For a part of this past week I was at a workshop in California, and a lot of excellent theoretical and experimental researchers of metamaterials were present. One of the points stressed by many of them is the difference between the idea of ‘negative refraction’ and a ‘negative refractive index’. I had been vaguely aware of the issue, but it was really driven home by some of the discussion. I thought I’d share my musings on the subject in a post.
Some musings on negative refraction
July 4, 2009 by skullsinthestars12 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #13!
July 3, 2009 by skullsinthestarsThis July 4th, if you’re celebrating the history of the United States, why not celebrate some history of science as well? There’s 12 days left until the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #13, which is the first anniversary edition of the carnival, to be hosted right here. Let’s make this one extra-special and get a lot of great entries submitted!
“Depression” isn’t just feeling bad
July 1, 2009 by skullsinthestarsThere’s been a healthy amount of discussion on the science blogs over the past few days about clinical depression, spurred on in large part by questions from aspiring academics concerning the best way to address the impact of their illness on their job and, just as important, their advisor’s perception of that job. Dr. Isis seems to have started the current ball rolling with a question from a postdoc, PalMD posted another reader’s experience as a grad student dealing with depression, and Mark Chu-Carroll updated an old post concerning his own struggles with depression. (If you search through the comments on the original post, you can read one of my very first blog comments, long before I had a blog of my own.)
I feel I should throw my own personal experiences in here. I’ve been on antidepressants myself since graduate school. I make no secret of it to anyone anymore, though I haven’t talked about it that much on the blog, except in one early post about the unjustified stigma that antidepressant drugs have. Read the rest of this entry »
My interview on “A Blog Around the Clock”
June 30, 2009 by skullsinthestarsAs part of the run-up to ScienceOnline’10, Coturnix of A Blog Around the Clock has been running written interviews with the participants of the ‘09 conference… including me! You can read my interview here.
Happy birthday to Ray Harryhausen!
June 29, 2009 by skullsinthestarsIt’s a good time of year for birthdays: today is Ray Harryhausen’s birthday! If you don’t know who Ray Harryhausen is, you should be ashamed of yourself — he’s the undisputed master of special effects.
Harryhausen pioneered the use of stop-motion animation to bring fantastic creatures to life. If you’ve seen It Came From Beneath the Sea, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Clash of the Titans, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms or — heaven help me — The Valley of Gwangi, you’ve seen Harryhausen’s mastery of special effects.
My favorite, which I still find awesome to this day, is the animated statue of Kali (via This Distracted Globe):
The Golden Voyage gives us this nice bit of trivia about the sequence:
In order to rehearse all the six arms with the actors in the sequence three stunt men had to be strapped together with a big belt standing and posing as Kali.
The adventure films of Harryhausen never made a whole lot of sense, but they were fun and filled with creatures more memorable than most of the throw-away CGI beasts produced today.
Most of Harryhausen’s work was done from the 50s through the 80s, but he still has an impact — numerous little “tributes” to him appear in animated films, and in 1992 he won the Gord0n E. Sawyer Academy Award “Given to an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.”
Happy birthday, and hopefully many more, to the father of modern special effects!
(P.S. I’m honored to share a birthday with him!)
Update: The Seventh Voyage.com, a site dedicated to Harryhausen, is fascinating! Particularly intriguing is the section on Lost Projects, imaginative movie ideas that Harryhausen never got a chance to make. Even more intriguing: one of these lost projects, War Eagles, was originally conceived in 1940 but is going to be released in 2010, with Harryhausen as executive producer! From IMDB: “A publicly humiliated test pilot and a lost clan of vikings riding giant eagles are America’s only hope against a surprise Nazi attack.” Awesome!
Abramowitz and Stegun online!
June 29, 2009 by skullsinthestarsAbramowitz and Stegun is a classic reference book which contains all sorts of information about special functions and their integrals. If you’ve ever needed to reference something on the road and don’t have your copy with you, you will be happy to learn that the book is accessible online.
