Robert E. Howard’s El Borak

Posted on April 8, 2010 by skullsinthestars

Finally, I’ve gotten to read some new Robert E. Howard!  Well, not new — Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936 — but new to me, anyway!

For those who are unfamiliar, Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was a Texas author who wrote fantasy, adventure, and horror fiction for pulp magazines such as Weird Tales.  He is best known for his creation Conan the Cimmerian, though he wrote a large body of memorable work and introduced many fascinating heroes.  For instance, the title of this blog, “Skulls in the Stars”, is a title of a story of Howard’s about his character Solomon Kane, a puritan adventurer and justice-seeker.

Most of Howard’s other works have fallen into obscurity, overshadowed by the popularity of Conan, but in recent years compilations of some of them have been released.  I recently picked up a compilation of Howard’s modern desert adventures, titled El Borak:

“El Borak” is the Arabic name of American adventurer Francis Xavier Gordon, and the bulk of the tales, though not all, focus on his adventures.  The tales are stories of action and intrigue set in the deserts and mountains of the Middle East, stretching all the way to Afghanistan.

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Posted in Adventure fiction, Robert E. Howard | 5 Comments

Wave interference: where does the energy go?

Posted on April 7, 2010 by skullsinthestars

Last week was a relatively lousy one for me, but it was made up in part by getting a good question from a student on waves and interference after class.  It’s really nice to get a question that indicates a genuine interest in the science (as opposed to just wanting an answer to homework), and I thought I’d discuss the question and its answer as a post.

The situation in question is as follows: suppose you have a harmonic wave on a string traveling to the right such that in a snapshot of time, the string looks as follows:

This wave carries energy, and there is a net flow of energy to the right.  Now suppose we excite the string with an additional wave of the same frequency and amplitude, but completely out of phase.  The sum of the two waves then vanishes:

The two waves cancel each other out, leaving a completely unmoving string due to destructive interference.  My student asked me: what happens to the energy?  As posed, it seems that we started with two waves carrying energy, but they canceled each other out, leaving no energy!  This interpretation cannot possibly be correct, so where is the flaw in our description?

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Posted in Optics, Physics | 33 Comments

10 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #22!

Posted on April 5, 2010 by skullsinthestars

This is your monthly reminder that there’s 10 days left until the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #22!  It will be hosted by The Lay Scientist.  Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!

Let me follow up again by saying we still desperately need hosts to fill in over the next few months; if you’re interested in hosting, please leave a comment or send me an email.  You don’t have to be a historian of science to host — just someone with a passion for science and its roots.

Posted in General science, Science news | 5 Comments

ResearchBlogging editor’s selections: Ocean conveyors, UV paleontology, science and “truth”, and scientific misconduct

Posted on April 5, 2010 by skullsinthestars
  • Ocean Conveyor running AMOC. Life on our planet owes a lot to the global ocean currents, but there is concern that global warming may shut this current down.  Is there any indication this is happening yet?  Alistair at Deep Type Flow discusses the theory and the evidence.
  • UV, You See? Black Light Reveals Secrets in Fossils. GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life talks about an underutilized technique in paleontology — using UV light to study fossils — and the awesome scientific dividends it has already paid.
  • Climate change and philosophy of science: Does climate science aim at truth? There was a recent tiff in The Guardian, in the context of climate science, about the question of whether science aims at “truth”.  Michael at Good, Bad and Bogus does a great job of dissecting the arguments.
  • What causes scientific misconduct? We know that scientists are tempted to “cheat” at their work much too often, but why?  Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science looks at research relating to the motivations of those who have been caught as such misconduct.

Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” highlights!

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

Michelson and Margarite

Posted on April 2, 2010 by skullsinthestars

My recent posts on Ada Lovelace Day (here and here) not only drove home the point that there were even more historically important women scientists and mathematicians than I had optimistically imagined, but that the smartest male scientists of their eras appreciated their contributions and actively encouraged them.

I don’t want to obsess over the approbation of the male scientists — undeniably, the women’s contributions stand out on their own.  Now that I’ve noticed it, though, I’m spotting other remarkable and little-remembered instances, and can’t resist sharing.  These stories give me a little more faith in humanity, or at least the scientific community.

The story I want to tell in this post I came across in a biography of Albert A. Michelson (1852-1931) written by his daughter Dorothy Michelson Livingston: The Master of Light (Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1973).

