How high can you fall from?

Posted on May 7, 2008 by skullsinthestars

My friend Personal Demon tipped me off to a potentially historic skydiving event that will be happening in roughly 17 days; Michel Fournier of France will attempt to break the record for the highest freefall.  Ascending in a pressurized capsule attached to a high-altitude balloon, Fournier will dive from 130,000 feet (25 miles) over the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada.

The previous record goes back to Joseph Kittinger, Air Force pilot and all-around Übermensch.  In 1960, he participated in Project Excelsior, which was implemented to study the effects of high-altitude bailout on pilots.  Kittinger left a balloon at 102,800 feet, and fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds reaching a maximum speed of 614 mph!  (Kittinger is less-known for being one of the few pilots who had to bail out of his jet in a thunderstorm.  The storms kept him aloft under parachute for 20 minutes before dumping him to the ground.)

Fournier’s group claims that their event is being done for similar medical and technological reasons, but it will at the very least be a very cool human accomplishment.  I’m staying tuned…

Posted in Sports | 1 Comment

Update on my “challenge” to science bloggers

Posted on May 7, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Now that I’ve actually written my “classic science” blog post, I realized I didn’t plan any way to compile all the entries in the end! If you accept the “challenge” (I keep putting the word in quotes because I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to be confrontational), and post an entry, send me an email! I’ve put together a permanent page to compile all the entries together in one easy to find spot.

(I think I didn’t plan ahead because I didn’t think anyone was actually reading my blog!) 🙂

One final note:  Just to have an end date associated with the challenge, let’s mark the end of May as the official end date; I’ll do a summary post at the end about everyone’s entries.

Posted in General science | 1 Comment

Dean Koontz: Subtle patterns in the darkness

Posted on May 5, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I haven’t done a “Horror Masters” post for a while, and it’s long past due!

Even if you’ve never read a Dean Koontz novel, you’re familiar with his work.  Airport bookstores are constantly stocked with his books; finding a horror author whose last name doesn’t start with “K” can be quite a challenge when traveling (King, of course, being the other one).

Broadly speaking, it is easy at first glance to dismiss Koontz as a “pop” horror author of no serious depth.  Many of his novels, especially his early work, follow a certain well-defined plot structure: boy/girl hero meets girl/boy love interest, both are threatened by some mysterious entity, they flee, they have a final confrontation with said entity in some isolated location and live happily ever after.  Furthermore, his short stories, such as those compiled in Strange Highways, often seem clumsy and somehow ‘inefficient’.

It would be easy to dismiss Koontz as another pop horror author showering the shelves with forgettable drek (I’m lookin’ at you, Preston and Child!), except for one important, undeniable, unavoidable reality:

Dean Koontz’s story ideas are incredibly, almost maddeningly, clever – and they’re executed brilliantly.

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Posted in Horror, Horror Masters | 3 Comments

Even airlines get it: slowing down saves fuel!

Posted on May 5, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I just saw this article on CNN the other day: Planes slow down to save fuel. Apparently airlines are finally starting to feel the pinch of higher gas prices, and are learning that going at a slightly slower speed can save significant money.

This isn’t a new observation: young folks today probably aren’t aware of the fact that the former national 55 mph speed limit was originally implemented in 1974 not for safety, but to conserve fuel in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.

The reality is that air resistance becomes a major limiting factor on fuel efficiency at high speeds.  Roughly speaking, the drag force increases as the square of the velocity at high speeds, which means that driving 100 mph results in 4 times the drag force that driving at 50 mph causes.

I drive a hybrid Civic, and the dynamic mpg gauge on the vehicle gives me significant insight into how air resistance kills fuel efficiency.  I typically find that, driving steady at 55 mph, I can get 40-50 mpg.  Once I push the car up past 70 mph, and into 80 mph, I’m lucky to get 35 mpg.  At low speeds, the car can ‘coast’ for appreciable distances without using fuel, but at high speeds, the engine must constantly work against the drag force.

These numbers, over long periods of time, add up: driving a little slower on a day-to-day basis can save you some significant money in the long run.

Posted in Politics, Science news | 12 Comments

Classic Science Paper: Otto Wiener’s experiment (1890)

Posted on May 4, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Update: In my haste to finish this “monster” post, I neglected to include an introduction to standing waves, an explanation which is crucial to understanding the experiment.  That oversight has been corrected.

A couple of weeks ago I issued a “challenge” to my fellow science bloggers: find, read, and blog about a classic, (preferably pre-WWII) scientific paper. There’s so much interesting historical context and methodological information hidden away that’s worth a second look.

