Weird Fiction Monday: The Worm

Posted on October 29, 2012 by skullsinthestars

It’s time for Weird Fiction Monday, when I post stories that I’ve written — both new and old — for the entertainment (hopefully) of my readers!  As always, I note that I haven’t done extensive editing of the tales here, so don’t be surprised to find the writing a little rough.  

This particular story is much darker than many that I write, and is oddly personal, as I note in an afterword.  It was written almost exactly fifteen years ago, in 1997.

The Worm

The dream, again.  He was shoveling, the worm was giggling, and someone was screaming.

He awoke suddenly, staring up at the ceiling, affixed to the bed by feelings of horror.  His throat felt raw; the voice screaming he always heard was, he suspected, his own.  If his neighbors noticed, though, they never commented.

Richard Dewar had needed no alarm clock to wake him for quite some time.  The dreams chased him from sleep every morning, and kept him from true rest every night.  Would they fade in time, as the memories became distant and unfamiliar?  Would the memories ever become unfamiliar?  Richard would not even dare hope.

Images of the people, and their eyes, lifeless, remained with him as he crawled out of bed, and echoes of the worm resonated within his skull.

“Your feelings are perfectly normal,” Richard told himself, rinsing up at the sink, but the words sounded hollow.  Richard’s therapist had spoken those words, many times, but how could his therapist possibly know?  She had not sat in the darkness, with the stench, and the blood, and the worm, shoveling…

Continue reading →

Posted in Fiction | 2 Comments

Halloween treats 2012 (Updated!)

Posted on October 27, 2012 by skullsinthestars

It is time again for my yearly dose of creepy and classic horror stories for some chilling Halloween reading!  You can also read my previous editions: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011 and my 2010 post on the true story of the “Lady of the Lake“. (Hopefully the older links still work!)

Casting the Runes, M.R. James.  Perhaps the best story about a supernatural curse, written by one of the best authors of the supernatural of all time!  When the Secretary of an academic association, Mr. Dunning, rejects a paper by the notorious warlock Karswell, the latter sets in motion an unnatural revenge of a bizarre and terrifying nature.

Caterpillars, E.F. Benson.  When a man stays in the old Italian home Villa Cascana, he witnesses a shocking and inhuman haunting that has fatal consequences.

The Colour Out of Space, H.P. Lovecraft.  Lovecraft is the father of the genre of “cosmic horror,” in which humanity is insignificant in the face of utterly monstrous and indifferent forces in an cold and deadly universe.  Nowhere does Lovecraft convey a sense of utter alienness than in this story of what happens when a creature beyond human comprehension lands near a New England farm.

The Yellow Sign, Robert W. Chambers.  “Have you found the Yellow Sign?”  A painter finds his work disrupted by the persistent lurking of a puffy, pale, churchyard worker in the area around his home.  As he encounters hints and eerie premonitions of doom, the painter comes across a copy of The King in Yellow, a stage play about the doom that befalls the people of the city of Carcosa, on the shores of Lake Hali — a play that is said to be deadly to those who read it.

Carmilla, J. Sheridan LeFanu.  This is one of the original vampire horror stories, predating Dracula!  Carmilla is a vampire quite unlike any other, and the story reads as both modern and ancient at the same time.

Who Goes There?, J.W. Campbell.  Both science fiction and horror at once, this is the original story that inspired The Thing From Another World (1951) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).  The story is much more akin to the latter movie, describing an isolated group of Antarctic researchers who realize that they have been infiltrated by a perfect alien shapeshifter.  Failure to uncover the impostor will result in not only the loss of their own lives and identities, but the whole of humanity.

UPDATE: Had to add one more story that I’ve been looking for online for years, but just found today:

Waxwork, A.M. Burrage.  When a journalist spends the night in the Chamber of Horrors in Marriner’s Waxworks for an article, he gets more than he bargained for.  What better place for a killer to hide than in plain sight as his own wax figure?

(After you’ve read the story, check out this illustration of it that first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery (1962), which is nearly perfect.)

Posted in Horror | Leave a comment

Invaders from Mars! Reports from the 1938 invasion

Posted on October 24, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Note: One of a couple of Halloween-themed posts for the season!

