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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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