In lieu of more substantive blogging, I present this video of our cat Zoe:
She’s developed her own lazy version of playing, in which she slides along the ground on her side after a toy instead of actually getting up to chase it. The other day the fiancée got Zoe going, so I snapped some video of the action. Look for her sideslide to come into play increasingly, starting at about the minute mark.
The post-Halloween season is a good time to snoop around for bargain Halloween books at Barnes & Noble, and two weeks ago I stumbled across a very nice collection of classic horror stories set on the high seas! The collection, A Skeleton at the Helm, was just published this year and is a wonderful hardbound book that’s a steal for only $10.00:
As one would expect from the nature of the collection, the stories are all old tales that are otherwise publicly available, but it is nice to have them together in one place for reading enjoyment. Stories come from such greats as Poe, Bram Stoker, Washington Irving, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Hope Hodgson, and even Winston Churchill! The book also comes with a nice introduction by the editor, which includes a discussion of real terrors of the sea which are just as chilling as the stories themselves!
From the discussion, it is easy to see why lots of myths and dark legends were spun about ocean travel: the sea is a frighteningly dangerous and unpredictable place, even in modern times. Rogue waves can snap or overturn the sturdiest oceal vessel, and their origins are still a subject of debate.
A Skeleton at the Helm has been added to my collection of quality hardcover horror books. If you like getting a chill from more than a stout ocean wind, I recommend it!
It’s a little late in the process, but I just noticed today that Brian Switek, who writes Laelaps, has fallen behind in votes for the 2008 Blogging Scholarship. The deadline for votes is tomorrow, but if you have a chance, follow this link and give Brian a vote!
If you don’t read Laelaps, you should really give it a look: Brian writes about paleontology, evolution and the history of science, among other things, and posts beautiful animal photos.
The fifth edition of The Giant’s Shoulders is up at Podblack blog! Thanks to Kylie for putting it together!
The next edition is slated to be held at Rigorous Trivialities on December 15th.
It’s time again to remind folks that the deadline for entries for the next edition of The Giant’s Shoulders are due in 2 days! This edition will be held at Podblack Blog on November 15th.
Entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to Podblack, as usual!
I’m still thinking of squeezing one more entry in for this month, but work is going to be hectic for the next two days…
One of the fun things about my blogging is that I keep turning up relatively unknown works by famous authors which, although not on par with their classics, give fascinating insights into the authors’ views. They’re usually quite entertaining, as well!
Soon after reading John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, I stumbled across yet another book about the interaction of mankind with the denizens of the deepest oceans: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep (1929).
Doyle, though certainly best known for his stories about Sherlock Holmes, was no stranger to a good adventure or horror story. The Lost World (1912), for instance, dealt with an expedition to a remote South American plateau where dinosaurs and other monsters still dwell.
The Maracot Deep, however, is set in the other great frontier of that era: the deepest parts of the ocean. It is one of Doyle’s weaker novels, and is extremely short, but is a fun read and is one of the last truly ‘speculative’ novels about the undersea world.
Ugh. I’m having one of those days where everything is going ridiculously wrong. If I maintain any religious faith at all in my life, it comes from those days when it seems clear that a supernatural agency is out to get me.
I woke up this morning to the news that my CAREER award proposal was rejected. Last year I had all ‘excellent’ reviews save for one lone ‘good’ dissenter. After revising my proposal to take into account criticisms from that first round, I actually got significantly worse reviews this time around.
Yesterday, I saw that my windshield had developed a crack in it. Since this morning, it has grown by about 1/2 inch, which probably means I’ll be paying for a replacement very soon.
I went to spend my troubles away at Best Buy, and got stuck in a ridiculously long line of about 10 people, since only one register was open. On my way back to the office, I found that the road to my research building was suddenly under construction, requiring me to drive around the entire campus to get back to work.
On top of this, today is my ‘teach from 5-7:30 pm’ day at the office, so things ain’t getting better. Ugh.
One of the broad challenges in a lot of optical applications involving visible light is simply that most materials aren’t particularly transparent. This is rather obvious, at a glance: materials can be strong absorbers of light, strong reflectors of light, or highly dispersive. Even materials which do not suffer from these problems can still strongly scatter a light field. Milk is a good example of this latter case: light can be transmitted through a glass of milk, but seemingly only in a diffuse manner. No images or bright points of light can be seen through the glass, only a diffuse glow which has little useful purpose.
Researchers at the University of Twente in The Netherlands, however, have demonstrated that it is possible to focus light through a strongly scattering media, in essence by finding special transmission paths through a ‘maze’ of strongly scattering objects, and overall increase the amount of light transmitted through such a scatterer. Some experimental results were recently reported in Physical Review Letters, and the research seemed cute enough to merit a blog post!
I interrupt my regularly scheduled blogging for a sweet picture of the kitties at home:
They are stacked in inverse order of authority: Sasha on the lowest step, Sabrina up a step, and Simon on the landing. Zoe, as always, is nowhere near the other kitties.
I was planning to comment on the CNN ‘hologram’ effect that they used on election night, and though I see that Tom at Swans on Tea beat me to it (I wave angry fist in the air, shouting, “Curse you!”), I thought I’d comment as well.
As you’ve probably heard already, and heard mocked on The Daily Show, CNN debuted a new technology, in which a correspondent’s image is ‘beamed’ into the CNN studio:
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 