Skydives at CarolinaFest 2012!

Posted on June 10, 2012 by skullsinthestars

I’ve been quite busy and having a hard time putting together some science posts.  In the meantime, I thought I’d share a video of a couple of skydives I did a bit over a week ago at CarolinaFest 2012 at Skydive Carolina, my regular dropzone!

CarolinaFest is an event known in skydiving parlance as a “boogie”, which is pretty much a skydiving convention: people come from all over to participate in special activities and to jump out of fun and unusual planes that have been rented for the event.  One of the perks of a boogie is load organizing: expert skydivers are brought in to plan and implement formation skydiving for the attendees.

My friends and I joined up with Regan Tetlow, who works at Skydive Empuribrava in Spain.  I did three jumps with him, though we didn’t have video on the first jump so only the first two jumps on the video have me in them!  I’m the one in the green and black jumpsuit and wearing the leather “frap hat”.

The two I’m in are an “8-way” formation jump and a “6-way” formation jump, both of which went pretty well.  I’ve managed to pick up an annoying habit of pulling my legs in and sinking out on the formation (going lower than I want to), so Regan ended up keeping me pretty close to him for the jumps.  (And I felt a little like an idiot by the end of the day!)

The boogie seemed really crowded this year, and in fact they had four airplanes running constantly on the day I was there!  The first jump was out of a twin otter, and the second was out of my favorite plane, the CASA.  The CASA is especially fun because it has a tail door, which allows for very easy and fun exits with a lot of people linked together.  On the second jump of the video, we actually launched six people together off the plane, though one fellow lost his grip and had to come back to the formation.

Overall, it was a really fun time!  Though my flying wasn’t at its best, I felt like I learned a few things to help improve in the future.  Special thanks to Larry and Kathy Stringer, my friends who recorded and edited these videos, respectively!

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Laird Barron’s The Croning

Posted on June 3, 2012 by skullsinthestars

I love Laird Barron’s writing!  I first came across his work in the horror collection Haunted Legends; Barron’s story, “The Redfield Girls”, really stood out to me above all the others in terms of its eloquence and eeriness. Since then, I’ve read both of Barron’s short story collections, The Imago Sequence (2007) and Occultation (2010), and been mightily impressed with both.

This year, Barron’s first novel was published by Nightshade Books, The Croning (2012):

The Croning is a very dark and modern interpretation of a classic fairy tale (which was already rather dark to begin with).  I found the novel to be a little challenging, for reasons that I will mention below, but it is also an undeniably creepy and potent story and an excellent first novel for Barron.

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Weird science facts: April — May 2012

Posted on May 31, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Though I stopped doing a Twitter weird science fact (#weirdscifacts) a day several months ago, I’m still occasionally posting facts as I come across them.  Here’s a collection of a few tidbits I came across over the past couple of months.

746. Apr 06: Pieter Zeeman was fired for doing the work that he eventually won the Nobel Prize for!  There are plenty of stories of Nobel prize research being unappreciated when first published, but it is rare to see someone get fired for doing it.

747. Apr 07: The mystery of the glow-in-the-dark Civil War soldiers.  The story of the miraculously-healing glowing wounds sounds like a supernatural story, but in fact has a scientific basis.

748. Apr 08: Versailles fountains could not be pumped all at once; gardeners watched Louis XIV and ran the ones near him as he strolled.  Interestingly, this week on Jeopardy! a contestant told a modern version of this story.  The contestant and his friend managed to hide in the Versailles gardens and sleep there overnight; they were awakened in the morning to the spray of the sprinkler system, and the sprinklers mysteriously seemed to turn on wherever they ran!  Turns out the gardeners were having a little fun with the trespassers.

748a.  Ever wanted to know how many WIMPS hit you per year?  (h/t @allinthegutter)

749. Apr 11: Dog eats scientist’s labwork. Paper ensues. (h/t @_ColinS_ and @SciencePunk)

750. May 17: Meet the sarcastic fringehead, a fish that looks like the predator!  (h/t @mcmuffinofdoom)

751. May 30: Airboats? The first one was built by a team in 1905 including Alexander Graham Bell.

752. May 31: The curious case of astrophysicist Rodney Marks, who may or may not have been murdered at south pole. 

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Physics demonstrations: rolling uphill

Posted on May 25, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Some of the best and most enjoyable demonstrations of physics principles can be put together quite readily with very cheap materials.  A good example of this was the simple version of the Magdeburg hemisphere demo I discussed previously; another example is the approximately $20 device shown below.

A pair of rails spread apart as they increase in altitude: they are 3” high on the right side, and 4” high on the left.  This is easier to see from a side view.

A pair of plastic funnels have been glued together at their wide ends; when the joined cones are placed on the right, lower, side of the device, they immediately roll to the left, stopping only when they hit the uprights on the far left side.  The joined cones have rolled uphill, in seeming defiance of gravity!

