The more things change…

Posted on October 23, 2007 by skullsinthestars

Most people are hopefully aware of the very strong religious right movement to incorporate creationism (the belief that God created the world and everything in it in its present form) in science classes as valid topic of study alongside evolution (the reality that all living species evolved from ‘lower’ forms of life, and continue to evolve over timescales almost incomprehensible). This dishonest movement, now referred to as ‘intelligent design’ or ID to get past the religion ban in classrooms, has no evidence in its favor and consists almost entirely of negative arguments (“You can’t explain that? Then God did it!”). The biology website Pharyngula, written by PZ Myers, is a good place to get the latest scoop on creationist nonsense. And these things have potentially catastrophic consequences: a Presidential candidate, for instance, is on the record as saying he doesn’t believe in evolution, and has other ideas that are far out of the mainstream of reality.

Leafing through the collected science essays of H.P. Lovecraft (hey, that’s what I do for kicks), one finds that similar problems have been around before.

Continue reading →

Posted in Lovecraft, Religion, Science news | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Horror Masters: “Themes” of horror fiction writers

Posted on October 22, 2007 by skullsinthestars

I’m planning to write little posts highlighting the works of a lot of the true masters of horror fiction, including a bit about them and what I consider to be their most enjoyable yarns. One aspect that I will address is the main ‘theme’ of the author’s work, and I wanted to say a few words about what I mean by that.

In all of creative writing, authors tend to have settings, topics, or metaphors that appeal to them and which they return to again and again. The one place I don’t usually hear this discussed is in the genre of horror fiction, perhaps because horror is generally considered to be a ‘low’ form of writing. Such ‘themes’ of a writer can be very insightful, both in understanding the author himself and the times he lived in as well as in understanding what makes certain authors’ fiction effective.

To consider a few illustrative examples, which we’ll no doubt return to in detail:

Continue reading →

Posted in Horror, Horror Masters, Lovecraft | Tagged | 1 Comment

Some of my favorite swordfights in film

Posted on October 21, 2007 by skullsinthestars

One of the things I love to do is make lists. Often I’m doing this in my mind when I’m driving around town. Today, I got thinking about the best swordfights in movies: the sort of clashes of metal that leave us exhilarated.

I’ve always been of the opinion that a good action sequence is like a little story-within-a-story, with its own plot of sorts, twists and turns, and climax. The same holds true for that special category of swordfights.

Continue reading →

Posted in Entertainment | Tagged , | 3 Comments

An interesting intersection of Lovecraft and relativity theory

Posted on October 19, 2007 by skullsinthestars

My thesis advisor has often lamented the rise of email in society, mainly because the electronic correspondence isn’t as permanent as the written letter, and lots of interesting historical anecdotes can get lost.

I delved into one of these recently while reading H.P. Lovecraft’s letters. Lovecraft was, in many ways, a ‘dream citizen’ for scientists. He had an active interest in all branches of science and attended popular lectures on many subjects. He also vigorously defended science against the encroachment of pseudoscience on one occasion (more on this in another post).

The particular letter which I want to describe is dated May 9, 1936 to James F. Morton:

Continue reading →

Posted in Lovecraft, Physics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A ride on the Shanghai maglev train

Posted on October 18, 2007 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been in a ‘magnet mood’ since I did my big post on the physics Nobel winners a week ago, and I thought it would be nice to show one of the most spectacular applications of magnetism – magnetic levitation (maglev) trains. China opened the first high-speed commercial maglev train line in the world in 2004 in Shanghai. I was there this January and my colleague set it up for us to take the train to the airport on departure.

Continue reading →

Posted in Science news, Travel | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Animal intelligence news, with videos!

Posted on October 17, 2007 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been meaning to write a post on animal intelligence for a couple of weeks, but have been sidetracked by work (and life). A few recent stories kicked off the motivation to write it, first and foremost this story on feline memories: “Feline memories found to be fleeting” (h/t babs67), which was originally linked to through Yahoo news.

