Conan the Barbarian: A Nest of Serpents, by Jim Zub

Posted on February 21, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 5 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account.

My blogging is at the happy point where I occasionally get copies of books to review, and I am always delighted to get works related to Robert E. Howard’s writing, which my whole blog was originally inspired by! Last year, I reviewed Conan the Barbarian: Twisting Loyalties, written by Jim Zub, and not long ago Titan Comics sent me the next volume in the series, Conan the Barbarian: A Nest of Serpents, also written by Jim Zub! This volume covers issues #21-24 of Conan, following directly after the last volume and continuing some of the plot lines.

One thing that is fun about Zub’s writing is that he fits the stories quite nicely into the original Conan fiction by Robert E. Howard. Twisting Loyalties was set during and after Howard’s famous 1934 story Queen of the Black Coast, and A Nest of Serpents is set following the events of Howard’s The Vale of Lost Women, which was only published in 1967 years after Howard’s death.

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Hothouse, by Brian Aldiss

Posted on February 15, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 4 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Could only find this book available on Amazon this time.

Been digging through my collection of unread books looking for something different to read and recently the book Hothouse (1962) by English science fiction author Brian Aldiss caught my eye!

I picked this up some time ago after reading Aldiss’ most famous book Non-Stop, a tale of humans who live on a malfunctioning generation ship that have reverted to a primitive society and think that the ship they are on is their entire world! Non-Stop was an imaginative and unique story and I had high hopes that Hothouse would be similarly innovative.

My hopes were proven true! Hothouse is one of the wildest science fiction rides I’ve been on in quite a while.

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The Berserker Throne, by Fred Saberhagen

Posted on January 29, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 3 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Today, I can oddly only link to the audiobook on Bookshop.org, since it is an old book and largely out of print.

I’ve been slowly reading the Berserker series of books by Fred Saberhagen in order (book one, book two, book three), but recently I saw one of the later novels in the series, The Berserker Throne (1985) in my local used bookstore and couldn’t resist jumping ahead! It doesn’t seem to be an issue to jump around a little, as long as one knows the backstory, because each novel appears to tell its own story about the Berserker menace.

For those unfamiliar, the Berserkers of Saberhagen’s tales are an army of super-intelligent robotic war machines that were constructed by an ancient alien race to eliminate their long-time enemy… however, the Berserkers went beyond their intended programming and wiped out both sides of the conflict and moved on to wipe out all life in the universe. They are fast, powerful, intelligent, deadly, and utterly ruthless in their goal. The first book of the series tells the story of humanity’s first devastating encounters with the Berserkers, and how it was only through the genius of a general named Karlsen that the main force of machines was wiped out and its remnants driven into hiding. The Berserkers are clever, however, and even a single weakened and isolated Berserker has the potential to ruin an entire world if left unchecked.

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On Whetsday, by Mark Sumner

Posted on January 19, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 2 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.

One joy of being active on social media — in the midst of a lot of downsides — is becoming friends with authors and getting to read their books. A few years ago, I picked up journalist and internet friend Mark Sumner’s 2016 science fiction novel On Whetsday; I lost track of it among a pile of books for a while, but finally settled in to read it this week and absolutely loved it.

Long ago, a race of beings known as the cithians (seen on the cover) rescued the last remnants of humanity from a disaster that rendered the Earth uninhabitable. Since then, the small number of humans have been cared for by their cithian hosts on the planet Rask, being fed and housed in special districts and only being asked to follow a small number of simple rules.

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What is an optical caustic?

Posted on January 16, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Here’s another post based on the revisions I’m making for the second edition of my Singular Optics textbook! Caustics are a subject that I’ve sort of casually understood for ages but never well enough to explain it, but book work has finally made it possible.

Most of the history of optics concerns itself with designing lenses and mirrors that focus light to a point in order to make image-forming and correcting devices like cameras, eyeglasses, microscopes and telescopes. But light gets naturally focused all the time when it passes through irregularly shaped pieces of glass, reflects off of dented metal surfaces, or goes through water drops. The bright spots of light one gets look much more intricate than a simple spot of light, as a few examples below show.

The first image was a spot of light I saw on the ground at Gaffney Outlet Mall, created by light passing through some sort of decorative glass feature. The second image shows a coffee cup with three bright images inside, one for each light source illuminating the cup (the arrows show the direction the light is traveling). The third image shows spots on the side of a building in my neighborhood, created by light reflecting off of warped windows of a neighboring building.

These images are all very different, but closer inspection shows that they have similar features. They generally consist of a bright area surrounded by an even brighter line. These lines are the caustics. One can see that these bright lines often possess sharp cusp points.

Once you start recognizing these caustic features, you will see them everywhere. The other day I was getting out of my car and my open door reflected the setting sun onto the car next to mine. I had to stop and take a photo of how the small dings and dents in my car created caustic patterns.

But what are caustics, and how do we interpret images like the coffee cup caustic, i.e. what causes them? That’s what this post will be about.

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Posted in Mathematics, Optics | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Our new paper on invisibility physics!

