Mythical creatures venn diagram. Not entirely accurate.

Finally, a Count I’m proud to have on my bookshelf.

Circular polarization is something I’ve always wondered about but never knew was real. If electromagnetic waves have amplitude in one direction, why not two? or three? After all, there are compression waves, too.

So I would think, some nights when I couldn’t sleep: if a wave moving along the axis Z had a wavelength W along the perpendicularY axis, and a similar wavelength along the doubly perpendicular X axis, wouldn’t it propagate in a helical fashion? And if you change the phase, won’t it change the handedness of the helix? As it turns out, yes it does. I only just found out it’s an established phenomenon (as I might have guessed) while researching stereoscopic methods for a post.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be circular. The more general form is elliptical polarization, but that doesn’t look as cool.

Long exposure of a helicopter landing, from the February 1949 issue of Life Magazine. By Andreas Feininger, and archived at Google. Fantastic picture.

Woah! Dresden Codak, which I found through one of my favorite webcomics, Hark, a vagrant, has one of the coolest art styles I’ve seen in ages. Click the above to zoom in, or click here for the whole comic, which is actually both interesting and funny.

Ha! This one’s great, too. Just figured out what I’m doing all afternoon (apart from working).

Photo I took for my ramen post. I’ve never really done food photography before (plus I don’t cook) so this was a new experience.