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Posted in History of science, Women in science | 3 Comments

ResearchBlogging editor’s selections: molding stem cells, lightning, dogs at play, and a heritage of honey

Posted on March 29, 2010 by skullsinthestars
  • Shaping a stem cell’s future. Most of us are familiar with the idea of stem cells (and the political controversies associated with them): cells which can be chemically manipulated into different types of functionality.  Rob Mitchum at ScienceLife describes research that has shown that this functionality can be controlled by manipulating the shape of the cell!
  • On the phenomena of lightning. How much do you know about lightning?  In the course of his radio astronomy work, Alexander at The Astronomist did some investigating and discusses some interesting facts about lightning and its generation.
  • Is My Dog Playing or Fighting With That Other Dog? Ever wonder how to tell the difference between rough dog play and a dog fight?  Jason at The Thoughtful Animal describes how dogs work it out.
  • Preserving a culture in wild honey. Finally, Alun at AlunSalt provides a thoughtful look at the disappearance of an Aboriginal tribes’ honey-gathering heritage.

As a bonus, if you were intrigued by last week’s description of macroscopic quantum-mechanical objects, Chad at Uncertain Principles provides more details on the experiment and what it actually demonstrated.

Check back next week for more “miscellaneous” suggestions!

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

Some more women in science, and their appreciators

Posted on March 28, 2010 by skullsinthestars

I thought, before this past week, that I appreciated quite well the important but often unacknowledged role that women have played in the history of science and mathematics.  It turns out that I’ve hardly scratched the surface of their contributions, which go back even further than I imagined.  Perhaps even more fascinating is the fact that a number of truly great male researchers realized the brilliance of these women, even if the bulk of the academic community did not.  As a supplement to my Ada Lovelace day post, I thought I’d present a little more musing on the role of women in science from the point of view of some of these researchers.

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Posted in History of science, Women in science | 23 Comments

Graham Masterton’s Blind Panic

Posted on March 27, 2010 by skullsinthestars

About a month ago, I picked up the most recent novel by horror author Graham Masterton, Blind Panic (2010):

Buying this novel was a no-brainer for me, because the back cover description completely intrigued me:

It began without warning.  Across the country, people were struck suddenly and totally blind.  At first it was just a few, but gradually more and more fell victim to the spreading darkness. Hospital emergency rooms filled to overflowing as highway pileups and airplane crashes were everywhere.  But now the true horror has arrived.  Silent, spectral hunters have begun to stalk their now-helpless prey.  The blind can only grope in frantic fear as the ghostly marauders prowl the streets, leaving nothing but death in their wake.

Sounds neat, eh?  I’m a very big fan of Graham Masterton’s work, as can be seen from my old “Horror Masters” post about him.  I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything I’ve read of his, and this novel is no exception, though I should point out that the back cover description is a little deceptive!  (Mild spoiler follows.)

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Posted in Horror | Leave a comment

Women published in the Royal Society, 1890-1930

Posted on March 23, 2010 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been struggling to think of a woman scientist to profile for Ada Lovelace Day!  Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was a brilliant woman mathematician and arguably the first computer programmer, designing a program for Charles Babbage’s (never constructed) Analytical Engine.  Ada Lovelace Day was started in 2009 to commemorate the accomplishments of women in science, and bloggers pledge to post on a science or tech heroine.

The trouble is that I don’t know enough about any particular female scientist to comfortably blog about her!  I’m very eager to blog about Sofia Kovalevskaya, an amazing Russian mathematician, but don’t know enough to add value beyond her Wikipedia article!  (That will be rectified next year, as I’ve ordered three books on Sofia: a biography, her memoirs, and her novel!)

I do read a lot of journals, however, and I’ve noticed that a lot of women make an appearance as authors starting in the late 1800s.  I’ve been downloading the papers of these authors from the Royal Society, and I thought it would be nice to briefly describe the women and the work of the era from roughly 1890 to 1930.  The list puts the lie to the misogynistic claim that women have no interest in science or have made no significant contributions — especially since these papers appear before women even had equal voting rights to men in the U.K.! (Women’s suffrage was fully granted in 1928.)

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Posted in General science, History of science, Women in science | 12 Comments

Pwned by a historian of science!

Posted on March 22, 2010 by skullsinthestars

I knew this moment would come eventually!  As an amateur scholar of the history of science, I’ve dreaded the day that I get my facts screwed up enough to bring commentary from an actual historian.  Well, that day has come — after reading my talk on “Forgotten milestones in the history of science“, ThonyC of The Renaissance Mathematicus sent me a nice email pointing out how I’d bungled my discussion of the significance of Ibn al-Haytham’s work.

I knew I was on shaky ground while I was working on that section of the talk, which was the hardest to prepare.  I was working from a limited amount of sources against a deadline to complete the talk, but I really wanted to include al-Haytham as perhaps the most significant optics researcher of his era.  Most of my colleagues in optics are unaware of the history of optics before Newton, and this was a great opportunity to bring a little attention to that era and the interesting philosophical questions pondered.

There’s nothing that bugs me more than incorrect information, and spreading said information, so I thought I’d try and correct at least some of my mistakes with the help of Thony’s comments via email!

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Posted in History of science | 6 Comments