A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage

Posted on February 22, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Abraham Merritt (1888-1943) was one of the greats of pulp fiction, although up until recently his work was largely forgotten.  Recently, two of his novels were reprinted, The Moon Pool (1919) and The Metal Monster (1920), both of which I’ve blogged about in some detail.  I found The Moon Pool, on the whole, a rather ordinary pulp adventure novel punctuated by scenes of brilliant weirdness, while The Metal Monster was a truly unique masterpiece of weird fiction.

I wanted to see where other works of Merritt would fall on the mundane/genius scale, but the book that most caught my eye isn’t currently in press.  Dwellers in the Mirage (1932) was too intriguing to pass up for me, though, as the cover will make clear:

dwellersinthemirage

That tentacled monster on the cover of the novel is the “terrible octopus-god Khalk’ru”, who heralds from an area outside space and time.  If you read H.P. Lovecraft, Merritt’s “Khalk’ru” will sound very much like Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu“.  Let’s take a closer look at Merritt’s interpretation of the Cthulhu mythos…

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Posted in Adventure fiction, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Weird fiction | 7 Comments

A personal academic milestone!

Posted on February 17, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Well, I’ve managed to graduate my first doctoral student!  I was confident in his ability to pass the dissertation defense, but I was still probably as nervous as he was.  Did I train him well enough?  Is his research sound enough?  All sorts of uncomfortable questions start to float through one’s mind before the talk.

He passed with flying colors, though!  Now my problem is figuring out how I’ll continue his line of research when he leaves…

Posted in Personal | 11 Comments

The Giant’s Shoulders #8 is up!

Posted on February 15, 2009 by skullsinthestars

The eighth edition of The Giant’s Shoulders is up at Greg Laden’s Blog, with a special emphasis on birthday boy Charles Darwin!  Many thanks to Greg for putting it together!

The next edition will appear on March 16th at The Evilutionary Biologist.

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

Do optics like Darwin’s Dad!

Posted on February 12, 2009 by skullsinthestars

A few days ago, I was wondeirng what else I could contribute to the celebration of the birthday of Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution which forms the cornerstone of modern biology.   Of course, I’m an optical physicist, not a biologist, so my options for discussing Darwin’s life and work are limited.

Enter the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific journal in the English-speaking world!  I was browsing the archives for the late 1700s when I came across a paper by Robert Waring Darwin, M.D., “New experiments on the ocular spectra of light and colours,” Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. 76 (1786), 313.  The paper was communicated by Erasmus Darwin, M.D., F.R.S.: Darwin’s grandfather!  Robert Waring Darwin is the father of Charles Darwin — and he wrote a paper about optical phenomena!

The paper is actually a collection of observations regarding vision, and these observations are straightforward and can be readily repeated by anyone who is interested.  So, to celebrate Darwin in my own, weird way, I thought I’d look at the paper of Robert Waring Darwin!

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Posted in History of science, Optics | Leave a comment

Upcoming horror game: The Path

Posted on February 10, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Via StumbleUpon, I came across the website for a short horror game which will be released in March or April 2009:  The Path.  Produced by a small independent game company called Tale of Tales (and I mean small: two programmers), the idea of The Path has totally captivated me and I can’t wait for the game to come out!

The Path is inspired by the tale of Little Red Riding Hood: the player’s official goal is to get six sisters to their grandmother’s house through a dark forest.  The girls have been given one important instruction: stay on the path to grandmother’s house.  Apparently, one can easily follow the path to grandma’s place without incident.   However, unlike most horror games, the true goal of the game is not survival; rather, the only way interesting things happen is by breaking that one rule.  Exploration of the areas of the forest off the path will reveal more about the story of the girls and eventually lead to their deaths.

The artwork looks very atmospheric and creepy, aided for me at least by the fact that it has a bit of an Edward Gorey “Gashlycrumb Tinies” feel to it.  If you aren’t familiar with the “Gashlycrumb Tinies”, it is a twisted work of humor that alphabetically describes the horrible fates of twenty-six children on an outing (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears”… damn, I still have it memorized).  If you compare this image of the six sisters,

thepath

with the famous image from “After the Outing”,

aftertheouting

you may get an idea of why I make the comparison.

If you’re tired of “Resident Evil” games which become more and more “Halo with zombies” in each iteration, you might want to give The Path a look when it comes out…

Posted in Entertainment, Horror | 4 Comments

Evolution’s influence in pulp fiction!

