Best. Ballpoint pen. Ever.

Posted on November 6, 2008 by skullsinthestars

For those who don’t read Swans on Tea (and if you like fun physics-y blogs, you really should), I have to link to this post concerning product reviews on Amazon.co.uk.  People have taken to heart the absurdity of being able to review anything you buy there, including pens.  A sample:

Writes well – but it’s unmusical

If all you wish to do is write on paper this product is ideal, but unlike its brother the Bic Stic, which has a softer, opague, plastic barrel, it is not possible to turn it into a whistle in less than a minute using only a penknife and a short length of softwood pencil. For some obscure reason Amazon does not sell the Stic so you’ll have to steal one from a Holiday Inn if you want to make yourself a whistle: having stolen a Bic Stic cut a flat about 1 mm deep and over 6 mm long along the side of the unsharpened end of a pencil. Remove all the pen components from the Bic Stic and make a cut about 3mm deep about 6 mm from the end of the barrel. Now cut a notch as shown in the diagram at http://www.jbryant.eu/whistle.jpg, cut 6 mm of flattened pencil and put it in that end of the barrel with the flat aligned with the notch. Now cut 6 mm of unflattened pencil and use it to close the other end of the barrel. You have a whistle. Blow at the end with the air hole.

There are some amazingly funny reviews there.

Posted in Silliness | 1 Comment

Yay, North Carolina!

Posted on November 6, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I just learned, via Americablog, that my home state has come through for Obama; the AP reports:

President-elect Obama has won North Carolina, a symbolic triumph in a state that hadn’t voted for a Democrat in more than a generation.

The Associated Press declared Obama the winner Thursday after canvassing counties in North Carolina to determine the number of outstanding provisional ballots.

That survey found that there are not enough remaining ballots for Republican John McCain to close a 13,693-vote deficit.

North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes brings Obama’s total to 364 — nearly 100 more than necessary to win the White House. Missouri is the only state that remains too close to call.

Obama’s win in North Carolina was the first for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976.

This was a damn close race: out of some 4,200,000 votes cast, less than 14,000 made the difference.  I really feel like my vote mattered this time around!  (Though I still don’t really like the electoral college system.)

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments

John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes

Posted on November 6, 2008 by skullsinthestars

John Wyndham either didn’t like the world much or worried about it a lot!  In a previous post, I discussed his classic horror/sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which a meteor shower leaves most of the world blind and helpless against a horde of mobile, carnivorous plants.  I recently finished reading his follow-up apocalyptic novel, The Kraken Wakes (1953), and I give a summary and some observations about the book below:

krakenwakes

Continue reading →

Posted in Horror, Weird fiction | 1 Comment

Victory

Posted on November 5, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I think I may sleep easier, for the first time in a while.

“President Obama”… sounds nice.

Update:  I drove into work blaring Duran Duran songs, which seemed quite appropriate to me, especially “New Moon on Monday”:

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis

Posted on November 3, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I’m a complete sucker for sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and actually I’ve written a significant amount of it for my own amusement.  Of course, the true master, and really the originator of the genre, is Robert E. Howard, whose Conan stories are both incredibly fun to read and surprisingly eloquent.

After Howard’s unfortunate suicide in 1936, readers still hungered for strong fantasy characters, and many incredible authors stepped up to fill the void.  One of those was the masterful Henry Kuttner, who danced easily between fantasy, horror and science fiction.  He wrote a quartet of stories about Elak of Atlantis, which were recently reprinted:

Below, I give a brief summary of the Elak stories, and some comparison to the Conan works of REH.

Continue reading →

Posted in Fantasy fiction, Robert E. Howard | 2 Comments

12 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #5!

Posted on November 3, 2008 by skullsinthestars

It’s time again to remind folks that the deadline for entries for the next edition of The Giant’s Shoulders are due in 12 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!

Posted in General science, Science news | 1 Comment

Happy Halloween! Some stories to go to bed with…

Posted on October 31, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Though I listed some good Halloween reading a few days ago, I couldn’t resist suggesting a few more!  I’m sure most people will be heading to bed soon, so here’s a few bedtime-themed stories to think about while falling asleep.

