Biltmore Estate… and Rick Springfield!

Posted on August 3, 2009 by skullsinthestars

This weekend, the wife and I took a trip up to Asheville, NC, to see the historic Biltmore Estate… and see a Rick Springfield concert! The trip was an absolute blast, and I thought I’d share some pictures of the Estate grounds, as well as of the concert itself.

Biltmore consists of a massive home of some 250 rooms and grounds of some 8,000 acres , and it is the largest privately-owned residence in the country.  It was built in the 1890s for George Washington Vanderbilt, who had inherited a fortune from his railroad tycoon father and grandfather.  Vanderbilt was a celebrity of his time, and built the home in part to escape from the chaos of New York City and the attention he received there.   Vanderbilt died in 1914, leaving his wife Edith the master of the estate.  In 1930, at the height of the Great Depression, daughter Cornelia opened the estate to the public so that the tourist draw could increase the area’s local revenue.  The house remains in family hands, and is now a wonderful tourist attraction.

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Posted in Entertainment, Travel | 8 Comments

The Linkin’ Log: August 2, 2009

Posted on August 2, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Over the weekend, the wife and I went to Asheville, NC,  to visit the Biltmore Estate and see a concert, which I will post about tomorrow.  In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few tidbits from around the internet that caught my attention:

  • In what counts as one of the stupidest things I’ve seen in a while, a tow truck driver in upstate NY hit a car and then crashed into a swimming pool because he was simultaneously texting on one cell phone and talking on another one.  A natural question to ask: what part of his body was left to steer with?
  • If that isn’t enough of the stupid: Bill O’Reilly recently decided to demonize my adopted home town of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, as a drug-infested city on the brink of societal collapse.   A Dutchman put together a nice YouTube video showing the hellhole that is downtown Amsterdam, with statistics of the U.S. and Holland for comparison.  Of course, I have a feeling the stats will be lost on someone of O’Reilly’s intellectual caliber…
  • Finally, via Cosmic Variance, a link to a wonderful video!  At the World Science Festival 2009, Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the universal nature of the pentatonic scale:
Posted in ... the Hell?, General science | Leave a comment

Scientific cranks: Going strong since at least 1891

Posted on July 30, 2009 by skullsinthestars

It is easy to assume that scientific crankery is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps fueled by the completely non-intuitive, sometimes intimidating nature of many modern scientific theories.   In physics, for instance, most cranks spend their time attacking Einstein’s theories of relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics, both of which go against “common sense.”

While browsing the older journals, however, I came across an example of crankery from 1891, well before the advent of “modern” physics!  The crankery practically jumped off the page at me as I was skimming the table of contents in the Philosophical Magazine.  An image of the page in question is below; see if you can spot what caught my eye (click to enlarge):

contents

Does anything strike you?

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Posted in ... the Hell?, History of science, Physics | 7 Comments

Another short note — and goldfinches!

Posted on July 29, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Just a quick note again — I’m still quite swamped with work, even after getting my proposal done.  Now I’m working feverishly on my book, as I want to have a first draft completed by the end of August.  I’ve also got to put my tenure package together at the same time, with the same deadline.  I’m still planning to post, but I’ll probably be pretty sporadic for a while — when I get home at night, I’m pretty bleary-eyed from staring at equations all day!

In the meantime, here’s some pics of some of our backyard visitors.  A male goldfinch, caught with thistle in his mouth:

goldfinch_m

and the female, getting her fill:

goldfinch_f

Posted in Animals, Personal | 3 Comments

Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber

Posted on July 27, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature is a great starting source for finding very good but relatively unknown horror gems.  I’ve been slowly working my way through Lovecraft’s picks, and recently Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber (1927) caught my eye:

thedarkchamber

Lovecraft adored this novel!  After working his way up the library waiting list to read it, he wrote ecstatically about it to Donald Wandrei on March 16, 1928:

My only reading since “Witch Wood” has been “The Dark Chamber” by Leonard Cline, & this is an absolutely magnificent work of art!  Poetry — song — & the ultimate quintessence of atmospheric morbidity & horror.  It rambles unfortunately in its effort to build up a dense miasma of unwholesomeness & madness, but even the divagations are authentic art.  And the main stream is superb — the terrible quest of a scholar back through the corridors of memory, personal & ancestral.  Ugh!  The strange odour…. & that hellish hound Tod, that bays in the night…. Don’t miss it!

A good recommendation, eh?  In a rare occurrence, however, I find myself somewhat in disagreement with Lovecraft.  I enjoyed The Dark Chamber, but found it fell short of my expectations.

