Freaks & geeks: optical freak waves in the laboratory

Posted on July 13, 2010 by skullsinthestars

ResearchBlogging.orgOne of the most fruitful and intriguing avenues for developing novel scientific research is through cross-pollination with other fields of study.  This is one of the reasons I’m proud of my excessively liberal arts-focused education, as well as one of the reasons I like reading blogs on diverse subjects outside of my field: interesting ideas can often come from unexpected sources.

An example of this I found a few months ago in Physical Review Letters, in an article entitled, “Freak waves in the linear regime: a microwave study,” by Höhmann, Kuhl, Stöckman, Kaplan and Heller.  Freak waves, also known as rogue waves*, are anomalously large — and deadly — isolated oceanic waves that can shatter and overturn ships, and they have only been acknowledged relatively recently as a genuine and unusual phenomenon, albeit one that is still not completely understood.

Hokusai’s 1832 The Great Wave off Kanagawa, via Wikipedia.   Not necessarily a freak wave, but probably close to what most people would envision one to be.

It was probably inevitable that researchers in optics would become interested in freak waves: broadly speaking, a wave is a wave, and an effect that appears in water waves is likely reproducible in electromagnetic waves.  Experts on oceanic freak waves have even been invited to speak at optics meetings; a session at the 2009 Optical Society of America’s Frontiers in Optics meeting was opened with the invited talk, “Freak Ocean Waves in One and Two Dimensions,” by Peter Janssen and Jean-Raymond Bidlot of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

In this post I thought I would take a look at the phenomenon of freak waves, the physical origins of said waves, and methods that physicists have used to create electromagnetic versions of them in the laboratory.

Continue reading →

Posted in Optics, Physics | 7 Comments

ResearchBlogging editor’s selections: International romance, sluggish T-rex, double rainbows and World Cup excuses

Posted on July 12, 2010 by skullsinthestars

It was, perhaps not surprisingly, a relatively quiet week in research blogging, but there were still lots of great posts!

  • Men, English, and international romance. We begin this week with a post about international relationships, specifically of Japanese folks with foreigners.  There’s been a lot of attention paid to Japanese women with foreign men, but what about the reverse?  In an amusing post, Lachlan of Language on the Move looks at some of the cultural aspects.
  • Tyrannosaurus didn’t have the nerve to run fast. Those scared to death by the t-rex in Jurassic Park can breathe a sigh of relief — recent research suggests that the “tyrant lizard” couldn’t move nearly as fast as depicted.  Brian Switek of Dinosaur Tracking explains the reassuring details.
  • The science of double rainbows (OMG, what does this mean?). Everyone loves to see a rainbow, but we feel doubly blessed when we see a double rainbow.   How do such rainbows form?  Westius of Mr. Science Show explains the physics.
  • Top ten excuses for World Cup losers (with citations). Finally, in honor of the recently-concluded World Cup, Duncan of O’Really? gives us the top ten excuses for failure — and the scientific citations that back them up!

Check back next Monday for more miscellaneous selections!

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

A. Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar

Posted on July 11, 2010 by skullsinthestars

(I’ve been working on a particularly difficult science post for a week now, and the end is still a ways off.  In the meantime, I thought I’d catch up a little on my weird fiction posts.)

Author A. Merritt (1884-1943) was, in a sense, the exception that proves the rule in fiction writing.  Though he was first and foremost a successful journalist and newspaper editor and only wrote weird fiction as a sideline, he was one of the most successful authors such stories of his day.  On this blog, I’ve discussed a number of his works, including his first serialized novel The Moon Pool (1919), the sublimely alien The Metal Monster (1920), Dwellers in the Mirage (1932) and The Face in the Abyss (1923).

Unfortunately, Merritt has been largely neglected in recent years, with the exception of his fantasy adventure novel The Ship of Ishtar (1924), which seems to be considered a classic of the genre.  I put off reading it until the release of the Planet Stories version this past October:

Curiously, though I enjoyed TSOI, I also felt like it had the least to offer of all of Merritt’s books that I’ve read so far.  There were also some rather unenlightened aspects of the story that I found rather unappealing and dated.

Continue reading →

Posted in Adventure fiction, Robert E. Howard, Weird fiction | 3 Comments

7 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #25!

Posted on July 7, 2010 by skullsinthestars

In spite of all the craziness in the blogosphere right now (or perhaps because of it), this seemed like a good time to remind people that there are 7 days left until the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #25, to be held at The Dispersal of Darwin.  This edition will mark the 2nd anniversary of this carnival’s existence!  Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

The sciencebloggosphere is a changing! (updated)

Posted on July 7, 2010 by skullsinthestars

(Updated July 22, 2010 — been hard to keep up with all the changes! Let me know if I have left anyone out.)

Update: The strike is over!  SEED seems to have agreed to the changes requested.