Posted on January 10, 2026 by skullsinthestars

So I’ve written a lot about the physics of invisibility on this blog and have even written a popular science book on the subject, but many people may not know that I also still occasionally do some research on invisibility physics! I recently had a paper come out on invisibility in the Journal of the Optical Society of America A, and it was even made an “Editor’s Pick” for reading! I thought I would do a short blog post explaining what it’s about. The paper, titled “Objects invisible from multiple directions,” was written by my now former student Dr. Ray Abney and myself; it constituted the final bit of research for Ray’s PhD.

To begin, a little background: though there is a long history of invisibility concepts popping up in physics, it was only in 2006 that research in the area exploded with the simultaneous publication of two theoretical papers arguing that it is in principle possible to construct “invisibility cloaks,” objects that will guide light around a center hidden region and send it along its way as if it had encountered nothing at all. I talked about these original papers a looong time ago on this blog; here, let me just show you an illustration from the paper by Pendry, Schurig and Smith that demonstrates the principle.

The lines represent light “rays” traveling around that central region. Remarkably, the first prototype of a cloak demonstrating the basic principle was introduced by Schurig et al. that same year; a photograph of their prototype is shown below.

Their device was designed to work at microwave frequencies, where the wavelength of the waves is about 3 cm. The cloak is constructed from a bunch of small elements known as split ring resonators that, when packed together, can act as an optical material with properties not found in nature. Such materials are now known as metamaterials, “beyond” ordinary materials. We note that this device is flat, and was designed to cloak against microwaves propagating through the region between two parallel metal plates. It was a far cry from the ideal theoretical cloak, but demonstrated that the cloaking principles are sound.

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I am a 2026-2027 Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer!

Posted on January 7, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Just wanted to drop a little personal news and add it to my record of stuff: I was chosen to be a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer for 2026-2027! I had applied early last year and though I was chosen I wasn’t sure if something had happened to my selection since I hadn’t heard anything, but I checked recently and I’m on the list!

For those unfamiliar, Sigma Xi is the Scientific Research Honor Society founded in 1886. The society performs a lot of outreach to the public and supports scientific research in general, and I was happy to be nominated to be a member a few years ago.

The Distinguished Lecturer Program selects a number of lecturers every year who can be invited to speak at Sigma Xi Chapters, and I offered to talk about two of my classic broad appeal topics — falling cats and invisibility — as well as one I’ve been working on for a while: the history of conservation of energy in physics.

So if you know any Sigma Xi Chapters looking for cool lectures, send them my way!

Posted in History of science, Personal | 5 Comments

Twelve Nights at Rotter House, by J.W. Ocker

Posted on January 7, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 1 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.

I seem to be on a bit of a haunted house kick lately, as the last book I blogged for 2025, A Haunting on the Hill, and the book I’ll blog about today, Twelve Nights at Rotter House (2019) by J.W. Ocker, are both very classic setup haunted house books! In fact, I bought them both on the same bookstore trip.

Twelve Nights at Rotter House, however, is distinct in the sense that the narrator of the book has deliberately opted to make his stay in a haunted house as much like a classic haunted house book!

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A Haunting on the Hill, by Elizabeth Hand

Posted on December 31, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Book 31 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year — I managed to squeeze one more in before the new year! My goal for 2026 will be 36 books, so off I go on a new quest starting tomorrow. As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.

One of my favorite horror movies of all time is Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting, a brilliant adaptation of one of my favorite horror novels of all time, Shirley Jackson’s 1959 The Haunting of Hill House. When I happened to come across Elizabeth Hand’s 2023 novel A Haunting on the Hill, there was really no doubt about picking it up to read.

For those who might be unfamiliar, The Haunting of Hill House is the story of a team of four investigators who arrive at the infamous Hill House with the goal of uncovering proof of the supernatural. But Hill House is an entity in and of itself, and a malevolent one, and it subtly and then not-so-subtly manipulates the temporary residents until it finds one that it can break and destroy. The novel is a classic haunted house tale, but also a magnificently horrific tale of psychological manipulation and abuse. In every haunted house story, the house itself is the main character, but that has perhaps never felt more true than in Shirley Jackson’s novel.

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Infinite singularities in an optical beam???

Posted on December 6, 2025 by skullsinthestars

Working on the second edition of my Singular Optics textbook and thought I would blog about some of the fun developments in the field that I’ve come across while doing the book research!

Light has wave properties, and as a wave it can do wavy things like other types of waves — including swirling around a central point like a vortex. When a beam of light manifests one or more of these swirling regions, it is typically referred to as a “vortex beam” and the individual swirling structures are known as “optical vortices” (naturally). Beams possessing optical vortices turn out to be really useful in a lot of applications, and the field of study of such beams, and related “singular” beams, has become known as “singular optics.”

A vortex is a localized, conserved, and discrete structure in a wavefield and when we think of vortex beams, we usually think of beams possessing a finite number of vortices. An infinite number of anything is a concept alien to physics in general, as “infinity” is generally considered an unattainable idealized limit.

I’ve been obsessed with infinity in the context of optical vortices, however, and have published some really neat results on this subject (I will elaborate momentarily). Thus when I came across a 2021 paper by Kovalev and Kotlyar1 titled “Optical vortex beams with the infinite topological charge,” I was immediately intrigued! In this blog post I will give an overview of what optical vortices are, how they behave, and why it is fascinating that one can apparently cram an infinite number of vortices in a beam of light!

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Posted in Optics | Tagged , | 4 Comments