Scientists make ‘blackest’ material ever!

Posted on February 4, 2008 by skullsinthestars

This was an interesting bit of science news from last week: according to an article on optics.org (free registration required), a research team from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Rice University has fabricated the ‘blackest’ material ever known, which reflects just 0.045% of the light incident upon it. This beats the previous record of 0.16% that was set by a nickel and phosphorous alloy.

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Posted in Optics, Physics | Leave a comment

Some unconventional vampire stories (updated)

Posted on February 1, 2008 by skullsinthestars

When I was younger, I was heavily into role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. I also ventured occasionally into other RPGs, and one of the popular ones was (and still is) Vampire: The Masquerade, in which one plays an Anne-Riceian vampire living secretly in contemporary society. I quickly got rather tired of Vampire, though; playing a character that is so much more powerful and special than ordinary folks left me with the pathetic feeling that I was trying to role-play somebody “cool”.

The ultra-trendy, ultra-sexy vampire seems to have become the standard image of the mythical bloodsucker. Alternatives exist, however; I thought I’d write a blog post highlighting some of my favorite stories in which vampires are depicted in a very different fashion…

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Posted in Horror, Robert E. Howard | 6 Comments

Science: It’s more complicated than creationists think

Posted on February 1, 2008 by skullsinthestars

The Bad Idea Blog recently contained a report about embarrassing arguments creationists in Florida are using against evolution:

“My objection to their proposal is that, at its core, the suggested science standard relative to evolution is a set of beliefs unproven. They believe that millions of years ago there was nothing and then suddenly there was something. They have no proof. It’s not replicable. It’s clearly a belief,” Kemple said. “You can give it a name and call it evolution, but it is nonetheless a set of beliefs.”

That quote comes from Terry Kemple, president of the Tampa Bay Christian public policy group Community Issues Council. ‘Bad’ already did a good concise job of pointing out how ignorant Terry is of evolution, but another part of this statement demonstrates a fundamental ignorance about science and I thought I’d rant about it a bit: “It’s not replicable. It’s clearly a belief.”

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Posted in ... the Hell?, General science | 9 Comments

Zombies for Romney!

Posted on January 31, 2008 by skullsinthestars

My friend Personal Demon (h/t) forwarded this image of a Romney supporter, from Yahoo! News photos:

Yes, the dead have risen and they’re voting Republican! (PD said in his email that he’s a mean, mean man.  I have to agree with him!)

Any suggested slogans for zombie supporters of Romney?

Update: Since the original link to the photo has broken (damn Yahoo!), PD managed to find a smaller archived version:

zombies-for-romney-digg-cache1

From now on, I copy all pics I use through links, so this doesn’t happen again…

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

Y: The Last Man comes to an end… (update)

Posted on January 30, 2008 by skullsinthestars

CNN reminded me that the comic series Y: The Last Man is coming to an end; the final issue is released this week. For those not in the know, Y is the story of a plague that wipes out, in a heartbeat, all male mammals on Earth: with the exception of one young man named Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. Faced with a world in chaos completely run by women (note: the chaos comes from 3 billion people dying, not from the fact that the world is run by women; don’t write me angry comments), Yorick ventures out in search of his girlfriend, who was in Australia at the time of the ‘event’. Though it may sound like an opportunity for cheesy and wacky sexual hijinks, the story is actually quite serious and at times downright poetic. A few images and metaphors over the course of the series have blown my mind, as have a number of the plot twists. Unlike many, many comic series, Y is a story completely thought out: the issues I’ve read so far (up through #58) carried with them implications and consequences that were initiated all the way in issue #1.

It’s worth mentioning that CNN also reports that Brian K. Vaughn, the writer of Y, is now writing for Lost, whose season premiere is tonight. Knowing that Brian is penning some of the stories makes me eager to watch the show again!

Update: Whoops, the season premiere of Lost is tomorrow night; tonight is apparently the last season’s finale again.

Posted in Entertainment | 5 Comments

Sound as a fire extinguisher?

Posted on January 30, 2008 by skullsinthestars

A friend of mine forwarded me a link (h/t “JakeRyker”) about extinguishing fire with sound waves that appeared in Scientific American. As noted in the article, it has been known since experiments by John Tyndall in 1857 that flames could be extinguished by sound, but evidently the exact mechanism is still somewhat elusive. This is not necessarily surprising; combustion is a complicated physical and chemical process. What is more surprising, though, is that the author of the article and the researchers suggest that sound might be used as a fire extinguisher to put out significant flames. A few observations below the fold…

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Posted in Physics, Science news | 2 Comments

Graham Masterton’s Tengu

Posted on January 28, 2008 by skullsinthestars

I’m reading a number of books by Graham Masterton these days, in anticipation of writing a ‘horror masters‘ post on his work. I had to ‘break radio silence’, though, and rave about one of his early books that I just finished over the weekend: Tengu. It’s currently out of print, though copies can be found through Amazon, and it’s well worth a read. I found the book riveting from it’s shocking and horrifying beginning to its explosive ending…

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Posted in Horror | Tagged | 8 Comments

Long-range optical communication… how much would you pay?

Posted on January 27, 2008 by skullsinthestars

There’s a lot of interest in both industry and the military in developing free-space optical communications systems.  The basic idea is to use a laser to transmit signals at optical frequencies over distances ranging from a few kilometers to hundreds of kilometers.  Potential advantages of such a scheme are the high bandwidth of communications, meaning lots of information can be transmitted very fast, and the highly directional nature of the signal, making it highly secure.  Disadvantages of such a scheme include the requirement of direct line of sight between transmitter and receiver, and more significantly the distortion induced in the beam by atmospheric turbulence.

Does one really need a laser to make a viable optical communications system, however?  I saw one talk at Photonics West, one of the best talks I’ve seen in a while, which demonstrates pretty convincingly that you do not…

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Posted in Optics | 3 Comments

Seth Pfefferle’s Stickman

Posted on January 25, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Nowadays, I tend to be pretty picky when it comes to reading horror fiction.  Much of the work out there is shoddy, even exploitative, and completely bereft of scares.  I’ve consequently kept my focus primarily on established authors and a rare few unknowns that look promising.

This wasn’t always the case: when I was in my teens, I would indiscriminately snatch anything off the bookshelves that had the word ‘horror’ on the binding.   Most of the time I was sorely disappointed, but every once in a while I found something nice.

One of the books I discovered back then is Stickman, by Seth Pfefferle.  I dug it out of my collection a couple of nights ago and gave it a reread, and it still holds up pretty well, even though I first read it as a teen in 1987!

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Posted in Horror | 1 Comment

Is it natural, or is it designed?

Posted on January 23, 2008 by skullsinthestars

Creationist quack/hack Ray Comfort has a blog, and he recently argued that the Bible is a science text, and in fact is better than science (h/t Pharyngula). My main response to such drivel is that if the Bible is better than science, than surely Ray, or a more science-minded creationist compatriot, will use the Bible to answer some of the troubling questions about the universe, such as the exact mass of the Higgs boson, the exact nature of dark matter (mass, spin, and relation to ordinary matter, please) or at the very least the grand unification energy at which the fundamental forces all become one and the same.

While we’re waiting for an answer, I was thinking about another creationist canard repeated often: that it is ‘obvious‘ that life is designed, because designed things are so obviously different than natural things.

This argument, while compelling to the fundamentalists, is flawed for one big reason: people have inferred or suspected design numerous times throughout history, only to later be refuted by scientific observation. I thought I’d put together a brief photo-essay of some examples…

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Posted in ... the Hell?, General science | Leave a comment