The seventeenth edition of The Giant’s Shoulders is up at The Primate Diaries! Eric Michael Johnson put together an excellent Darwin Sesquicentennial Edition!
The deadline for the next edition is December 15th, and it will be held at Just a mon. Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!
Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” highlights!
I never believed it when people told me that their cats are trying to kill them. Well, I never believed it until last night. The wife and I were watching television, and I got up to make some popcorn. While I was returning with two small bowls for us, our kitty Sabrina thought that it would be a good time to pounce at my foot!
She didn’t actually grab me, but she managed to get her paw under my foot as I was putting it down. To avoid stepping on her, I stumbled forward — and completely hyperextended my big toe in the process. It is now completely swollen and painful, and I’ve spent most of Saturday off my feet playing videogames. (Though it is arguable that I would have done that anyway.)
Sabrina has acted remorseful all day, coming up to me and rubbing her head up against me, something she typically doesn’t do. I’m not fooled, though; this was a dry run before my eventual elimination. The wife claims that it wasn’t intentional, and that she acted alone, but I have my doubts. Would you trust a face like this?
Or this?
Or this?
Henry Kuttner is, for me, one of those authors who never disappoints, and is always thought-provoking. He had an incredibly vivid imagination, and each of his works is absolutely unique, seamlessly blending pulp adventure with science fiction. I’ve discussed a number of his stories previously on this blog, and I’ve loved each one of them. Most recently, I sat down to read Destination Infinity (1956), originally published with the title Fury (1947):
(Image taken from fantasticfiction.co.uk.)
This novel is the first of Kuttner’s that I’ve read that is wholeheartedly science fiction; it is also the first novel of his that features an anti-hero! However, it still retains the flavor of Kuttner’s earlier pulp adventures, and is a lot of fun.
Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” highlights!
This is one of those stories that just fills one with awe about the ancientness of life on earth. Via The Great Orange Satan, I found this article in Wired about an amazing discovery:
The world’s oldest known spider web has been discovered on a beach in Sussex, England, trapped inside an ancient chunk of amber.
Scientists found the rare amber fossil in December, and have now confirmed that it contains remnants of spider silk spun roughly 140 million years ago by an ancestor of modern orb-weaving spiders. After slicing the amber into thin sections and examining each piece under a high-powered microscope, the researchers discovered that the ancient silk threads share several features common to modern spider webs, including droplets of sticky glue used to hold the web together and capture prey.
Spiders have been doing their web-spinning thing for at least 140 million years. That’s just amazing.
(More physics posts in the works, for those who are wondering what I’ve been up to.)
About two years ago, I had the pleasure of happening across and reading John Grant’s book Corrupted Science. Corrupted Science deals with the systematic weakening, ignoring, and suppression of scientific reality for political purposes; examples include the disastrous Lysenkoism of Stalin’s Russia and the potentially catastrophic ignoring of evidence for man-made climate change. Corrupted Science (CS) was Grant’s second book, following Discarded Science, which describes those scientific ideas that in the end turned out not to be true.
The other day, wandering through the exact same Barnes & Noble where I found CS two years ago, I found that Grant has a new book out exploring similar themes to his previous two, Bogus Science; or, Some People Really Believe These Things:
Where DS dealt with wrong science in the scientific community and CS dealt with wrong science in the political theater, BS focuses down and takes a look at individual kooks, crackpots, and frauds and their perversion of established science (and reality).
The book is very good; as a first statement I can highly recommend it. There were also a few aspects of it, however, that made me like it a little less than his previous book.
A few days ago, I got a nice email from FilminFocus.com, the film culture website of film company Focus Features (A Serious Man, Brokeback Mountain, Coraline). For Halloween, they asked five horror writers to each list their five favorite horror movies. Some of the names I’m familiar with — Kim Newman, Joe R. Lansdale, Tananarive Due — and others are new to me, but their choices are all interesting, even though there are some that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with (Carnival of Souls? Really?).
Though I’m not a professional horror author (yet), I thought I’d chime in with my own set of movies that disturb me! This list is by no means complete — after all, it’s only five — but it is indicative of what unsettles me…
Just a short note that I’ve added Renaissance Mathematicus to the blogroll, a long overdue addition! For those readers here who like the history of science, I can highly recommend thonyc’s blog, if you haven’t been reading it already! A mission statement about the scope and contents can be read here.
There’s 12 days left until the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #17! It will be held at The Primate Diaries, and entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 