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!

Posted in Animals, Science news | Leave a comment

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

The Linkin’ Log: March 14, 2008

Posted on March 14, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Just thought I’d point out a few interesting science posts around the web, for those who might not have stumbled upon them:

Blake Stacey at Science After Sunclipse is doing his best to shed readers with an excellent, but mathematical, post about the Dirac equation.  Dirac’s mixing of special relativity and quantum mechanics led to the prediction of antimatter, and also  naturally incorporated quantum-mechanical spin.

Tom at Swans on Tea points out that it is officially ‘Talk Like a Physicist Day‘.  So I ‘propagated’ to work today instead of ‘drove’, and instead of ‘eating lunch’ I’ll be ‘extracting energy from organic compounds.’

Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles describes some recent interesting optical four-wave mixing experiments and their implications.

Over at PLEKTIX, Ben Allen gives a non-technical discussion of ‘causality’ in special relativity and, in essence, who to blame when something goes wrong!

Posted in General science | 4 Comments

A pair of heart-warming stories

Posted on March 14, 2008 by skullsinthestars

We live in a world that’s pretty crappy sometimes, and the current world political situation just makes things look even bleaker.  It’s so nice, then, to occasionally see a few stories that can warm your heart and make you feel good inside.  In that spirit, I briefly describe a couple of happy tales that I stumbled across on the ‘tubes’ this week…

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Posted in Animals | Tagged | 1 Comment

Making optical ‘black holes’ in a laboratory?

Posted on March 12, 2008 by skullsinthestars

My attention was recently drawn to this article (h/t Personal Demon and StumbleUpon) in Scientific American: a group of researchers have concocted a relatively simple way to generate an ‘event horizon’ in an optical fiber, analogous to those found in black holes. This technique may make it possible to study, on a tabletop, some of the more intriguing theoretical predictions about black holes. I give a brief description of the theory and experiment below the fold, plus a few observations…

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Posted in Optics | 3 Comments

Solomon Kane and Robert E. Howard’s religious beliefs

Posted on March 9, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Now that I’m thinking of Solomon Kane, I thought I’d do a brief post about the character, his adventures, and the clear influence Howard’s religious beliefs had on both.

Solomon Kane is a 16th century English Puritan, warrior and wanderer.  Stereotypically dour and fanatical, he wanders the globe, primarily traveling through Europe and Africa, in search of evil to vanquish and, in later stories, answers to his own theological unease.  Like all of Robert E. Howard’s fictional heroes, he is larger than life and almost elemental in his pursuits.

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

Solomon Kane movie?

Posted on March 8, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I put this in the category of things I found that I wasn’t looking for: it looks like a movie based on Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane is slated for release sometime in 2008!  My blog title, of course, is taken from the title of one of my favorite Kane stories.  It will be interesting to see what is done with Kane in movie form, but if it’s anything like Hollywood’s various takes on Howard’s other character, Conan, I’m a little scared…

Posted in Robert E. Howard | Leave a comment

The Camera Obscura and a neat optical illusion

Posted on March 6, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I thought I’d muscle in on Swans on Tea’s turf for a post and discuss an interesting optical illusion that is based just as much on optics as on the idiosyncrasies of the eye itself. While stumbling through StumbleUpon.com, I found an interesting collection of images at 2Loop.com showing ‘3D Painted Rooms’. An example of this is shown below the fold, from 2Loop…

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Posted in Optics | 9 Comments