Physics demonstrations: tensegrity table

Posted on March 1, 2024 by skullsinthestars

The best demonstrations of physics are those that show you something completely unexpected and counter to the way that physics is supposed to work. One of my favorites is this curious contraption, which I got through a Kickstarter a few years ago:

This is what is known as a tensegrity table, which demonstrates the phenomenon of tensegrity. What is “tensegrity?” We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s just marvel at how this structure stands upright, supported only by wires, with the added twist of the wire in the middle of the structure being held together by magnetic force, leaving a gap in between! Thus that connection has no material connection at all! (This is the feature that drew me to this Kickstarter in particular.) How can such a structure stay standing, if only flexible wires are supporting it?

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Invisibility audiobook 70% off!

Posted on February 19, 2024 by skullsinthestars

For those who enjoy audiobooks and haven’t yet gotten my invisibility book, this is just a quick note that Invisibility is now 70% off at audiobooks.com. I get full royalties even with the discount, so I’m totally cool with such deals!

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Black Mad Wheel, by Josh Malerman

Posted on February 16, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 3 of my 26 books for 2024 goal!

Some books look so appealing that I grab them off the shelf at the bookstore without hesitation, but somehow take forever to get around to reading. That is the case with Black Mad Wheel (2017), by Josh Malerman, which has been on my home shelf for probably at least two years and which I finally finished reading this past week.

Malerman has been a very successful horror author in recent years, as evidenced by the sub-caption on the title, “Author of Bird Box,” referring to his 2014 novel that became a movie in 2018 and resulted in a gif that produced a thousand jokes:

Black Mad Wheel is less apocalyptic and far stranger than Bird Box, and uses Malerman’s own experiences as a singer-songwriter for a Detroit rock band as inspiration. The novel centers around a mysterious sound that has been detected coming from a remote part of the world… a sound that could be the most powerful weapon ever created.

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New TikTok video on the Barkhausen effect!

Posted on February 13, 2024 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been neglecting my TikTok page as much as my blog, so here’s a video that makes up for both! I talk about the really cool Barkhausen effect, which allows you to actually hear metal being magnetized.

I wrote about this effect and did a YouTube video a decade ago, so I felt like it was time to bring it back out. You can read the original post, with more details, at this link.

@drskyskull

Making magnets speak! The Barkhausen effect, in which you can hear quantum physics in action. #science #physics #fyp #foryoupage

♬ original sound – Drskyskull
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How many actors have two LEGO minifigs?

Posted on February 5, 2024 by skullsinthestars

So yesterday I learned that there is a Bricks & Minifigs store in my area, and I had to check it out. LEGO has become so huge in recent years that official LEGO stores are no longer enough, so you get these great LEGO resale stores, where you can hunt down a wide variety of minifigs. I picked up a few just for fun, but that’s not the point of this post!

While I was there, I was astounded to see that there were actual LEGO sets made based on the 2010 Prince of Persia movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which has to be one of LEGO’s most ill-advised licenses ever.

But then a weird thought occurred to me: this means Jake Gyllenhaal has had minifigs made of two characters that he has played, because he also played Mysterio in Spider Man: Far From Home, which had its own LEGO sets!

Because of the way my brain works, I started wondering: how many actors have had more than one movie character represented by LEGO minifigs? I thought that there couldn’t be many, but in fact there are a surprising number! Because this was my obsession for the better part of a day, let me make it yours as well.

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Posted in Entertainment, Silliness | 3 Comments

Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on February 3, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 2 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! Still roughly on track, though I want to pick up the pace.

One reason I like book blogging is that I pay more attention to things like book introductions and that often leads me to more interesting reads! Last year, when I read Orrin Grey’s excellent collection How to See Ghosts and Other Figments, I noted the lovely introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Mexico-born Canadian novelist. I am always looking for new and interesting authors to read, and so I picked up her 2019 novel Gods of Jade and Shadow, whose premise immediately intrigued me.

This novel is a modern fairy tale, set in the Jazz Age in Mexico, and features a young girl who gets drawn into a power struggle between two Mayan Gods of Death!

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“The birth of electromagnetism” on TikTok!

Posted on February 1, 2024 by skullsinthestars

I have made another history of science video for TikTok, this time focusing on the curious story of how electromagnetism was discovered in 1820 in an experiment that is utterly unique for one really big reason:

@drskyskull

Some more unusual #history of #science for folks, this time about the unique circumstances in which electromagnetism was discovered. I also talk about one corpse and one guy who kinda looks like a corpse.

♬ original sound – Drskyskull

Like a lot of my TikTok videos, this represents a condensed version of a blog post I did a few years ago; if you want more detail and/or a text version of the story, here’s the link!

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Robert Williams Wood adds invisibility to his textbook (1911)

Posted on January 28, 2024 by skullsinthestars

It’s kind of a fun phenomenon that no matter how thoroughly I research my history of science books, after they’re published I always find something that surprises me. In this case, I was tracking down some data on the physics of anomalous dispersion (more on that in another blog post), which led me to Robert Williams Wood’s textbook on Physical Optics, whose second edition came out in 1911. And in this book, I found a whole section on “invisibility of objects!”

This doesn’t change my overall narrative on the history of invisibility, as I’ve written about Wood’s 1902 paper on invisibility before, in which he experimentally tested a very curious (and certainly not true in general) hypothesis by Lord Rayleigh. I’ve also written about Wood’s science fiction novels before (two of them: here and here), and his fascinating series of physics lecture demonstrations. Wood was an all-around fascinating fellow, and he is one of a few physicists who got a mention in both my Falling Felines book and my Invisibility book!

Let’s take a look at Wood’s section on invisibility, because it is a fascinating glimpse into how physicists were even thinking about the possibility of invisibility over 100 years ago!

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Helgoland, by Carlo Rovelli

Posted on January 21, 2024 by skullsinthestars

Book 1 of my new modest goal of reading and blogging about 26 books this year! This one is a little bit of a cheat, as I read much of it near the end of last year, but I finished reading it for my book club this year, so I’m counting it!

A few months ago, I finally completed my long-delayed series of posts explaining quantum entanglement, and Part 7 was all about the question, “What does it all mean?” For the purpose of interpreting and predicting experimental results, quantum physics as it is currently interpreted (in what is known as the Copenhagen interpretation) works really, really well; however, from a logical and philosophical point of view, it seems filled with contradictions.

To get around these contradictions, numerous researchers have come up with different ways to interpret quantum physics, and one of those interpretations is known as relational quantum physics, as first introduced by the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli in 1994 and published in a peer-reviewed journal in 1996 [1].

Several years ago, Rovelli wrote a popular account of the concepts of relational quantum physics, titled Helgoland (2020), and I was intrigued to learn more.

I must admit that I was deeply skeptical of relational quantum mechanics when I first heard of it, but a combination of reading Rovelli’s book and some of the research papers on the subject have made the ideas seem much more compelling, at least in a broad sense!

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Posted in History of science, Physics | 2 Comments

Fake Book Titles Extravaganza, Part 8!

Posted on January 20, 2024 by skullsinthestars

It’s time to compile all my fake book titles from social media again!  You can see compilation 1, compilation 2, compilation 3, compilation 4, compilation 5, compilation 6 and compilation 7 at the links. 

This is a smaller batch, because I haven’t been as inspired lately and haven’t done as many. The collapse of Twitter has left me less motivated, too, but I still try to do them when a cover grabs my attention!

Some covers require minimum effort to modify and feature subjects soooo satisfying to mock.

Original title: Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson
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Posted in ... the Hell?, Silliness | 1 Comment