BIG Update: PZ Myers of Pharyngula is going on strike until SEED makes changes both in its communication policies and improves its technical support! (Greg Laden joins the strike.)

Update: Food Frontiers is officially off of Scienceblogs.  It remains to be seen how this will affect the bloggers’ decision to stay or go — some have already stated that they won’t be coming back.

If you haven’t heard, the Scienceblogs community has gone through a tremendous upheaval over a short span of 24 hours, with a number of their best science writers basically resigning from the community in protest.  The spark that ignited the powderkeg was the introduction of a corporate paid for and sponsored blog to the science blogging mix, Food Frontiers: a blog by PepsiCo on nutrition, of all things!  This has been seen by many, if not most, of the bloggers as corporate propaganda masquerading as legitimate science, which hurts the reputation of said bloggers and corrupts the integrity of the system.

I don’t have enough of an understanding of the details to make a strong statement about the controversy here (at the very least, the whole thing seems like a very big PR clusterf#$k on the part of SEED).  Right now I can understand the arguments of both those who have chosen to stay at SBs and those who have chosen to move on to, or rather back to, independent blogging.  I did want to say that I support all of the Sciencebloggers and feel your pain right now (hell, the whole thing has made me anxious, and I have no association with SBs!).

I also wanted to help out those who have departed by throwing a few links towards their new/old homes!

People who were undecided but seem to be staying (for now):

I’ll try and update this when I hear more about where folks are ending up…

Note: Carl Zimmer is also keeping a list of evacuees here.

Posted in ... the Hell? | 41 Comments

Is there anybody… out there?

Posted on July 6, 2010 by skullsinthestars

Over the past week, a lot of blogs have revived a venerable scienceblog tradition: inviting those who “lurk” on the blog (read without posting) to de-lurk and say “hi”!  I’ve never tried to do that, but it seemed like a nice idea to fill some time while I’m working on my next science-y post.

I’d love to hear from you!  Feel free to post a comment saying a little about yourself, how you found yourself at this blog, and what sort of topics interest you.  Heck, even if you’ve posted comments somewhat regularly here, you should also feel welcome to say hello!

(Title of post comes from here, if you’re wondering.)

Posted in Personal | 49 Comments

ResearchBlogging editor’s selections: Eclipse in the Odyssey, photons still bosons, and soccer GPS

Posted on July 5, 2010 by skullsinthestars

Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” suggestions!

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

Hummingbirds are back!

Posted on July 3, 2010 by skullsinthestars

The hummingbirds are back around, and drinking from our window-based feeder!  I managed to get a really clear shot of one of them:

The image is so clear, in fact, that if you zoom in on the full, hi-res version, you can actually seen the side of the house reflected in the hummingbird’s eye!

This shot was a bit of quirky luck: I had seen the birds buzzing in and out of the feeder several times during the day, but they usually take off when they see me moving in the house.  On a random whim, I suddenly decided to grab the camera and stand, motionless, pointing at the feeder, just in case one went by.  This was really a long shot, since they come by perhaps several times a day at most, but within a minute of me standing there, the fellow pictured above stopped in for a drink!

Posted in Animals | 2 Comments

Richard Marsh’s The Goddess: A Demon (Valancourt edition)

Posted on July 2, 2010 by skullsinthestars

With the release of the Valancourt edition of Richard Marsh’s The Goddess: A Demon, I thought I’d repost my earlier review of the book, with some modifications specific to this edition.

I’ve read a lot of the books of Richard Marsh (1857-1915) over the past few years, and have yet to be disappointed in his work.  Marsh’s breakthrough work was The Beetle (1897), and he produced many other clever and atmospheric tales of weird fiction, including the bizarre horror tale The Joss (1901) and the silly social commentary The Magnetic Girl (1903).  Sadly, most of these books were forgotten and neglected early in the 20th century.

Valancourt Books has been doing a wonderful job reprinting Marsh’s work, with the added bonus of scholarly introductions and often reproductions of the original covers.  Their most recent release is Marsh’s The Goddess: A Demon (1900):

Let’s take a look at it…

Continue reading →

Posted in Horror, Mystery/thriller | 1 Comment

Invisibility physics: Kerker’s “invisible bodies”

Posted on July 2, 2010 by skullsinthestars

(This is a continuation of my “history of invisibility physics” series of posts.  The earlier posts are: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI)

The history of invisibility physics truly began with the concept of radiationless motions of charged particles, as described by Ehrenfest in 1910 and Schott in 1933.  There are many more discoveries associated with these and related phenomena, which would eventually be referred to as nonradiating sources.

I would like to jump ahead in the history a little bit, however, and discuss a paper published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America in 1975 by Milton Kerker, entitled, “Invisible bodies”.  The article, relatively unknown today, is the first article to describe an object which is invisible in the true sense of the word — although the object itself is microscopic!

Continue reading →

Posted in Invisibility, Optics | 17 Comments