I just wanted to share a quick note that I just received the Italian edition of Invisibility, and it looks fantastic! I am also happy to report that since the word “invisibility” is quite similar in Italian, they were able to keep my pun in my “Invisibibliography,” which is “Invisibibliographia.” It’s been almost a year since Invisibility came out, so I’m taking the pinned post about it off my blog, though I will still discuss invisibility and the book whenever I have a good reason to. But otherwise on to new things ..read more

Been rather busy lately, but wanted to drop a short note to let folks know that my friend Darlene has finally released a printed volume of The Story of Jasmine, her fantasy graphic novel (“comic” seems to reductive) that first appeared in Dragon Magazine for a short run in 1980 and she has been continuing in recent years! I met Darlene for the first time back in 2019, when I ordered a copy of her very impressive, ahead-of-its-time card game Jasmine: The Battle for the Mid-Realm Collector Card Game. By a happy coincidence, Darlene lives relatively close to me, so we met up so that she could te ..read more

Back in January of this year, I gave a talk about Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and it was one of my favorite presentations on the subject, not to mention my most up-to-date! The folks at APL record their talks, and approved mine for public release, so I thought I would share it here. If you haven’t seen me talk about the history of falling cats, based on my book, this is the best presentation I’ve done of it to date ..read more

Book 4 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! I’m a little behind, but in fairness, February is a short month. Why 26 books? I normally can read much, much faster than that pace, but the way life and work has been, I haven’t had as much time or energy to read as I would like. One book every two weeks seemed like a reasonable bare minimum goal. This next book is one I’ve been interested in reading for a while! The Space Vampires, by Colin Wilson (1976). The reason I’ve been interested in reading it is that it was the inspiration for the cult classic Tobe Hooper directed movie Lifeforce, that appeared i ..read more

The best demonstrations of physics are those that show you something completely unexpected and counter to the way that physics is supposed to work. One of my favorites is this curious contraption, which I got through a Kickstarter a few years ago: This is what is known as a tensegrity table, which demonstrates the phenomenon of tensegrity. What is “tensegrity?” We’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s just marvel at how this structure stands upright, supported only by wires, with the added twist of the wire in the middle of the structure being held together by magnetic force, leaving a gap in ..read more

Book 3 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! Some books look so appealing that I grab them off the shelf at the bookstore without hesitation, but somehow take forever to get around to reading. That is the case with Black Mad Wheel (2017), by Josh Malerman, which has been on my home shelf for probably at least two years and which I finally finished reading this past week. Malerman has been a very successful horror author in recent years, as evidenced by the sub-caption on the title, “Author of Bird Box,” referring to his 2014 novel that became a movie in 2018 and resulted in a gif that produced a thou ..read more

I’ve been neglecting my TikTok page as much as my blog, so here’s a video that makes up for both! I talk about the really cool Barkhausen effect, which allows you to actually hear metal being magnetized. I wrote about this effect and did a YouTube video a decade ago, so I felt like it was time to bring it back out. You can read the original post, with more details, at this link. @drskyskull Making magnets speak! The Barkhausen effect, in which you can hear quantum physics in action. #science #physics #fyp #foryoupage ♬ original sound – Drskyskull ..read more

Book 2 of my 26 books for 2024 goal! Still roughly on track, though I want to pick up the pace. One reason I like book blogging is that I pay more attention to things like book introductions and that often leads me to more interesting reads! Last year, when I read Orrin Grey’s excellent collection How to See Ghosts and Other Figments, I noted the lovely introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Mexico-born Canadian novelist. I am always looking for new and interesting authors to read, and so I picked up her 2019 novel Gods of Jade and Shadow, whose premise immediately intrigued me. This novel i ..read more

I have made another history of science video for TikTok, this time focusing on the curious story of how electromagnetism was discovered in 1820 in an experiment that is utterly unique for one really big reason: @drskyskull Some more unusual #history of #science for folks, this time about the unique circumstances in which electromagnetism was discovered. I also talk about one corpse and one guy who kinda looks like a corpse. ♬ original sound – Drskyskull Like a lot of my TikTok videos, this represents a condensed version of a blog post I did a few years ago; if you want more detail and/or a t ..read more

Book 1 of my new modest goal of reading and blogging about 26 books this year! This one is a little bit of a cheat, as I read much of it near the end of last year, but I finished reading it for my book club this year, so I’m counting it! A few months ago, I finally completed my long-delayed series of posts explaining quantum entanglement, and Part 7 was all about the question, “What does it all mean?” For the purpose of interpreting and predicting experimental results, quantum physics as it is currently interpreted (in what is known as the Copenhagen interpretation) works really, really well ..read more