Posted on February 9, 2009 by skullsinthestars

This February 12th will be the 200th anniversary of the birthday of Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution which forms the cornerstone of modern biology.  Being that this birthday coincides nicely with the February 15th deadline of The Giant’s Shoulders, I wanted to write something about the influence of Darwin’s theory.

The problem, however, is that I’m not a biologist, and have no training to meaningfully expound upon the significance of Darwin’s work in biology (and would likely be biologically lynched if I tried).  My other blogging interest, however, is in pulp horror and science fiction, and the theory of evolution made a huge impression of the authors of such weird tales, in both positive and negative ways.

As my tribute to the memory of Darwin, I thought I’d take a look at some of the references to evolution in science fiction and horror in the years following its discovery!  We’ll look at stories from almost the time of the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) to the 1930s.  This list is by no means exhaustive, but represents some of the tales I’ve come across recently.

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Posted in History of science, Weird fiction | 1 Comment

A physics history-mystery: magnetism from light?

Posted on February 8, 2009 by skullsinthestars

As I’ve noted in previous posts, one of the fun things about researching historical scientific papers is the unexpected places the investigation can take you.   Often a simple search on a straightforward topic will start a chain reaction of increasingly interesting discoveries, comparable to a trip to the grocery store ending up in Machu Picchu.  Case in point:  I’ve been doing a series of posts about the research of Michael Faraday (see here and here), but I have yet to write about the paper that originally interested me in the subject!  Too many other intriguing observations keep getting in the way.

Case in point in case in point: I’ve been looking into Faraday’s contribution to the understanding that light is an electromagnetic wave.  That investigation led me to some early work by other researchers on the light/magnetism connection, and led me in turn to a puzzler: how significant and accurate is that earlier research?  I don’t have a good answer, so I will pose the questions to the physics/blog community in the post.

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Posted in History of science, Physics | 27 Comments

Duke’s Lovely Lemurland!

Posted on February 6, 2009 by skullsinthestars

There was one other event at the rapidly-receding-into-the-past ScienceOnline 09 that I wanted to blog about: my visit to the Duke Lemur Center!  Friday was a day for local trips to areas of interest, and I opted to go with a small group (including Brian) to the Lemur Center.

The Center is funded by the National Science Foundation and has a mission to “to promote research and understanding of prosimians and their natural habitat as a means of advancing the frontiers of knowledge, to contribute to the educational development of future leaders in international scholarship and conservation and to enhance the human condition by stimulating intellectual growth and sustaining global biodiversity.”  It is a relatively low-key (but awesome) facility with a strong emphasis on research and conservation.  Visitors are welcome but must schedule a guided tour — the directions to the Center are not even publicly displayed on their website!

We were not at the Center at the optimal time.  In the summer, the animals have free run of a open-air forest, but in the winter are kept mostly indoors.  The day of our visit it was particularly cold, and the animals had to be coaxed to even come near the open windows to say ‘hello’ by our excellent guides (whose names, alas, escape me).

Nevertheless, I’ve been a huge fan of lemurs for years, so I found the visit a delight.  Below the fold I share a few of my pics from the Center and some of my older lemur photos — and videos!

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Posted in Animals | 4 Comments

10 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #8!

Posted on February 5, 2009 by skullsinthestars

There are now ten days left until the deadline for the 8th edition of The Giant’s Shoulders, to be held at at Greg Laden’s Blog.  Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

The NSF online porn scandal!

Posted on February 3, 2009 by skullsinthestars

Finally I have a post topic (almost) as attention-getting as scicurious’ posts (see, for instance, here and here)!  It was reported a few days ago that an internal investigation by the National Science Foundation’s inspector general has revealed numerous cases of employees of the NSF downloading porn at work.  Via Politico,

Despite the less-than-lurid sound of the probes, the employees in question weren’t just logging onto their Facebook accounts or buying birthday gifts on Amazon.com. The report says they were watching, downloading and e-mailing porn, sometimes for significant portions of their workdays, and over periods of months or even years.

In one particularly egregious case, the report says one NSF “senior official” was discovered to have spent as much as 20 percent of his working hours over a two-year interval “viewing sexually explicit images and engaging in sexually explicit online ‘chats’ with various women.”

Investigators calculated the value of the time lost at more than $58,000 — for that employee alone.

The revelations of the report have gotten Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley up in arms, and he has requested/demanded all relevant documents related to the scandal.

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Posted in ... the Hell? | 3 Comments