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Posted in Horror | 4 Comments

Thomas Levenson’s Newton and the Counterfeiter

Posted on July 26, 2009 by skullsinthestars

About a month ago, I noted that Thomas Levenson’s book Newton and the Counterfeiter (2009) is now available:

newton

The book is the story of how the great scientist Isaac Newton, after making the discoveries which electrified the scientific world, took a job as the Warden of the Royal Mint, an official charged with protecting the nation’s currency.  In this role, he came into contact, and conflict, with a criminal mastermind and counterfeiter William Chalconer, and the two would play a game of cat-and-mouse with life literally at stake.

When I’ve told people about this book, they ask, “For real?”  They naturally assume that the book is historical fiction, but it is in fact a true story!

I bought the book immediately, but didn’t read and review it right away: I figured that a book with such subject matter would naturally be an instant hit!  But as Tom Levenson noted on his own blog, the book has not gotten the publicity it needs (I would say deserves), so I thought I’d do my own part to draw people’s attention to it.

It deserves your attention, too: if you’re a fan of history, a fan of science, a fan of true crime stories, a fan of economics, or just interested in reading a good, true, tale, Newton and the Counterfeiter is well worth your time.

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Posted in History of science, Physics | 8 Comments

Maxwell on Faraday

Posted on July 25, 2009 by skullsinthestars

I’m working on a few longer posts at the moment, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a nice little passage I came across while looking through James Clerk Maxwell‘s A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873).  Maxwell, of course, was the scientist who theoretically put together, for the first time, a complete set of equations of electricity and magnetism, the eponymous Maxwell’s equations, and also used these equations to postulate that light is an electromagnetic wave.

I’ve blogged a lot about the accomplishments of Michael Faraday, who did most of the experimental legwork which allowed Maxwell to make his discovery.  This relationship was not lost on Maxwell, who had nothing but unadulterated praise for his predecessor in the introduction to his own text:

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Posted in History of science, Physics | 3 Comments

Skating a rollercoaster?

Posted on July 23, 2009 by skullsinthestars

I know people will call me nuts, but this looks like fun: via The Daily Mail, we learn that an extreme sports enthusiast took a high-speed ride on a rollercoaster — on specially designed roller skates!

An adrenaline junkie has taken in-line skating to new heights and set a new world record after racing down a roller coaster at speeds of 56mph.

Dirk Auer decided to go where no sane man or woman had gone before and skated down an 860 metre track in just over a minute.

Wearing specially designed in-line skates, the German made the attempt on the Mammoth roller coaster at the Trips Drill theme park in Stuttgart.

There’s several photos accompanying the feat, including this one:

From a physics point of view, this is sort of interesting.  On the one hand, it’s probably easier to skate a coaster than it looks, because the banked turns of the coaster are designed to keep the forces a rider experiences pointing down into the track, meaning that one would expect that forces tugging from side to side are not too bad.  On the other hand, I get the impression that Auer was traversing the coaster faster than a normal car would, which means that the banked turns would not compensate as well for his motion.

I predict that I won’t have to wait too long to try such a thing: I’m guessing some enterprising theme park manager will design a ride similar to Auer’s feat, though probably not one going quite so fast…

Posted in Sports | 2 Comments

Hummingbirds move fast!

Posted on July 22, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Less than 24 hours after putting up a new hummingbird feeder, we have this:

hummingbird01

hummingbird02

This one is from a little later in the day:

hummingbird03

We’ve got a lot of birds visiting our yard these days, so much so that we’ve had to get more feeders.  I’ll put up more bird pics once I get good ones (damn cardinals never sit still).

Posted in Animals | 7 Comments

Lord Dunsany’s Pegana

Posted on July 21, 2009 by skullsinthestars

A bit over a month ago, I decided to read a few of Lord Dunsany’s plays after reading Lovecraft’s glowing review of them in Supernatural Horror in Literature.  The plays are wonderfully eerie and capture the spirit of ancient myths and folktales, in which people sin against the Gods, and the Gods, in a pissy mood, bring divine justice against the sinners.

Dunsany’s most influential works relating to ancient myths are his Pegana1 stories, within which a complete fictional pantheon and its associated mythology are constructed.  Below is the cover of the Chaosium edition, which collects all of Dunsany’s tales of Pegana:

pegana

The Complete Pegana combines three of Dunsany’s collections: The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), and three later stories grouped as Beyond the Fields We Know.

In a word, these tales are magnificent!  There have been plenty of authors who have created their own fictional mythos, but I can’t think of any other who so perfectly captures the spirit of ancient myths and bends that spirit to his own purposes.

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Posted in Fantasy fiction, Lovecraft | 4 Comments