Concert report: Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm

Posted on March 23, 2008 by skullsinthestars

The girlfriend and I spent the weekend in Atlanta to catch Jonathan Coulton in concert.  The internet sensation responsible for Code Monkey and Re: Your Brains put on an excellent show, and even though the auditorium wasn’t filled, the audience was wild and enthusiastic.  My favorite part was Coulton using the audience to provide a ‘zombie chorus’ for Re: Your Brains, and I joined in as best (or, more accurately, worst) I could.

One of the most pleasant surprises of the show was the opening act: Paul and Storm.  This comedic musical duo warmed up the crowd with a collection of silly and very funny short tunes.  They also seemed completely undaunted that most of the audience had never heard of them before!  (Hopefully that will change.)

Coulton joined Paul and Storm for a song, and P & S joined Coulton for quite a few.

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A better economy in 2009?

Posted on March 21, 2008 by skullsinthestars

This made me laugh: CNN’s headline right now is “Americans confident in 2009 turnaround”, at least as far as the economy is concerned. The first thing that came to mind for me: what’s the one thing that absolutely must change in 2009? This is what I came up with…

P.S. The Girlfriend and I are going to be going to a concert this weekend, so I probably will be posting light, if at all…

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Relativity: Measuring the speed of light

Posted on March 21, 2008 by skullsinthestars

When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors told the following funny (and probably apocryphal) anecdote (recalled from memory):

A court case was being tried in New Mexico. A group of pornographers were charged with smuggling pornography from Mexico by projecting it across the border to a camera. The defense argued that nothing physical was transported, and in the end the argument boiled down to this: if light moved at a finite speed, the films were being transported; if it moved at infinite speed, the defense was correct. A physicist was brought in to discuss the speed of light but, after a number of figures were presented, the judge interrupted. “When I put my hands over my eyes, the light stops coming immediately, and when I move my hands, it reappears instantly. The speed of light is infinite – the defendants are not guilty!”

The reason I suspect this story is apocryphal is that science has accepted that the speed of light is finite – albeit very large – for centuries. The value, usually denoted c, is approximately c = 3\times 10^8 meters/second, or 186,282 miles/second. In fact, as we will see in later posts, light is the fastest thing in the universe. The topics we address in this post: a brief history of measuring the speed of light, and how these measurements led inexorably to Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

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Posted in Optics, Physics, Relativity | 20 Comments

Happy birthday to Patrick McGoohan!

Posted on March 19, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Through watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I’ve learned that today is Patrick McGoohan’s birthday!  If you don’t know McGoohan, you should: he was the star and one of the driving forces behind The Prisoner television series, arguably the best and most challenging television series in history.  The Prisoner is a series about a retired secret agent (“Number 6”) struggling to maintain his identity after being abducted to a mysterious prison for spies called “The Village.”  Before The Prisoner, McGoohan played agent John Drake in the Bond-esque spy thriller Danger Man aka Secret Agent Man (I can play and sing a pretty darn good Secret Agent Man theme).  He has also appeared in countless other movies, notably (to me, at least) as the warden in Escape From Alcatraz, sinister art dealer Roger Devereau in the Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor comedy Silver Streak, and King Edward I in Braveheart.

Happy birthday to Patrick McGoohan!  Be seeing you!

Posted in Entertainment | 2 Comments

Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90

Posted on March 19, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, writer of numerous books including the iconic 2001, passed away today in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. Reading various comments around the internet today, I almost get the feeling that Clarke will be remembered as much, if not more, for his influence on the perception of science as much as for his actual science fiction writing. This is certainly true for me personally.

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The War Prayer

Posted on March 19, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Tomorrow marks the five-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. I don’t have a whole lot to say about it this morning, but instead will link to the text of Mark Twain’s The War Prayer. Twain was a brilliant writer, and his essay is as relevant and poignant today as it was when he first wrote it. This piece was considered controversial enough that Twain was discouraged from publishing it, and it appeared only six years after his death.

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments

Just how well can an elephant paint, anyway?

Posted on March 18, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Via noob.us, I found an intriguing video which has been making the rounds. An elephant in Thailand named Hong has been taught to paint – really well. Watch the video, be astonished, then go below the fold to be brought back to Earth (a bit)…

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Posted in Animals | 3 Comments

Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out

Posted on March 16, 2008 by skullsinthestars

A lot of fascinating books pass unjustly from immense popularity to relative obscurity as time passes. I just finished reading one such book, The Devil Rides Out (1934), by Dennis Wheatley. Wheatley (1897-1977) was an amazingly prolific author who wrote stories in the adventure, mystery, and occult genres. The Devil Rides Out was his sixth book, and is a fascinating hybrid adventure/occult thriller.

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Posted in Horror | 3 Comments

Talking parrots, vocabulary canines, and tool-using crows… Oh my!

Posted on March 15, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Just a quick note: a friend of mine pointed me to a very nice National Geographic article on animal intelligence, which can be read here.

The article discusses the well-known case of Alex the parrot, but also discusses other surprising species skills: border collies that have a 300-word vocabulary, and crows that can fashion tools. Well worth a read!

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Event horizons in water flow: the math!

Posted on March 15, 2008 by skullsinthestars

In a previous post, I discussed recent research which demonstrated the creation of an artificial ‘event horizon’ in a fiber optic cable. In that post, I described how a river speeding up as it goes towards a waterfall has an event horizon: waves that are created past the horizon have no possibility of escape. This was illustrated by the figure below:

As you can see, I’ve drawn the wavefronts created by rocks dropped in the water as ellipses, which seems like the obvious solution: waves will be ‘stretched out’ along the flow of the river, while they will spread normally perpendicular to the flow. Being a nitpicky sort of guy, though, I wanted to demonstrate that this is the case mathematically, which I do below the fold… (warning: algebra and calculus follow!)

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Posted in Mathematics, Physics | Leave a comment