I happened across this by pure dumb luck while looking for some sort of obscure Bessel function integral some time ago…
Francis Stevens’ The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy
June 29, 2009 by skullsinthestarsIn my readings for this blog, I am constantly surprised by how many truly excellent authors and works of weird fiction have been (mostly) lost in the passage of time. Fortunately, a number of publishers have valiantly taken up the cause of bringing these forgotten works back into the public eye, and I’ve talked a quite a bit about Valancourt Books, Wordsworth Mystery and Supernatural, and Paizo Press. I should probably add to this list Bison Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, which a few years ago produced an edition of Francis Stevens’ short stories, titled The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy:
Francis Stevens was the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948), who wrote a number of novels and short stories between 1917 and 1923. She is credited in the Bison Books edition as being “the woman who invented dark fantasy”, and with good reason: though the tales in the book are uneven in their plot and character development at times, they present a truly dark vision of the world that has obvious influences on such luminaries as H.P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt, as we will see.
Happy birthday to Bruce Davison!
June 28, 2009 by skullsinthestarsI’m out of town for a few days, and likely posting light, but I had to put in a short “happy birthday” to actor Bruce Davison!
Davison, who has a distinguished air about him that screams, “upper echelon”, is often pegged for roles as academics, doctors or politicians — both good and bad. He played the evil, mutie-hating Senator Kelly in X-Men, and the do-good philanthropist on the remake of Knight Rider. He did an excellent, though brief, job as the unstable Dr. Silberman on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and has guest-starred on shows as diverse as Seinfeld, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost. I’ve always been particularly fond of his role as the increasingly deranged Dr. Stegman on the surprisingly good Stephen King miniseries Kingdom Hospital.
One performance of his, however, has been burned into my brain from long before I knew who he was. One of his earlier roles was in the made-for-TV movie The Wave (1981), in which he plays high-school teacher Ben Ross, who is apparently turning his students into a new wave of Nazi idealogues.
Best wishes to Davison on his birthday for a long and successful career!
Oh, the things I hear
June 28, 2009 by skullsinthestarsOverheard at the airport this morning, part of a conversation between two older ladies:
“She’s really pretty. She has beautiful teeth.”
A REAL problem for modern universities
June 27, 2009 by skullsinthestarsThere have been a lot of people of late who have offered suggestions for “improving” the university system, mainly by putting the blame on the faculty. There’s been criticism that the educational system produces “dull” scientists, and the more-or-less perennial calls for a heavier regulation of faculty members and an abolishment tenure. However, as a recent case illustrates, perhaps faculty members shouldn’t be the only ones blamed for the quality of the system:
What does it cost to get an unqualified student into the University of Illinois law school?
Five jobs for graduating law students, suggest internal e-mails released Thursday.
The documents show for the first time efforts to seek favors — in this case, jobs — for admissions, the most troubling evidence yet of how Illinois’ entrenched system of patronage crept into the state’s most prestigious public university.
They also detail the law school’s system for handling “Special Admits,” students backed by the politically connected, expanding the scope of a scandal prompted by a Chicago Tribune investigation.
In one e-mail exchange, University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman forced the law school to admit an unqualified applicant backed by then- Gov. Rod Blagojevich while seeking a promise from the governor’s go-between that five law school graduates would get jobs. The applicant, a relative of deep-pocketed Blagojevich campaign donor Kerry Peck, appears to have been pushed by Trustee Lawrence Eppley, who often carried the governor’s admissions requests.
This is pretty appalling, and to me illustrative of a real problem with modern universities: the view that an education is simply a commodity to be sold, and more broadly that a university should be run just like any other business. Reading the full article, I feel bad for the Dean of the Law School, who resisted pressure to admit the sub-par candidates as much as possible.
While I sympathize with the view that a university has to keep itself financially viable, far too often it seems that administrations try and improve the prestige and success of the institution by every method except the one that counts: maintaining first-rate academic programs.
Is there any part of Illinois that Rod Blagojevich didn’t corrupt?