While researching a post for my new Tumblr “Science Chamber of Horrors“*, I ended up reading the October 31st, 1938 edition of The Evening Independent newspaper of St. Petersburg, Florida.  Perusing the article that I had originally sought after, I couldn’t help notice some of the headlines of the evening edition:

THOUSANDS SCARED BY RADIO REPORTS

ONE WOMAN SAW FIRES FROM MARS

It only took a moment to figure out what the hubub was:  Radio reports?  Mars?  Halloween?  I had serendipitously stumbled across newspaper reports about the hysteria surrounding Orson Welles’ radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds!

Continue reading →

Posted in ... the Hell?, Entertainment, History of science | 3 Comments

The Giant’s Shoulders #52 — “Loads more heroes edition” — is out!

Posted on October 19, 2012 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been silent on the blog for the week because I was attending the Frontiers in Optics meeting of the Optical Society of America in Rochester, NY this week.  Hopefully I’ll have more to say about that soon, but…

In the meantime, let me give a belated announcement that 52nd edition of The Giant’s Shoulders history of science blog carnival has been posted at the Friends of Darwin blog!  It is a “heroic” edition of the carnival — once we get past the naive vision of folks like Darwin being solitary geniuses who worked alone, we find that there are a lot more “scientific heroes” who contributed to and led to great discoveries.

In this edition, you can read about:

  • How  Friedrich Miescher discovered what later became known as DNA in decomposing pus,
  • How statistics were used to improve the quality of Guinness,
  • Richard Owen, the “sea-serpent killer”,
  • and much more!

I would like to thank Richard Carter for putting together an excellent themed carnival!

The next edition will be posted on the 16th of November and will be hosted by the ever-awesome Scicurious at The Scicurious Brain.  Entries can be submitted to Thony C or myself via email (or comments), or can be submitted directly to the carnival host.

Posted in General science, Science news | 1 Comment

Introducing the “Science Chamber of Horrors”!

Posted on October 5, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Those who have been following this blog for a while know that I spent two full years posting a daily “weird science fact” on Twitter, which have all been compiled into posts here. I still carry on the weird science fact tradition on occasion, but I’ve been wondering what to do with this huge catalogue of facts that I’ve accumulated. Well, considering many of them involve really horrific animal behaviors, shocking natural phenomena or freaky scientific experiments, I thought I’d start a Tumblr about the creepiest of these: the “Science Chamber of Horrors“!

 

Roughly twice a week, I’ll try and write short posts about the nastier and creepier parts of science, scientists and nature. Let me know what you think!

Posted in General science, Horror | 2 Comments

Best Science Writing Online 2012 is out!

Posted on October 3, 2012 by skullsinthestars

I thought I’d put up a short post letting people know that the 2012 edition of the “Best Science Writing Online” has been published — and I’m in it!  You can see my name in the right-most red column on the cover.

For those who are unfamiliar, this book is a part of a series that collects the “best” science writing of the year that was published on the internet.  I always put “best” in quotes because there is so much good stuff written every year that it is impossible to speak in absolutes — I prefer to say “some of the best”!

This volume is a continuation of a series that used to be called “The Open Laboratory”, and I was fortunate enough to have one of my pieces included in last year’s volume as well.  The 2012 edition is somewhat special, in that it is published by Scientific American and can be found in brick-and-mortar bookstores, as I verified in my local Barnes & Noble:

Even though I’ve written a textbook, this marks the first time that my writing has appeared on a regular bookstore shelf, so I’m rather excited about it!  I’ve already submitted a number of posts as candidates for next year’s volume, though the competition gets tougher every year so we’ll have to see what happens.  In any case, cheers to editors Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Ouellette for putting together another great edition.

My contribution is based on my blog post on the curious Mpemba effect, officially discovered in 1969.  One of the nice side-effects of this book being published is that I’m actually sending a copy to Erasto Mpemba himself!  I’ll blog more details when I learn what he thinks of my writing…

 

 

Posted in Science news | 5 Comments

Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm

Posted on October 2, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Bram Stoker’s name is inextricably and deservedly associated with horror fiction, thanks to his famous novel Dracula.  Of course, he wrote other novels and short stories, many of which are mostly (and undeservedly) forgotten today.  With this in mind, I recently started working my way through some of these other works.  A couple of weeks ago I read and blogged about Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), a quite wonderful story about an ancient Egyptian curse and a resurrected mummy that predates modern mummy movies and the opening of King Tutankhamun’s tomb!

