Here I dig up yet another letter from HPL, to E. Hoffmann Price, from 1936:
Glad you found the Mts. of Madness readable. That was my attempt to pin down the vague feelings regarding the lethal, desolate white south which have haunted me ever since I was ten years old. It was written in 1931 — and its hostile reception by Wright and others to whom it was shown probably did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career.
The blogosphere is abuzz with Michael Medved’s op-ed at Townhall arguing how slavery in the U.S. wasn’t such a big deal and people shouldn’t make it out as such. Clearly he’s trying to win an award as the most idiotic pundit in print (though he still has a way to go to beat John Stossel), and numerous people have already commented, and torn to shreds, his six bullet point arguments:
This is a little belated, but I was a little troubled by a post on Kevin Drum’s blog at the Washington Monthly. The substance of the post is about interpretations of certain poll results:
A recent New York Times poll showed that 65% of respondents want to withdraw either some or all of our troops from Iraq. Hooray! The country is with us! But then the Times asked a followup question: “What if removing troops meant Iraq would become more of a base of operations for terrorists, then would you still favor removing U.S. troops from Iraq, or not?” Guess what? Of that 65%, only 30% still favored removal… The odds are that in real life — i.e., during a campaign in which voters were responding to actual arguments instead of casually answering poll questions over a telephone — there’s something like 30% who want to stay in Iraq, 30% who want to get out, and 40% somewhere in the middle who aren’t really sure what to do.
I’m going to wrap up my discussion of the Ukraine with a collection of pictures, some panoramas, from its capital and largest city, Kiev. Lots of big pictures below the fold… (Note: some of the pics have been ‘squashed’ to fit the frame. You can right-click on the pic to view it in its original form!)
Researchers at Yale have apparently managed to take an important step forward in the development of quantum computers: they’ve gotten atoms to talk to each other coherently over a long distance.
What is ‘quantum computing’? To understand this, we begin by mentioning a classic problem in mathematics: the traveling salesman problem. Suppose a salesman needs to visit N cities during a round-trip sales route. Assuming the costs of travel between all pairs of cities are known, what is the cheapest route possible which visits each city only once?
While in Amsterdam, my girlfriend and I got into a political discussion with my post-doc advisor about the founding fathers of the United States. Basically, my advisor argued that the founding fathers (FFs) are treated essentially as religious figures, and given an unreasonable amount of deference in the U.S. political world.
The discussion started over the “Scooter” Libby pardon, and the question of why the President has the unconditional ability to pardon anyone he sees fit. My advisor argued that this power is simply a holdover from monarchical rule, while I suggested that the FFs intended this to be another ‘check’ in the system of checks and balances that makes the government run (of course, I also pointed out that it isn’t working quite as intended). This led right into the question of why we care so much what the FFs think in the U.S.: evidently there’s no other country in the world where a political figure’s thoughts are treated as ‘the ultimate truth’.
I’m terribly disappointed. Last week, a story out of Peru had all the hallmarks of a good alien invasion story — a mysterious meteorite crashes near a small town in Peru, and local residents start to fall ill. (‘Personal Demon’ tipped me to the story a few days back.)
Speculation ran rampant, but much of it went against the locals story – some arguments suggested that it was an underground gas explosion that caused the crater.
Well, the verdict is in: it was a meteorite, and its crash to Earth did result in people falling ill – though they fell ill not due to some space-borne illness, but due to arsenic deposits in the groundwater being released into the air.
Alas, I was hoping for some sort of ray-gun toting aliens to leap from the crater. Scientists like me always get to be the heroes in stories like that…
One thing that strikes you about traveling in Eastern Europe is that everything seems BIG. Buildings, monuments, and other things are not only built large, but somehow conspicuously large. For instance, here’s a photograph of one of the government buildings in Kiev:
Rejoice, one and all, for Heroes returns on Monday with its season premiere.
Truth be told, I’m only in the process now, on my trip to San Jose, of watching the DVDs of season one. Although many, many people whose opinions I respect told me it was a good show, I’ve assiduously avoided watching it until now (I caught an episode on the BBC while in Amsterdam, and got hooked). After I thought about it a bit, I realized that I’m afraid of getting hooked on yet another television show which promises intricately crafted plots, complex characters and real development of the story line, but fails to deliver after I’ve invested lots of emotion into it.
So I was sitting in my Kiev hotel, watching local television, and I came across the following television show:
This is undoubtedly a Ukrainian/Russian television show. Does it look familiar at all?
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 