 2010 by skullsinthestars
There’s 12 days left until the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #20! It will be held at The Lay Scientist, and entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!
On a related note, we REALLY need some more hosts for the carnival — The Lay Scientist is the last one currently scheduled! If you’ve got a blog and want to see the history of science carnival continue, please consider being a host!
Posted in General science, Science news | 7 Comments »
February 2, 2010 by skullsinthestars
Horror fiction is often burdened by the popular impression that it is the refuge of the anti-social, the unliterary, the morbid, and even the perverse. However, a surprising number of authors of classic literature have dabbled in macabre fiction, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, (“Young Goodman Brown”, “Rappacini’s Daughter”), William Faulkner (“A Rose for Emily”), Charles Dickens (“The Signal-Man”), and Edith Wharton (“Afterward”). In addition, plenty of very successful professionals in other fields, such as journalism, medicine, and academia, have ventured into horror.
For years, the pièce de résistance in my argument in favor of the positive quality of horror authors is a little known 1899 story titled, “Man Overboard!” The author is one Winston Churchill. Yes, that Winston Churchill — or so I thought.
In doing background for another blog post, I Googled Churchill’s “Man Overboard!”, and was surprised to find that there were in fact two famous Winston Churchills in that era — the British politician (1874-1965), and a very famous American author of the same name (1871-1947). So which one wrote the story?
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Posted in ... the Hell?, Horror | 4 Comments »
February 1, 2010 by skullsinthestars
- Doctor Who and the Silver Spiral. Via Megan at Rigel, follow Doctor Who as he travels to the Silver Spiral and explains the physics behind a supernova!
- Evo. Anthro. Study Suggests You Might Be Running Wrong. I always suspected something like this! Brian at Laelaps describes research that suggests that fancy running shoes don’t reduce impact injuries as much as adopting a good barefoot running style.
- Un-Natural Disasters. Bryan at In Terra Veritas discusses an intriguing way to look at “natural” disasters: though due to natural processes, most of the “disaster” part comes from a lack of risk management.
- You and your ugly avatar. The virtual world has proven to be a fascinating laboratory for studying social interactions! David Bradley at Sciencetext describes research on the relationship between the appearance of one’s online avatar and the attention that avatar receives from others.
Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” highlights!
Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a Comment »
January 29, 2010 by skullsinthestars
In a recent post, Chad at Uncertain Principles addresses an interesting criticism of one of his posts. In short, he attempted to summarize the essential features of quantum mechanics that set it apart from other, classical theories of physics. As Chad notes,
So, what’s the issue? The strongest single objection probably comes from Peter Morgan, who didn’t like my element 2):
2) Quantum states are discrete. The “quantum” in quantum physics refers to the fact that everything in quantum physics comes in discrete amounts. A beam of light can only contain integer numbers of photons– 1, 2, 3, 137, but never 1.5 or 22.7. An electron in an atom can only have certain discrete energy values– -13.6 electron volts, or -3.4 electron volts in hydrogen, but never -7.5 electron volts. No matter what you do, you will only ever detect a quantum system in one of these special allowed states.
He commented:
NOOOO!!!!! You need to talk about measurement operators, not about states, if you want to say “discrete”.
Perhaps: Measurement operators that have discrete spectra are used to represent measurement apparatus/procedures that produce discrete measurement results. Measurement operators that have continuous spectra are idealizations that do not correspond to real experimental data that is written in lab books or in computer memory.
The state space is usually taken to be vectors in a Hilbert space over the complex field, or density operators (arguably always one of these, by quantum physicists?), which are pretty much continuous linear spaces.
Leaving aside the technical details, the real issue between poster and commenter is one that’s often on my mind: how much description is necessary to properly explain a physical phenomenon? This is relevant not just to authors of blog posts, but also to educators in general. Science is complicated, and we want to simplify it as much as possible for our students/readers. There is clearly some point, however, at which the simplifying just becomes misleading. The question, then, is: how does one draw the line?
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Posted in Physics | 3 Comments »
January 25, 2010 by skullsinthestars
I’m a little delayed this week, because I’m at a science conference in San Francisco and, surprisingly, internet access is somewhat scarce. Nevertheless, here are this week’s selections:
- Were the Maya noble savages? Everyone knows that the Mayan civilization collapsed around 700 AD, but people are still not sure why. The most popular explanation is that the Mayans wrecked their own ecosystem through deforestation, but were they really that careless? Thomas Kluyver at Thomas’ Plant-Related Blog considers the cons of the explanation.
- Dark Materials. From Brian Koberlein at Upon Reflection, we get a nice discussion of the idea of dark matter and the evidence for its existence — including in our own galaxy.
- Can science be artistic? Finally, nuclear.kelly at Miss Atomic Bomb describes a challenge in science communication given to her graduate students: write a fictional story about your research! She illustrates the challenge with her own story.
Check back next Monday for more miscellaneous selections!
Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a Comment »
January 23, 2010 by skullsinthestars
This post chronicles two firsts: my first trip to San Francisco and my first iPhone-written post!
I’m in town to attend Photonics West and meet with colleagues; today the wife and I were wandering around to see the sights.
I’ll post some pics and a travelogue, though it may take a couple of days – my $200/night hotel only has wired Internet, which they charge $12/day for. They also provide only a 2 ft Internet cable.
Posted in Personal, Travel | 2 Comments »
January 21, 2010 by skullsinthestars
I have yet to be really disappointed by the works of Richard Marsh (1857-1915)! Over the Christmas holiday, I spent some time reading A Spoiler of Men (1905) , which has recently been reprinted by the always great Valancourt Books, complete with a scholarly introduction and a facsimile of the original cover:
Marsh was a quite versatile writer: his books range from supernatural horror, to murder mystery, to comedy, to adventure, to the genuinely unclassifiable. Marsh continues the trend in A Spoiler of Men, where the primary character is in fact an anti-hero, and the story is a bizarre thriller involving, among other things, chemical zombification!
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Posted in Horror, Mystery/thriller | 2 Comments »
