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…

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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

Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman: Domestic Darkness

Posted on March 5, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Our next horror master is Mary Eleanor Wilkins-Freeman (1852-1930). I think it is fair to call her a ‘minor’ horror master, simply because horror was not her primary fiction focus. An early feminist writer, she penned numerous novels and short story collections, and was the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her goal in writing ghost stories seems less motivated to scare than to highlight or illustrate the lives of contemporary women, but she still manages to produce a number of stories of significant power.

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Posted in Horror, Horror Masters | 2 Comments

Slugbuggery takes a new twist…

Posted on March 5, 2008 by skullsinthestars

This post is mainly for my girlfriend: today’s xkcd comic:

Posted in Silliness | 6 Comments

Point Break: Mars!

Posted on March 5, 2008 by skullsinthestars

My mind works in rather silly ways sometimes. Posting about skydiving soon after posting about avalanches on Mars, I got to thinking about how cool it would be to skydive off of a Martian cliff. Then I started to wonder: could you? What would be a skydiver’s terminal velocity in freefall on Mars? Well, with a little prior knowledge and some physics, we can actually make a rough estimate of this!

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Posted in Physics | 6 Comments

Gary Gygax has died

Posted on March 4, 2008 by skullsinthestars

It’s official: Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died.  (My friend PD alerted me to the rumor earlier.)

I credit D&D for much of my current science aptitude and creativity.  I was still in grade school when I took my first foray into the game, adventuring through (like so many others) The Keep on the Borderlands and In Search of the Unknown.  Playing D&D and later role-playing games taught me several important skills: I gained an aptitude in basic math and probability from the rules of the games (what are the odds I’ll be able to hit that AC -8 will o’ wisp?), and the development of adventures for my friends gave my creativity a workout.

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Posted in Fantasy fiction, role-playing games | 4 Comments

A major falling-out with some of my friends…

Posted on March 3, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Alas, I fear I must report that I recently had a major falling-out with some of my friends. We have these sort of events all the time, but this time I managed to catch it on video, which is after the fold…

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Posted in Sports | Tagged | 2 Comments

Mars has avalanches!

Posted on March 3, 2008 by skullsinthestars

For those who don’t read the Bad Astronomy blog, I feel duty bound to share an image taken by the HiRISE camera currently orbiting Mars.  They caught a picture of several avalanches on steep cliffs on Mars:

It’s also worth looking at the full set of pictures, which shows the wide-angle shots and the zoomed-in shots of two avalanches, giving a better sense of how far the orbiter was when the pictures were taken.   Modern technology is quite amazing, isn’t it?  (I may have found my newest desktop background.)

Posted in Science news | 6 Comments