Skulls in the Stars

I feel like a kid again.

When I was young, I scrupulously saved my ‘proof-of-purchase’ from all my Star Wars figures so that I could get the precious Boba Fett action figure, which could only be purchased through mail order.  Oddly, as I recall, this was before The Empire Strikes Back came out, so nobody actually knew who Boba Fett was, but I didn’t care: he looked cool.  The challenge was waiting the 6-8 weeks for delivery, which made me think, as Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes once said, “I’ll be OLD then!”

I’ve got that feeling again, but now it isn’t action figures I’m waiting for (I swear I just heard a huge sigh of relief from the fiancée), but articles ordered through InterLibrary Loan.  I’ve been having so much fun reading and researching old scientific papers that I’ve put in about a dozen requests over the past couple of weeks, all for papers which are circa 1900 and extremely out of date.  (The librarians have to be wondering what on Earth is going through my head.)  Now I find myself compulsively checking the library web page, just like I checked the mailbox as a kid, and impatiently shaking my fist at the screen.

On the bright side, the articles I’ve gotten so far are utterly fascinating, and once I’ve got them all together I’ll have a really neat post.  Stay tuned!

(Hooray!  As I was writing this, an email arrived, telling me that another ILL arrived!)

As of yesterday evening, ‘Babs67 aka The Girlfriend’ became ‘Babs67 aka The Fiancée’!  I proposed at one of our favorite local restaurants, and she said yes!  (I wasn’t particularly worried about the answer, considering we had spent a number of weekends investigating rings.)

The manager of the restaurant, once he realized what was going on, paid for our dinner.  This immediately started us thinking about doing multiple ‘proposals’ for the next couple of weeks at various restaurants!

In other news, single women throughout the world breathed a collective sigh of relief last night…

I was browsing through H.P. Lovecraft’s writings again, in particular his collected philosophical works, and came across an interesting essay: “Time and Space”, printed in Conservative 4, No. 1 (July 1918). Though extremely flowery and poetic, the essay does justice to both Lovecraft’s fiction and science as a whole, as I discuss below. The text, and some commentary, below the fold…

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I haven’t had much time to write a detailed optics post lately. I’m trying to get a couple of papers prepared for publication, and that’s been hindered by coursework and the travel I’ve been doing. Beyond that, I haven’t seen any new optics results recently that have leapt off the intertubes and cried out for blogging. (The odds are, of course, that I haven’t been looking hard enough.)

Hopefully that will change in the near future, but in the meantime, are there any physical science topics, preferably in optics, that anyone would like me to blog about? Consider this an open invitation to submit your requests…

P.S.  For that matter, if there’s any ‘horror blogging’ requests, as well, I’d love to hear those, too!

Just a quick note: I’ll be heading off to give another talk tomorrow, so my posting may be light for a few days again.  I’ve got some cute stuff I’ve been working on, though, so if I have time, I’ll sneak in a post!

Just an entertaining blog stats observation: a few days ago I noticed that my blog stats started to really spike upwards.  This completely confused me at first, as all the hits were appearing on my semi-old post on elephant intelligence.  It took me a little while to realize that the post has apparently migrated to the top of some Google search results.  For instance, if you type ‘elephant paintings hong‘, you get my post as the top entry!  Typing ‘how do they teach the elephants to paint‘ will get me on the first page.

I’m glad I was relatively thorough in my discussion of the topic, which hopefully merits its inclusion high in the search pages.  There’s a lesson here: don’t be too sloppy with a blog entry; you never know where it will end up!

Via Respectful Insolence, I found a wonderful web tool that allows you to rate the amount of cussin’ you do on your blog. I rated a pathetic 1.7%:

I need to swear more, for fuck’s sake…

Ugh.  I’m waiting in an Ohio airport for a flight home.  I just finished giving a talk on my research, which seemed to go over well - lots of questions and lots of compliments afterwards.  This will be a less-than-24-hour stay; hopefully, I’ll be blogging more interesting stuff come tomorrow.

In the meantime, below the fold is a grainy, cell phone picture I took of a hawk.  I was heading into the building for the next session when I noticed a lady photographing the bird.  It was resting on a low-hanging branch, no more than ten feet from us.  I think that’s the closest I’ve been to a wild hawk in my life.  Lovely bird:

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This made me laugh: CNN’s headline right now is “Americans confident in 2009 turnaround”, at least as far as the economy is concerned. The first thing that came to mind for me: what’s the one thing that absolutely must change in 2009? This is what I came up with…

P.S. The Girlfriend and I are going to be going to a concert this weekend, so I probably will be posting light, if at all…

Tomorrow marks the five-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War.  I don’t have a whole lot to say about it this morning, but instead will link to the text of Mark Twain’s The War Prayer.  Twain was a brilliant writer, and his essay is as relevant and poignant today as it was when he first wrote it.  This piece was considered controversial enough that Twain was discouraged from publishing it, and it appeared only six years after his death.