It’s an interesting scientific study. The researchers wanted to know how a cat coordinates motion of front legs with back legs. The researchers first let a cat step over an obstacle with its front legs, then distracted it with food and determined how long they could distract a cat before it would forget to lift its back legs to clear the obstacle. It turns out that the magic number is somewhere around ten minutes, i.e. cats have a muscle memory of about ten minutes.  However, when they distracted the cat before it had cleared the obstacle, so that it only had its visual memory to remind it of the barrier, “The main surprise was how short lasting the visual memory on its own was—just a few seconds when animals were stopped before their forelegs stepped over the obstacle.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Animals, Science news | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Put your keyboard where your mouth is!

Posted on October 15, 2007 by skullsinthestars

No, I’m not referring to some sort of act which would get you arrested in the South. I’m referring to National Novel Writing Month, which is coming up in November. “Personal Demon” reminded me of its impending arrival.

The idea, for those not familiar, is to vow to write a 50,000 word novella within the confines of the month of November. This means you’d have to write a lot of words (2000/day) over an extended period of time, and the quality won’t be the best. But quality isn’t the point: the point is to force you to sit down and actually write a novel, and not just talk about it (hence the post title).

I’m still deciding whether to do it or not this year. I wrote a novel last March at PD’s suggestion, and managed to finish something I was quite happy with (even though I later noticed that I managed to use the word “funds” three times in the first paragraph, and used the phrase “on foot” twice in the second sentence). If I do it, I may just post the daily results on this blog, for kicks. I’ll let people know what I decide…

Posted in Fiction | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Breathing a huge, sad, sigh of relief

Posted on October 15, 2007 by skullsinthestars

One of the most useful and moving sources of information for understanding the impact of the Iraq war on the civilian population has been Baghdad Burning, a blog by an Iraqi woman and apparently former computer programmer.  The last I had read on the blog was back in April of this year, when Riverbend announced that her family was leaving the country.  I’ve been checking the blog every few weeks since then, and the silence made me fear the worst.

Fortunately, there’s a new post.  It’s dated September 6, though I’m pretty sure I’ve checked the site since then and seen nothing.  Apparently Riverbend’s family has made it to Syria.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Kitty in da water!

Posted on October 13, 2007 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been planning to do a post about animal intelligence, with videos, but that’s taking a while to put together. (Kinda like putting together my physics Nobel post.) In the meantime, I present two cute animal videos I took in 2004 and posted today on YouTube.

While I was living in Amsterdam, I lived only two block from the Artis Zoo, and I spent a lot of weekends wandering the zoo and taking pictures and videos of the animals. If you go often enough to a zoo, you inevitably run into some really cute pictures and some surprising behavior. In this case of these videos, it was a really hot day, apparently too hot for even one of the jaguars.

Continue reading →

Posted in Animals | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

And the Nobel Peace Prize goes to…

Posted on October 12, 2007 by skullsinthestars

Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The award was won for their efforts to raise awareness about global warming.

There’s a few interesting things to note about this award.  First, it was barely a day ago that a British court ruled that Gore’s film, though it contains some ‘alarmism’, is ‘substantially founded upon scientific research and fact‘.   This is a ruling in favor of Gore, as the original complaint by a part-time school official argued that the film shouldn’t be shown at all, but will instead be allowed, albeit with a disclaimer.  It’s interesting to note that the CNN headline mentions the alarmism but doesn’t mention that An Inconvenient Truth essentially won the case: our ‘liberal media’ at work again.  I do wonder how the judge reached these conclusions, since a majority of climate scientists, as I understand it, endorsed the film.

As Steve Benen notes, the Nobel win has fueled once again rampant media speculation that Gore will run for president.  There’s no evidence from Gore himself that he’s interested in the job (ironically, a true sign that he’s perfect for the job).  Personally, I think he’d be a great president, but taking on that role would distract attention from the issue of climate change.

Perhaps the best result of all this was predicted by Kevin Drum.

Posted in Politics, Science news | Tagged , | 1 Comment