There’s a nice article in Wired (h/t Pharyngula) about the return of Futurama to the entertainment world.
Futurama was always given a bum rap by the networks, because it was unusual and more clever by far than the Simpsons episodes coming out at the same time. FOX more or less intentionally killed it with a scheduling pillow-over-the-face: I recall hanging out at my friend Personal Demon’s house every Sunday night, only to find Futurama yet again preempted by Sunday Night Football.
I thought this was pretty cool. Remember when the powered armor in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers seemed so futuristic? Well, a company is developing exoskeleton suits for the military, and though I wouldn’t want to be running around on a combat field in one right now, they can do some pretty amazing things, and are surprisingly mobile.
Well, I made the deadline! I officially made 50268 words at 1:20 am on November 28. My winner’s image:
Which I display with pride. This takes care of the paperwork, but the irony is that the novel isn’t finished! I’ve got a few more nights of work to wrap up the storyline. Just like the last time I did a novel-in-a-month, the plot took on a life of its own and I’ve spent the past 10K words trying to put on the brakes!
I’m gunning to completely finish the story by the last day in November. Wish me luck!
I’m up late, writing my NaNoWriMo for the evening, but thought I’d take a break with a few pictures of Zoe! She’s still an incredibly sweet cat, as evidenced by this picture of her taking a break:
There’s some skepticism in the blogosphere, over the recent discussion of geocentrists and now, apparently, flat-earthers, that these web sites and trolls must be joking. Nobody could possibly believe such simple-minded tripe in our modern, rational world, could they?
All this talk reminded me of the story of Cyrus Teed, a man who believed that we were living on the inside of a hollow Earth, not the outside, and that the sun and stars all resided in the central cavity. Teed ended up with a cult worshipping under his new religion, Koreshanity, which at its peak had 250 followers.
When did all this happen? Teed died in 1908. About three dozen members of the cult remained, however, and there were still 35 members in the 1940s. Finally, in 1960, the remaining four members deeded the Koreshan lands to the state of Florida.
My favorite part of the story? Teed was confident that he would be resurrected after his death. His followers awaited his rising until the body had decomposed enough for the county health officer to order it interred.
The lesson here is that there’s always somebody out there willing to believe just about any crazy thing, if you give them a good enough story.
After you’ve read some of the science blogs for long enough, you start to think that there isn’t any amount of crackpottery that can surprise you. For instance, reading Good Math, Bad Math will expose you to an endless amount of mathematics abuse, from bible code crazies to horrible mathematical ‘proofs’ of God. If you read Pharyngula, you will encounter so many creationists and Biblical literalists to make you want to become a Pharisee.
But I was really stunned when I discovered (h/t Pharyngula) another science blog where trolls are actually arguing in favor of geocentrism, the long-debunked view that the Earth is the fixed center of the universe and everything else revolves around it.
It’s a common observation amongst the liberal blogosphere that the media in the U.S. doesn’t do a terribly good job, and dumbs down things excessively.
So I’m watching 60 Minutes tonight, and they have a segment about New York City’s fight to require chain restaurants (particularly fast food) to put the calories of each item explicitly on the menu, so diners know exactly how much they’re getting. Personally, I find that very reasonable. After some discussion about how many fast food chains are fighting this requirement, they turn to Subway, which is voluntarily adding the calories to the menu. BUT, the reporter says, the numbers only reflect the calories of a six-inch sub. If I want to know the calories intake for a foot-long sub, and I quote, “I’d have to double the number — in my head!”
The reporter was apparently speaking seriously and sincerely. I laughed for a good minute, until I started to cough.
Well, yesterday marked the halfway point of November, and I managed to make and pass my NaNoWriMo goal of 25,000 words total by the end of the day, and even go past it. I was a little behind during the week, but rallied well. Amusingly, I misread the date on Monday and assumed I needed to write much more than I actually did, which meant that I actually caught myself up to the appropriate point on Tuesday.
The writing is finally getting easier, as the characters are starting to practically tell their own stories. I’m pretty confident that I’ll finish the 50,000 words by the end of the month, though of course things could change at any moment…
Can I combine catblogging and horror blogging? I’m going to try!
The past couple of nights, I’ve sensed a restless presence in my home. I’ve heard strange sounds and seen motion out of the corner of my eye. At last, I got a picture of the phenomenon:
Is my apartment haunted? Is a restless spirit stalking the corridors?
In the first part of my series on ‘What is a wave?’, I attempted to give a broad definition of a wave, so that we can identify them when we see them. In this part, I will address two of the most important behaviors of waves: interference and diffraction. Interference may be loosely described as the interaction of a wave with itself, or a wave with another wave, while diffraction may be loosely described as the interaction of a wave with other objects.
We will discuss interference in this post, and consider again the wave on a string discussed in part I of this post. A pair of waves are sent down the string to a fixed end, where they are reflected and return to their point of origin. What happens when the waves pass each other? An animation of such an event is displayed below:
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 