For my part in the challenge, I chose an 1890 paper by Otto Wiener, “Stehende Lichtwellen und die Schwingungsrichtung polarisirten Lichtes,” Ann. Phys. Chem. 38 (1890), 203-243. Loosely translated, the title is, “Standing light waves and the oscillation direction of the polarization of light.”

The experiment that Wiener performed, as we will see, is conceptually simple and elegant. I foolishly thought that this would “translate” into a short, easy to cope with paper. As one can see from the citation above, no such luck: the paper is 40 pages of somewhat antiquated German! I accepted my fate, though, and soldiered on. A description begins below the fold…

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Posted in History of science, Optics, Physics | 19 Comments

Iron Man: Pretty damn cool!

Posted on May 3, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Me & the fiancée just got back from seeing Iron Man, and I gotta say: cool! A few observations:

  1. The director, Jon Favreau, is to Hollywood films what a closer is to a baseball team. At least, that’s what he’s starting to look like to me: the guy who can take what seems like a losing situation and turn it around. He made Elf a genuinely funny film, and he took what I would have considered one of the most difficult Marvel characters to translate to film and made what is one of the best comic-to-film translations yet.
  2. Robert Downey Jr. also does a masterful job of making Tony Stark simultaneously rather reprehensible and incredibly likable.
  3. Cheers to Jeff Bridges as well. I own all the original “Iron Monger” series of Iron Man comics and loved them, and I had my doubts that he could carry the character, but he did so excellently. Now I’ve got this urge to head back to my childhood home and read them all again…
  4. There are a number of excellent in-jokes for those fans of Marvel comics in general and Iron Man in particular, and not just the obligatory Stan Lee appearance.
  5. Speaking of in-jokes, make sure you stay ’till the end of the credits for one of the coolest end ‘stingers’ ever!
  6. Recently a poll was done on ScienceBlogs about the best ‘pro-science’ movies.  I’d like to think Iron Man has a place on the list!
Posted in Entertainment | 4 Comments

Mrs. SkySkull?

Posted on May 1, 2008 by skullsinthestars

As of yesterday evening, ‘Babs67 aka The Girlfriend’ became ‘Babs67 aka The Fiancée’! I proposed at one of our favorite local restaurants, and she said yes! (I wasn’t particularly worried about the answer, considering we had spent a number of weekends investigating rings.)

The manager of the restaurant, once he realized what was going on, paid for our dinner. This immediately started us thinking about doing multiple ‘proposals’ for the next couple of weeks at various restaurants!

In other news, single women throughout the world breathed a collective sigh of relief last night… 🙂

Posted in Personal | 16 Comments

Richard Laymon and a bit of a horror fiction pet peeve

Posted on April 28, 2008 by skullsinthestars

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, part of my motivation for writing this blog was to give myself a reason to reinvestigate one of my “lost loves”: horror fiction. I’ve been reading massive amounts of horror since then, from some of the oldest Gothic works to the most recent publications. Some of it has been edifying, but some of it has also been rather disappointing.

One of the contemporary authors I’ve been investigating is Richard Laymon, who has been in print since 1980. I’ve never read his stuff before, but recently I gave two of his books a try. One, The Beast House, is from his early phase, and the other, To Wake the Dead, is only a few years old. I discuss both books, which are… okay, below the fold, but they also remind me of one of my pet peeves of contemporary horror fiction, which I feel like ranting about a bit.

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Posted in Horror | 26 Comments

A couple of cool, albeit impractical, clocks

Posted on April 28, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I’m between “blog thoughts” today, but I thought I’d point out a couple of cool clocks that I “stumbled upon” in recent weeks. Though I don’t think either of them will help Tom with his research, they’re both pretty cool. Below the fold…

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Posted in General science | 8 Comments

Tim Lebbon: “Berserk” and “The Everlasting”

Posted on April 26, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I haven’t been doing much horror blogging recently, though I have been busy with horror reading. A couple of books by Tim Lebbon recently caught my eye, and I thought I’d offer a few thoughts about them.

First, a rhetorical question: what is it with the U.K. and horror? So many of the best horror authors these days are British: there’s Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Graham Masterton, to name a few. Now we can also add to that list Tim Lebbon. Though I don’t necessarily rank him as the equal, yet, to the other authors I’ve mentioned, he’s an excellent writer with some intriguing ideas. His first novel came out in 1996, so he hasn’t been around as long as the others, either.

Two novels whose premises caught my attention that I had to read were Lebbon’s Berserk and The Everlasting, and I discuss them both below the fold…

Continue reading →

Posted in Horror | 1 Comment