We’re less than a half-a-month away from the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #6, to be held at Rigorous Trivialities on December 15th.
Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!
I’ve also initiated a contest to design a new banner for the TGS blog! If you feel inspired to work on a banner image that represents in some way the history of science/classic science, take a look at the TGS website for more details.
I’ve talked a bit about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sword and planet adventures before; in particular, I’ve discussed his ‘Barsoom‘ (Mars) series briefly and did a post on the first two books on his ‘Pellucidar‘ (Hollow Earth) series. In preparation for another massive literature survey post, I decided to read Burroughs’ fantasies set on yet another planet: Venus! The series, describing the adventures of scientist/adventurer Carson Napier when he crash lands on Venus, consists of four books: Pirates of Venus (1934), Lost on Venus (1935), Carson of Venus (1939), and Escape on Venus (1946). (There is also a posthumously published story, Wizard of Venus, which I haven’t read.)
The novels are interesting and distinct for a number of reasons. First, the ‘Venus’ series was initiated much later than the other adventures Burroughs is known for, and represents the last series he would start (though he continued to write Tarzan, Barsoom, and Pellucidar books at the same time). Perhaps because of this, the Venus series seems a little more mature and a little less spectacular than its predecessors. Whereas David Innes, for instance, had completely dominated Pellucidar in the span of two books, Carson Napier is more or less on the run throughout the four books.
Let’s take a tour through Burroughs’ fictional version of Venus, and meet its inhabitants!
I’m workin’ on some spiffy new posts. In the meantime, I note that a commenter, JasonF at Balloon Juice, wrote up the auto industry conundrum as a play in three acts. It’s quite excellent: read it here.
I’m still in holiday mode and not in scienceblogging mode, but I’ll hopefully be back in the swing of things next week. In the meantime, via Americablog, I present ‘Christmas and holiday cards for geeks‘. A sample:
I’m using the day as an opportunity to get some work done on my textbook. We managed to eat our Thanksgiving dinner without kitten interference, as they were too tired to notice. Later, however, the fiancée got up to make a turkey sandwich for her mother, and kitty chaos resulted:
First only three of the kitties demanded food, but soon Simon hopped up on the island to get in on the action:
Soon after, the kitties pounced, and the pictures of the horrifying aftermath are not for the faint of heart…
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was a very interesting fellow. Reading through his Wikipedia entry, he was definitely not one to run with the crowd. He was raised in Dublin, but moved to Cincinatti, Ohio at the age of 19. Though he started out in poverty, he quickly rose through the ranks of the news business through his writing. He married Alethea Foley, an African-American woman, in Cincinatti, an act which was actually illegal at the time. He moved to New Orleans at the age of 27, where he wrote about the local culture. Eventually he went to the West Indies as a correspondent, and ended up in Japan in 1890 and quickly fell in love with the country and its people. He became a Japanese citizen, married a local woman (presumably the marriage to Foley didn’t last), and adopted the name Koizumi Yakumo.
Hearn’s (I mean, Yakumo’s) writings introduced the western world to Japanese culture and history, and he is still highly regarded in that country.
Among those writings, Hearn compiled a number of books of ghost stories from the Orient, among them: In Ghostly Japan (1899), Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904) and Some Chinese Ghosts (1887). Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural compiled a volume of these tales together as Oriental Ghost Stories; though it’s been sitting on my shelf for a while, I finally gave it a read this week:
Some thoughts about this lovely volume of spooky tales from the East below…
This is my busy class day today, so I don’t have time for a detailed post. However, a friend of mine sent me a video of his recent skydiving exploits, which he refers to as ‘swoop bowling’. I present the video, with the disclaimer (for my fiancée) that this isn’t something I would do:
I have to say, it’s nice to see my old home DZ again, even if only in a video!
Via Daily Kos, I learned that there was a U.S. government civics test given to elected officials by the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI. The results were pretty embarrassing:
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.
Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).
It’s easy to laugh at such results, but how did I fare? I took the test, and scored 90.9% (30 out of 33 correct). To be fair, some of the questions seemed more historical than really ‘need-to-know’ civics (like a question concerning FDR’s battles with the courts over the New Deal). But there’s really no excuse for getting less than 50% on a test like this.
How do you, the reader, compare? Take the test here. Feel free to post your scores in the comments — if you dare!
Of course, we’re all familiar with how boldly the Democrats stood up to Joe Lieberman, the man who campaigned not only for the Republican presidential candidate but also numerous down-ticket Republicans. In the end, the Democrats welcomed him back with the same powers and privileges, even though he’s quite likely to use those powers against them in the near future.
The last 20 seconds of the following video gives a good impression of what the negotiations were probably like:
Try to imagine the Democrats as Ted and Lieberman as Dr. Kelso. If you like, you can also imagine Dr. Cox as Obama, but that’s stretching the analogy a bit too far, I think.
This is cool. Via Americablog, I learn that researchers believe that they have identified the grave of Nicolaus Copernicus — by comparing the skeleton to two hairs found in one of the astronomer’s books!
Copernicus (1473-1543) was the Polish astronomer who first introduced a scientific cosmology placing the Sun as the central point of motion, rather than the Earth. This heliocentric theory opened the door for modern astronomy and following work by such important scientists as Galileo.
Copernicus was known to be buried in Frombork Cathedral and in 2005 remains were found in the cathedral floor which were suspected to belong to the esteemed astronomer. Recent DNA investigation on the hairs in one of his books and the suspect skeleton confirmed the identity.
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 