My Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics colloquium at APL!

Posted on March 6, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Back in January of this year, I gave a talk about Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and it was one of my favorite presentations on the subject, not to mention my most up-to-date! The folks at APL record their talks, and approved mine for public release, so I thought I would share it here. If you haven’t seen me talk about the history of falling cats, based on my book, this is the best presentation I’ve done of it to date!

Posted in History of science, Physics | Leave a comment

The Space Vampires, by Colin Wilson

Posted on March 5, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 4 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! I’m a little behind, but in fairness, February is a short month. Why 26 books? I normally can read much, much faster than that pace, but the way life and work has been, I haven’t had as much time or energy to read as I would like. One book every two weeks seemed like a reasonable bare minimum goal.

This next book is one I’ve been interested in reading for a while! The Space Vampires, by Colin Wilson (1976).

The reason I’ve been interested in reading it is that it was the inspiration for the cult classic Tobe Hooper directed movie Lifeforce, that appeared in 1985, and freaked me out when I was younger!

The movie has one scene in particular where a desiccated corpse is being examined by a doctor, only for it to spring to life and drain the lifeforce of the doctor! That scene is still disturbing to me to this day, though the movie as a whole was less satisfying.

But what about the book? Well, the title tells you a lot, but let’s get into more details!

Continue reading →
Posted in Horror, Lovecraft, Science fiction | Leave a comment

Physics demonstrations: tensegrity table

Posted on March 1, 2024 by skullsinthestars

The best demonstrations of physics are those that show you something completely unexpected and counter to the way that physics is supposed to work. One of my favorites is this curious contraption, which I got through a Kickstarter a few years ago:

This is what is known as a tensegrity table, which demonstrates the phenomenon of tensegrity. What is “tensegrity?” We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s just marvel at how this structure stands upright, supported only by wires, with the added twist of the wire in the middle of the structure being held together by magnetic force, leaving a gap in between! Thus that connection has no material connection at all! (This is the feature that drew me to this Kickstarter in particular.) How can such a structure stay standing, if only flexible wires are supporting it?

Continue reading →
Posted in Physics demos | Leave a comment

Invisibility audiobook 70% off!

Posted on February 19, 2024 by skullsinthestars

For those who enjoy audiobooks and haven’t yet gotten my invisibility book, this is just a quick note that Invisibility is now 70% off at audiobooks.com. I get full royalties even with the discount, so I’m totally cool with such deals!

Posted in Invisibility, Personal | Leave a comment

Black Mad Wheel, by Josh Malerman

Posted on February 16, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 3 of my 26 books for 2024 goal!

Some books look so appealing that I grab them off the shelf at the bookstore without hesitation, but somehow take forever to get around to reading. That is the case with Black Mad Wheel (2017), by Josh Malerman, which has been on my home shelf for probably at least two years and which I finally finished reading this past week.

Malerman has been a very successful horror author in recent years, as evidenced by the sub-caption on the title, “Author of Bird Box,” referring to his 2014 novel that became a movie in 2018 and resulted in a gif that produced a thousand jokes:

Black Mad Wheel is less apocalyptic and far stranger than Bird Box, and uses Malerman’s own experiences as a singer-songwriter for a Detroit rock band as inspiration. The novel centers around a mysterious sound that has been detected coming from a remote part of the world… a sound that could be the most powerful weapon ever created.

Continue reading →
Posted in Horror | Leave a comment

New TikTok video on the Barkhausen effect!

Posted on February 13, 2024 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been neglecting my TikTok page as much as my blog, so here’s a video that makes up for both! I talk about the really cool Barkhausen effect, which allows you to actually hear metal being magnetized.

I wrote about this effect and did a YouTube video a decade ago, so I felt like it was time to bring it back out. You can read the original post, with more details, at this link.

@drskyskull

Making magnets speak! The Barkhausen effect, in which you can hear quantum physics in action. #science #physics #fyp #foryoupage

♬ original sound – Drskyskull
Posted in Physics | Leave a comment

How many actors have two LEGO minifigs?

Posted on February 5, 2024 by skullsinthestars

So yesterday I learned that there is a Bricks & Minifigs store in my area, and I had to check it out. LEGO has become so huge in recent years that official LEGO stores are no longer enough, so you get these great LEGO resale stores, where you can hunt down a wide variety of minifigs. I picked up a few just for fun, but that’s not the point of this post!

While I was there, I was astounded to see that there were actual LEGO sets made based on the 2010 Prince of Persia movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which has to be one of LEGO’s most ill-advised licenses ever.

But then a weird thought occurred to me: this means Jake Gyllenhaal has had minifigs made of two characters that he has played, because he also played Mysterio in Spider Man: Far From Home, which had its own LEGO sets!

Because of the way my brain works, I started wondering: how many actors have had more than one movie character represented by LEGO minifigs? I thought that there couldn’t be many, but in fact there are a surprising number! Because this was my obsession for the better part of a day, let me make it yours as well.

Continue reading →
Posted in Entertainment, Silliness | 3 Comments

Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on February 3, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 2 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! Still roughly on track, though I want to pick up the pace.

One reason I like book blogging is that I pay more attention to things like book introductions and that often leads me to more interesting reads! Last year, when I read Orrin Grey’s excellent collection How to See Ghosts and Other Figments, I noted the lovely introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Mexico-born Canadian novelist. I am always looking for new and interesting authors to read, and so I picked up her 2019 novel Gods of Jade and Shadow, whose premise immediately intrigued me.

This novel is a modern fairy tale, set in the Jazz Age in Mexico, and features a young girl who gets drawn into a power struggle between two Mayan Gods of Death!

Continue reading →
Posted in Horror, Weird fiction | Leave a comment

“The birth of electromagnetism” on TikTok!

Posted on February 1, 2024 by skullsinthestars

I have made another history of science video for TikTok, this time focusing on the curious story of how electromagnetism was discovered in 1820 in an experiment that is utterly unique for one really big reason:

@drskyskull

Some more unusual #history of #science for folks, this time about the unique circumstances in which electromagnetism was discovered. I also talk about one corpse and one guy who kinda looks like a corpse.

♬ original sound – Drskyskull

Like a lot of my TikTok videos, this represents a condensed version of a blog post I did a few years ago; if you want more detail and/or a text version of the story, here’s the link!

Posted in History of science, Physics | Leave a comment

Robert Williams Wood adds invisibility to his textbook (1911)

Posted on January 28, 2024 by skullsinthestars

It’s kind of a fun phenomenon that no matter how thoroughly I research my history of science books, after they’re published I always find something that surprises me. In this case, I was tracking down some data on the physics of anomalous dispersion (more on that in another blog post), which led me to Robert Williams Wood’s textbook on Physical Optics, whose second edition came out in 1911. And in this book, I found a whole section on “invisibility of objects!”

This doesn’t change my overall narrative on the history of invisibility, as I’ve written about Wood’s 1902 paper on invisibility before, in which he experimentally tested a very curious (and certainly not true in general) hypothesis by Lord Rayleigh. I’ve also written about Wood’s science fiction novels before (two of them: here and here), and his fascinating series of physics lecture demonstrations. Wood was an all-around fascinating fellow, and he is one of a few physicists who got a mention in both my Falling Felines book and my Invisibility book!

Let’s take a look at Wood’s section on invisibility, because it is a fascinating glimpse into how physicists were even thinking about the possibility of invisibility over 100 years ago!

Continue reading →
Posted in History of science, Invisibility | Leave a comment