The Citadel of Fear, by Francis Stevens

Posted on December 20, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 19 of 26 books for 2024! Can I reach 22 before year’s end?

I definitely underestimated Francis Stevens on this one. Stevens was the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-1948), an author of fiction that now tends to fall under the label of “dark fantasy.” Quite a long time ago, I read a complete collection of her short fiction and followed up with her 1920 novel Claimed!, about a man who stubbornly refuses to return the possession of a dark power of the seas. Looking back on those blog posts, that were written some 15 years ago, I found Stevens’ work enjoyable but not exceptional. At the same time, I picked up a vintage copy of her novel The Citadel of Fear, first published in 1920, but somehow didn’t get around to reading it at the time. You can see from the gorgeous cover art why this 1970 edition of the book caught my eye.

As I started the novel, I was initially unimpressed, perhaps distantly remembering my views of previous works of Stevens that I had read. It begins like a rather familiar “lost civilization” pulp adventure story, but then transforms into something… quite different. And clever. And even powerful!

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Gwen in Green, by Hugh Zachary

Posted on December 17, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 18 of 26 books for 2024! Maybe I’ll make at least 22…

Valancourt Books has been doing a great literary service by reprinting “Paperbacks from Hell” such as Carnosaur, and I’ve been reading as many of them as I can reasonable handle. One that I picked up some time ago and had not yet gotten around to is Gwen in Green, by Hugh Zachary, first published in 1974.

As they often do, Valancourt also used the original cover art for the book, which is actually pretty accurate and telling about the novel itself!

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The Case Against Satan, by Ray Russell

Posted on December 15, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 17 of 26 books for 2024! Hoping to hit 20.

I think everyone on the planet is familiar with William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist and the William Friedkin-directed 1973 adaptation, which is widely considered one of the greatest horror movies of all time and inspired countless others. But did you know that there was an earlier novel about two priests fighting to exorcise a demon from a young woman, written by Ray Russell? Let me talk about The Cast Against Satan, which was first published in 1962.

This particular Penguin edition was released in 2015, with a foreword by the incomparable Laird Barron, but it took me ages to get around to reading it.

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Raft, by Stephen Baxter

Posted on December 13, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 16 of 26 books for 2024! Still aiming for 20.

There’s a series of works published by Orion Publishing Group known as SF Masterworks, and it has been going since 1999 and so far has nearly two hundred unique titles. As the name suggests, the books are all classic works of science fiction, and though the list includes many famous titles, it also includes works of lesser-known authors, and it has been a joy to discover some really excellent books through the series.

The one that most recently caught my eye was Raft, by Stephen Baxter, which was his debut novel, first published in 1991 and expanded from a short story he wrote in 1989. The SF Masterworks edition was published in 2018.

The premise of the novel is a fascinating one, and the elevator pitch goes something like this: Some 500 years ago, a spaceship from Earth accidentally passed into a parallel universe where the force of gravity is a billion times greater than in our universe. The force largely tore their massive ship to pieces, and now the descendants of the original survivors live on small “islands” of matter, eking out an existence trading with each other. There is the Raft, the main hub of civilization, built around the ruins of the original starship, and there is the Belt, a ring of habitations orbiting around a small burned out star from which they extract precious iron. These habitations reside within a nebula filled with air, meaning that humans can travel without life support between destinations; this travel is done on flying trees native to the nebula.

Rees has lived his whole life as a miner on the Belt, prevented from traveling to the Raft due to the strict class hierarchy of their society. He has always been curious and clever, however, so when a chance to escape does arise, he takes it, going in search of answers to a question that has haunted him — why is the nebula dying, and what can humanity do to save itself?

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The Opener of the Way, by Robert Bloch

Posted on December 10, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 15 of 26 books for 2024! Still aiming for 20.

Valancourt Books, of who I am a huge fan of, continues to impress with quality editions of quality authors. Recently, they have started reprinting the works of horror master Robert Bloch, best known for writing Psycho, which led to the famous Hitchcock movie. Fans of horror fiction probably love him best for his weird horror short stories, which includes cosmic horror in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft. Bloch corresponded with Lovecraft regularly until the latter’s death, and Lovecraft served as a mentor to the young Bloch.

The Opener of the Way was the first published collection of Bloch’s stories, originally released by Arkham House in 1945. The Valancourt edition, featuring a new introduction by horror great Ramsey Campbell and an eye-catching new cover, was just released in fall of 2024.

The book features 22 stories from Bloch’s early career, and I do mean early: he started writing professionally at age 17 and the collection came out when he was 28. The stories are very rough and arguably unpolished, but they also represent some of Bloch’s most imaginative work, when he was experimenting with a variety of story types and styles.

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Life Lessons From Historical Women, by Eleanor Morton

Posted on December 7, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 14 of 26 books for 2024! Still aiming to get to at least 20 for the year, which would be a triumph considering this year.

