Just a quick note: I’ll be heading off to give another talk tomorrow, so my posting may be light for a few days again. I’ve got some cute stuff I’ve been working on, though, so if I have time, I’ll sneak in a post!
I broke out another of my skydiving videos to post on YouTube the other day. This one, below the fold, is what is known as a “speedstar”. Most formation skydives are meticulously planned to be “slot perfect”: that is, every skydiver has a very specific place in the formation, as in the jump I blogged about previously. A speedstar, on the other hand, is all about everybody getting together as fast as they can! Nobody leaves the plane together: everyone piles out single file and then rushes to the formation. In the video below the fold, we were doing a speedstar with 10 people (a “10-way”) and we planned two points…
Just an entertaining blog stats observation: a few days ago I noticed that my blog stats started to really spike upwards. This completely confused me at first, as all the hits were appearing on my semi-old post on elephant intelligence. It took me a little while to realize that the post has apparently migrated to the top of some Google search results. For instance, if you type ‘elephant paintings hong‘, you get my post as the top entry! Typing ‘how do they teach the elephants to paint‘ will get me on the first page.
I’m glad I was relatively thorough in my discussion of the topic, which hopefully merits its inclusion high in the search pages. There’s a lesson here: don’t be too sloppy with a blog entry; you never know where it will end up!
When I wrote my ‘speed of light’ post, I had to do a lot of searching to find Fizeau’s original paper. Fizeau, as I mentioned, produced the first terrestrial measurement of the speed of light, using a rapidly rotating toothed wheel to break a light signal into continuous pulses whose speed could then be estimated. Since I’ve managed to find, after some effort, Fizeau’s paper, I thought I’d do the physics community a service and post it in a more easy to find place: my blog!
Via Respectful Insolence, I found a wonderful web tool that allows you to rate the amount of cussin’ you do on your blog. I rated a pathetic 1.7%:
I need to swear more, for fuck’s sake…
One can hardly let March 31st go by without wishing iconic actor Christopher Walken a happy birthday! This quirky actor has played a number of offbeat roles, including a seemingly-insane drill sergeant in Biloxi Blues, a Bond villain in A View to a Kill, a dark angel in The Prophecy, an eccentric tyrant of a South American town in The Rundown and of course a head-chopper in Sleepy Hollow. He has also demonstrated a great talent for more serious parts, such as his academy-award winning role in The Deer Hunter, and an Oscar-nominated role in Catch Me If You Can. When needed, though, he can also be uproariously funny, as he demonstrated in Pulp Fiction and Wayne’s World 2 (indeed, he might have been the only funny thing in the latter film).
When I think of Christopher Walken, though, I will always think first and foremost of the role presented in video form below the fold:
I mentioned in a previous post the “Planet Stories” publications, which are reprints of classic pulp fantasy, horror, and adventure stories. I finished recently one of those publications, Black God’s Kiss, the collected stories of C.L. Moore’s character Jirel of Joiry. The character of Jirel is especially notable as being the first strong female sword-and-sorcery character written by a woman!
I’ve previously described Max Brooks’ first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, which I found to be a both amusing and chilling fictional field guide written in the wake of a world-wide zombie holocaust. My favorite part of that book was its appendix of ‘historical’ zombie outbreaks, a collection of vignettes about human encounters with the living dead throughout history. The terseness of these little stories made them especially creepy, as the reader feels that he/she is lacking crucial pieces to the puzzle.
Brooks’ 2006 follow-up, World War Z, continues and expands upon this narrative style. It is written as an oral history recorded after the zombie holocaust by a U.N. worker. Tales begin with the Chinese outbreak which starts it all, through the collapse of civilization as we know it, to the turn of the tide of battle and eventually the aftermath of the decidedly Pyrrhic victory. The tales are at times fascinating, humorous, horrifying, and even inspiring, and as a whole I found the book nearly impossible to put down.
I get so many `phishing’ emails that I used to not bother even looking at them, but some of them are such comedy gold that I’m starting to enjoy the bizarre tales that they tell (like, for instance, the one that begged me to help out some poor Christian lepers). The most recent one (which arrived in a batch of four identical messages) is so ridiculously generic that I had to post it. Phisher after the fold:
A few weeks ago I did a post on the camera obscura and noted that the earliest researcher to really understand its properties was the middle-eastern scientist Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040), who in spite of his impressive achievements is rarely discussed by the physics community (including myself in that group). The post caught the attention of Bradley Steffens, who has recently written a short book on the scientist, and now that I’ve read it, I thought I’d recommend it!
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 