The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume 1

Posted on April 23, 2021 by skullsinthestars

Having a quiet night at home and realized this would be a good time to catch up on some book blogging! I finally started getting back into reading, after a long pandemic-depression hiatus, at the start of the new year, but am way behind in writing about the books I read.

Let’s start with The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume 1, which came out in December of 2020.

Edited by James Jenkins and Ryan Cagle, the founders of Valancourt Books, this volume collects a bunch of horror stories, never translated into English, by authors from around the world. As they put it in the blurb for the book, there’s a whole world of horror fiction out there that most of us in the United States have never explored, and we’re missing out on some wonderful work.

This is a good time to review volume 1, as volume 2 in what will presumably be a series is already available for pre-order. And I’m glad they’ve evidently found success with the concept, because they’ve demonstrated that there are a lot of wonderful stories to be found around the world.

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Posted in Horror | 1 Comment

Me on This Week in Science!

Posted on April 23, 2021 by skullsinthestars

I’m having a lot of fun doing video chats on science shows lately! A few days ago, I happened to see that This Week in Science talked about some optics that I am familiar with, and I jokingly complained to them that I should have been consulted. Well, that turned into me appearing to talk about optics, invisibility, and cat physics this week! You can watch the interview and discussion below:

Posted in General science, Optics | Leave a comment

Old School Dungeons and Dragons: Part 20

Posted on April 19, 2021 by skullsinthestars

Wow, have I been doing these threads forever? Yes, yes I have! The first one was in August of 2019!

Anyway, here are some more old school Dungeons & Dragons posts, compiled from my twitter threads.

Night Below, an Underdark Campaign (1995), by Carl Sargent. This one is a truly epic D&D product!

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Posted in Entertainment, Fantasy fiction, role-playing games | 1 Comment

Personally Speaking… about Falling Felines!

Posted on March 18, 2021 by skullsinthestars

Hi all, I’ve been rather busy with work lately and haven’t had much time to blog. I’ve got a lot to write about, and no time to do it! In the meantime, however, I gave a talk at my university about my Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics book which, thanks to the pandemic, will be about as “official” as a book tour event as I will have.

The event was a lot of fun, and the video is available below for anyone interested in watching! The talk itself was about 1/2 hour, followed by another 1/2 hour of Q&A with the virtual audience.

More bloggy stuff to come!

Posted in History of science, Personal, Physics | Leave a comment

Old School Dungeons and Dragons: Part 19

Posted on February 5, 2021 by skullsinthestars

Have I really done enough twitter threads of old school Dungeons and Dragons to fill 19 posts? Yes, I have, and there’s more to come!

Let’s jump right in…

The Book of Lairs (1986), by Jim Ward and Michael Breault. This next product was a big deal when it first came out, as I remember!

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Posted in Fantasy fiction, role-playing games | 1 Comment

Row, row row your boat, James Clerk Maxwell (1841)

Posted on January 23, 2021 by skullsinthestars

Another short post inspired by my work on my upcoming book on the history of invisibility physics!

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) is rightly regarded as one of the most important physicists of the 19th century, and indeed of all time, thanks to his work on a variety of subjects: color vision, statistical mechanics, and electromagnetic theory. It was Maxwell who found the “missing link” in electromagnetic theory, a previously unknown factor in the interaction of electricity and magnetism that, when included, predicts electromagnetic waves that travel at the speed of light. From this, Maxwell correctly concluded that light is an electromagnetic wave, revolutionizing our understanding of light, electricity and magnetism all at once.

James Clerk Maxwell.png
James Clerk Maxwell, later in life.

I always enjoy stories that humanize such powerful figures, and the 1882 book The Life of James Clerk Maxwell goes into some detail about the curious and intelligent child that Maxwell was. Throughout his childhood, his repeated question about any new object was, “What’s the go o’ that? What does it do?” If the answer was insufficient, he would add, “But what’s the particular go of it?”

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Posted in History of science, Optics | 1 Comment

Thomas Young sees the light (1800)

Posted on December 23, 2020 by skullsinthestars

A post inspired by work I’m doing on my next book, on the history of invisibility! Also will help me get my thoughts in order to write the book chapter.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, humanity’s understanding of the nature of light underwent a dramatic transformation. For about a century, the study of optics had been dominated by the views of Isaac Newton, who published his classic work on the subject, Opticks, in 1704. Newton did rigorous experiments, testing the properties of light in every way imaginable in his era, and concluded from his work that light consists of a stream of particles. Newton’s work seemed to put to rest an argument that had raged in his time — is light a stream of tiny particles, or a wave, like water and sound? In 1800, however, the British scientist Thomas Young published the first of several papers arguing that light does, in fact, have wavelike properties, and his research would be the start of a new era of wave optics that continues (with some important modifications) to this day.

I’m not sure how many people are aware of the work of Young. I think most scientists have heard about his most famous contribution, now known as Young’s double-slit experiment, but even most of them may not be aware of the fascinating story of how Young came to his conclusions. This post is an attempt to rectify this.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Some photos of the conjunction!

Posted on December 22, 2020 by skullsinthestars

You may have heard that yesterday there was a rare planetary conjunction, in which Jupiter and Saturn appear very close together in the sky! Well, the planets will still be close for several days, and I thought I would go out tonight and try a few shots with my old Canon PowerShot camera, which did surprisingly well.

So, here’s one of the best images I got, where you can actually see the rings of Saturn, probably not much different than Galileo did when he first looked at the planet through a telescope in 1610!

Fun trivia: much like my image above, to Galileo the rings appeared as two dots on either side of the planet, which slowly appeared to disappear as the days passed. What Galileo didn’t know is that the rings were tilting towards him, making them effectively invisible, but Galileo wrote to a friend, “Has Saturn devoured his children?” (Which is appropriate, if one knows the story of Saturn.)

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Old School Dungeons & Dragons: Part 18

Posted on December 2, 2020 by skullsinthestars

Time for another round of old school Dungeons and Dragons, taken from my long-running twitter series!

Dragons (1986), by Cory Glaberson. Here is another supplement in the Role Aids line for D&D that was produced by Mayfair Games, originally under the untested premise that TSR couldn’t sue them for making unlicensed products!

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Posted in Fantasy fiction, role-playing games | 6 Comments

Superoscillations: imaging beyond the limits of diffraction

Posted on November 22, 2020 by skullsinthestars

This past week I gave a virtual talk to the Charlotte Amateur Astronomy Club about a fascinating development in wave physics and imaging called “superoscillations,” and I thought I would record a version that I could share here!

Hopefully the video makes sense — I throw in a little history about the wave theory of light in addition to the discussion of modern developments.

Posted in History of science, Optics | Leave a comment