The first thought that I had when I finished reading Eleanor Morton’s Life Lessons From Historical Women? I thought: Eleanor Morton is a good person.

This may seem somewhat like an odd thought to have after reading a book written by a professional comedian, and the book is indeed very funny, but it is also an extremely moving tribute to all those women out there, past and present, who are changing their world for the better, in large ways and small. Morton’s compassion stands out on every page, as does her willingness to connect the struggles these historical women faced with modern day oppression.

And, again, let me say that the book is also very funny.

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My tips for scientific conference presentations

Posted on December 3, 2024 by skullsinthestars

This semester, I decided to replace the final exam in one of my upper-level graduate courses with a short 15 minute presentation on a scientific paper related to the course topic. To give the students some guidance, I provided a list of my tips for given short conference presentations, and I thought: why not share it here? Then at least I will have an easy place to point students in the future. At this point, I have about 30 years of experience giving presentations at conferences and elsewhere, so hopefully this information will turn out to be useful.

If you’re not interested in tips for scientific presentations, you can safely ignore this post. 🙂

Guiding principle #1: A 15-minute conference presentation is not intended to give detailed information, it is more of an advertisement. You want to provide enough information for the audience to understand “Why was this work done?” (background), “How was it done?” (methods), “What did we learn?” (results). Your goal is to convince the audience that they should go read your printed publication on the subject, where they can get all the details.

Guiding principle #2: You should structure your presentation like you are telling a story. There should be a narrative flow throughout the presentation that leads the audience naturally from slide to slide. One way I’ve put it in the past is that every slide should ask a question that the next slide answers. Even many professional scientists will give a talk as a list of isolated results with no strong connection between them. Constructing the talk with the “ask a question/answer a question” approach to building your slide deck will give the slides a natural flow and avoid awkward pauses where you look at the next slide and try to remember why you put it there at all.

Beyond those guiding principles, here’s a list of random tips to keep in mind:

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Posted in Personal, Physics | 2 Comments

Hanbury Brown and Twiss and their impossible interferometer (1956)

Posted on December 1, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Update: fixed a mistake in my numbers for telescope resolution, which I had worse by a factor of 10.

Science is in general intended to be a serious business, but every once in a while one comes across some serious research that also ends up being incredibly funny. Sometimes this is deliberate humor on the part of the scientists — like the time that Athanasius Diedrich Wackerbarth destroyed Charles Piazzi Smyth’s “pyramid power” series of pseudoscientific articles — but sometimes the humor just falls out naturally in the course of a scientific debate.

One of my favorite of the latter cases is the controversy that arose in the 1950s surrounding the functioning of a new type of interferometer introduced by Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Q. Twiss. Describing this controversy is an excellent opportunity to introduce the science of what is known as intensity interferometry and leads up to what is to me a hilarious punchline.

To begin, we need to look at the limitations of conventional imaging systems, and how Albert A. Michelson found a method to work around those limitations in the 1890s.

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Posted in History of science, Optics, Physics, quantum | 5 Comments

Electromagnetic Optics available for pre-order!

Posted on November 20, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Let me just share a short note here that my Electromagnetic Optics textbook is now available for pre-order, to be published in March 2025! The link to the IoP Publishing site is here.

The official description of the book:

Light is an electromagnetic wave, and because of this it possesses unique features that are not possessed by other types of waves such as sound waves and water waves. This book will be an in-depth textbook introducing and covering all topics related to the fact that light is a transverse electromagnetic wave. It will begin with a discussion of the history of Maxwell’s equations, from which the wave properties of light were first deduced, and then move into the fundamentals of electromagnetic waves, such as the polarization of light, energy and momentum conservation, and basic solutions of Maxwell’s equations. From there, it will move into more practical topics: light propagation in matter of various types, light propagation through interfaces, light propagation in waveguides (like fibre optic cables), and light scattering.

You’ll notice that there isn’t a cover image yet, and… I’m working on that. I’ve got one crazy silly idea and one backup idea if the first one doesn’t work out.

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Alley, by Junji Ito

Posted on November 16, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 13 of 26 books for 2024! Fighting to complete most of my objective, in spite of life throwing me a lot of tough curveballs.

I’ve spent a significant amount of time talking about the work of Junji Ito, a groundbreaking manga horror writer. His works are bizarre, often surreal, fantastically grotesque, and genuinely haunting. There are a number of famous complete graphic novels by Ito, notably Gyo and Uzumaki, but there are also many collections of his shorter works. The most recent, released in July of 2024, is Alley.

The volume collects ten of Ito’s short stories, all of which apparently date from before 2011 (when this edition was first printed in Japanese). They are all fascinating and, as you can see from the cover art, creepy as hell.

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