Of course, this simple device can be readily explained by physics, and its unusual operation can be used to highlight an important principle in the physics of forces and motion.

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Posted in Physics demos | 2 Comments

Philip Wylie’s Gladiator (1930)

Posted on May 24, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Stories of superheroes have evolved dramatically since the appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1 in 1938.  Where many of the first, like Superman, were moral, upstanding individuals striving to do good in the world, many modern heroes are flawed, struggling with a sense of purpose and with their own sense of right and wrong.  The supreme example of this modern style are the characters in Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen (1986-1987), who are faced with a world with problems much greater than they can solve.

Before even Superman, however, there was a super-powered protagonist that struggled to find his place in the world: the character of Hugo Danner in Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator.

In fact, Wylie’s Danner was likely a major inspiration for Superman!  Though Shuster and Siegel never admitted as much, the similarities are striking, and it is hard to imagine that the two Superman creators were unaware of the popular novel.

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Posted in Weird fiction | 1 Comment

The Giant’s Shoulders #47 is up at The Medical Heritage Library!

Posted on May 23, 2012 by skullsinthestars

A week delayed, but worth the wait:  the 47th edition of The Giant’s Shoulders history of science blog carnival is up at The Medical Heritage Library!  In this edition, you can read about:

  • the politics of Isaac Newton’s knighthood,
  • the gruesome history of eating corpses as medicine,
  • the story of  Lady Mary Montagu, who introduced smallpox innoculation to London,
  • the Great New York Starvation Challenge of 1881,
  • and much more!

A very hearty thanks to Hannah for assembling such a nice carnival!

Once again, we have run out of hosts for future editions of the carnival!  If you are willing to host a future edition (including and especially June), please let myself or ThonyC, the carnival organizers, know!  You can either send an email or leave a comment on this post.

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Personal book page for “Mathematical Methods”

Posted on May 20, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Now that the semester is over and I have some time, I finally got around to writing a short book page for my Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering textbook!

This page will serve as a place to post any new information about the book, as well as the errata and supplemental problems (as soon as I get around to writing them).

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An American in Spain, part 7: the Plaza de España, Seville

Posted on May 17, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Part 7 of a photo travelogue of my (not quite so) recent trip to Spain with my wife and her family! (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

Our first full day in Seville was quite a busy one!  In the morning, we visited the Seville Cathedral (part 5), and around lunchtime we visited the Real Alcázar (part 6).  After that visit, we were quite exhausted, but there was at least one more “must see” location in Seville: the Plaza de España!  Madrid also has a Plaza de España*, but Seville’s is in a completely different league, as we will see.

The Plaza was a bit of a walk from the Cathedral and the Alcázar, and we were pretty exhausted, so we stopped along the way first to grab some lunch.  I didn’t get a photo of that day’s meal, but this is nevertheless a good place to share a photo of the previous evening’s dinner.

A tapas dinner in Seville.

The upper left corner is a plate of prawns (niece-in-law #2 was appalled by the huge eyes on them), and the other two plates are traditional Spanish tapas: croquetas on the top and a Spanish tortilla on the bottom.  I loved both of these plates and ate them almost every day, eventually burning out on them by the end of the trip!

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The secret molecular life of soap bubbles (1913)

Posted on May 16, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Nature can be extremely devious in the way it hides its secrets.  Sometimes the most remarkable and profound insights are staring us right in the face every day in the most mundane phenomena.

For instance, we have all seen the spectacular colors that can appear in soap bubbles:

Image from Microscopy-uk.org.uk, by Michael Reese Much. Borrowing his lovely images until I can produce my own!

These colors are produced by optical interference, as we will discuss below; the “thin film optics” that creates bright colors in soap films also results in the bright colors of oil slicks.

A rainbow of color produced by white light reflecting off of a thin layer of diesel fuel on water, via Wikipedia.

Most of us would look at a soap film image and marvel at the beautiful rainbow colors; others would investigate the optics underlying them.  But it took an exceptional physicist, Jean Baptiste Perrin (1870-1942), to realize that these colors concealed something more: direct evidence that matter consists of discrete atoms and molecules!

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Posted in History of science, Optics | 11 Comments

Physics demonstrations: Magdeburg hemispheres

Posted on May 8, 2012 by skullsinthestars

Sometimes one can demonstrate very profound and remarkable physics with very simple, even mundane, tools.  Last week I received the tools to perform one such demonstration by mail:

This pair of iron hemispheres, with handles attached and a valve on one side, are a small scale model of one of the earliest and most dramatic displays of the power of atmospheric pressure.  They are now known as the Magdeburg hemispheres, and they still work as a great demo to this day.

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Posted in Physics demos | 22 Comments