Emboldened, I turned next to reading what became Stoker’s last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, written in 1911.

Cover of the 1911 first edition of The Lair of the White Worm, via Wikipedia.

Well.  Um.  Hmm.  The nicest thing I can say is that The Lair of the White Worm is not quite what I expected.  What it really is, however, is a baffling, incoherent, almost impenetrable work.  Though the idea of the novel is original, it is so poorly executed that it is difficult to recommend.  However, Bram Stoker likely should be excused for this, as we will see.

Continue reading →

Posted in Horror | 6 Comments

Making magnets speak: the Barkhausen effect

Posted on October 1, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Occasionally I come across a demonstration of physics that is so simple to implement yet illustrates a phenomenon so profound that it almost takes my breath away.  I learned of one such demonstration recently, which requires only a handful of readily available pieces, shown below.

We have a helical coil of wire surrounding a steel bolt, with the wire hooked to an audio amplifier.  The final piece is a moderately strong neodymium magnet.

What can we do with this simple setup?  In fact, we can do something absolutely amazing: we can hear the sound of steel being magnetized!

The phenomenon is called the Barkhausen effect, and was first reported in 1919 by the German physicist Heinrich Barkhausen (1881-1956).  It was one of the first experimental glimpses into the microscopic processes that govern magnetization, and provided some of the earliest evidence for what is known as the domain theory of magnetization.  In this post, we’ll look at the Barkhausen effect, what it tells us about how magnets work, and describe how you can create the effect for yourself for around $40 of readily available materials!

Continue reading →

Posted in Physics | 6 Comments

Weird Fiction Monday: A Vignette

Posted on September 24, 2012 by skullsinthestars

It’s time for Weird Fiction Monday, when I post stories that I’ve written — both new and old — for the entertainment (hopefully) of my readers!  As always, I note that I haven’t done extensive editing of the tales here, so don’t be surprised to find the writing a little rough.

This is actually not a complete story, but rather a small vignette that is part of a larger story that I’m working on.  I thought it stood alone well enough to post it here.

She had the dream again that night.  It came to her distressingly often, at least twice a month, and always followed the same course.

She was in an underground chamber, in the sewers of the city.  She could tell this because the only light in the room came from a barred sewer grate through which sunlight streamed.  Regularly, she could see the shadows of carriages passing by, and she could hear the sounds of gentlemen out for a stroll with their ladies, engaging in jovial banter.  The street above her was filled with life, a stark contrast to the dark desolate room she was enclosed in.

Continue reading →

Posted in Fiction | Leave a comment

“Hairy balls” in optics?

Posted on September 23, 2012 by skullsinthestars

The title of this post certainly got your attention, didn’t it?  Don’t worry — the topic of the post is not quite as bad as it sounds!  The “hairy ball” theorem is in fact a mathematical theorem that states, in simple terms, that “you can’t comb a hairy ball flat without creating a cowlick,” a cowlick being an area of one’s hair where the directions “clash”, typically in a swirling pattern.

The back of my head, with a swirling cowlick visible. I should note that it is quite tricky to photograph the back of one’s own head.

I was reminded of the hairy ball theorem by a recent intriguing post by Steven Strogatz. The theorem applies to balls which are completely covered with hair, like a coconut — it is of course possible to comb human hair without a swirl, simply by making it a gigantic comb-over!  For a fully hairy ball, however, there must be at least one cowlick, and most likely two.  For instance, suppose we try to comb a ball, starting at the top, away from a central point.  At the bottom of the ball, we will end up with an “inward cowlick”, where all the hairs converge (arrows indicate the direction the hairs point).

We might instead try and comb the hair in a swirling pattern, which creates a cowlick at its origin at the top of the sphere and creates another at the bottom.

The hairy ball theorem is a fascinating aspect of the subject of mathematics known as topology, which loosely speaking is concerned with the mathematical characterization of shapes.  But hairy balls are of significance in other fields, as well: in fact, many optical scientists are  unaware that a hairy ball is, in essence, right in their face every time they do experiments!  It is hidden in the polarization of light, i.e. in light’s inherent transverse wave properties.  In this post we will uncover this mysterious hairy ball of light.

Continue reading →

Posted in Optics | 3 Comments