Happy Halloween, and pleasant dreams!

Wilkie Collins, A Terribly Strange Bed.  The title sums it up, I think…

M.R. James, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.  Make sure you read this one while snuggled beneath the sheets…

F. Marion Crawford, The Upper Berth.  One of the best ghost stories ever written.  Period.

E.F. Benson, Caterpillars.  There are some rooms that it is genuinely unhealthy to spend the night in.

Posted in Horror | Leave a comment

Optics basics: Inverse problems

Posted on October 31, 2008 by skullsinthestars

In previous posts, I’ve talked at some length about computed tomography (CT) and optical coherence tomography (OCT).  Each of these is a technique for determining information about the internal structure of an object, such as the human body, from exterior measurements of the scattering of electromagnetic waves from the object.  In the case of CT, x-rays are used to measure and image a cross-sectional ‘slice’ of the human body, while in OCT, broadband visible light is used to probe a few millimeters into the skin or an internal organ of the human body.

Plenty of other techniques exist for measuring the internal structure of objects, using a variety of different types of waves.  Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) subjects a patient to an intense magnetic field, and makes an image by measuring the radio waves emitted when the field is suddenly switched.  Ultrasound imaging uses ultrasonic waves to probe the soft tissues of the human body, and is used in mammography.

Each of these techniques is quite different in its range of application, but all require nontrivial mathematical techniques to reconstruct an image from the raw scattered wave data.  These mathematical techniques are broadly grouped into a class of problems known as inverse problems, and I thought it would be worth an optics basics post to discuss inverse problems, their common features, and the challenges in solving them.

Continue reading →

Posted in Invisibility, Optics, Optics basics | 6 Comments

Aaaagh! Attack of the work-week!

Posted on October 30, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Just a brief apology about the lack of science posts this week.  Work has been crazy: on top of trying to catch up on all the class stuff I ignored while I was at the OSA meeting last week, I’ve got all sorts of other things that have come up, including trying to finish a few papers, paying attention to my role on a planning committee for an optics meeting, preparing a grant with colleagues, working on my book, refereeing papers, working on a new review article, supervising student research, and planning a local optics event.  It’s safe to say that I’ve been in ‘optics overload’ this week.

As a side note, it really is amazing how quickly this stuff piles up.  When I started as a faculty member, I just sat around all day planning my class and doing research by myself.  Nice little invitations to help out with projects and join committees started to pop up here and there, and now I’m looking around and realizing that everything needs to get done AT ONCE.  I’m not really complaining, ’cause I love to be busy, but it is quite stunning to me.

I’ll be back in the next couple of days with more detailed optics posts.  I’ve been ILL’ing a bunch of research papers to get background information, and got permission from APS to explicitly use a figure from one of their PRLs (it’s not too difficult to do, by the way).

Awright, back to working on an inverse scattering problem… hmm… inverse scattering… I feel an ‘optics basics’ post coming on…

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

Bertram Mitford’s The Sign of the Spider

Posted on October 30, 2008 by skullsinthestars

It’s hard to find out information about author Bertram Mitford (1855-1914).  Even Wikipedia doesn’t have information about him, instead redirecting to another Bertram Mitford who wrote about Japan.  He was, like H. Rider Haggard, a writer of adventure stories set in the wilds of Africa, though certainly not as well known (Haggard wrote King Solomon’s Mines and She, the latter of which I’ve blogged about before).  Valancourt Books, which has not led me wrong yet, has been valiantly reprinting much of Mitford’s work.  I decided to give The Sign of the Spider (1896) a read:

signofthespider

I was, quite frankly, blown away.  According to the book notes, Mitford has been dismissed as an imitator of Haggard.  I found The Sign of the Spider to be a much more compelling, and even deep, read than any of the Haggard work I’ve read so far.  A summary and some observations follow.

Continue reading →

Posted in Adventure fiction, Horror | 7 Comments