Happy 09/09/09!

It's not quite as cool as Pi Day or Mole Day, but today's still pretty nifty!

It's also nifty because of this. Picture number three in particular is neat. The Globular Star Cluster Omega Centauri may not have the most poetic name, but - well, it gives me the excuse to say with complete honesty, "My god, it's full of stars!" which is worth a lot.

Man on the moon

Forty years and a few hours ago, two human beings landed in a strange looking vessel on the moon.

A few hours after that they crawled out the door of that vessel, down a ladder, and dropped a few feet to the surface of the moon. They looked up, and they saw a dark sky marred only by the glow of the Earth looming above them.



You can't put a price on awesome like that. That's human exploration in it's purest form. We went because, as President Kennedy said, it wasn't easy. It was hard. Things went wrong. Lots of things went wrong, from Liberty Bell 7's hatch blowing out and sinking, to the hatch not opening on Apollo 1. Some very talented, smart, and dedicated men lost their lives for it. But ultimately, we succeeded - not because America was a superpower, but because when brilliant, scientific minds get going on something they're not going to stop until they figure it out - and there we were. Two men on the moon...

...and one circling above.



And that, my friends, is why we've kept going, and why we need to keep going. It's awesome. Literally awesome; it inspires awe. We said to hell with gravity, extreme temperatures, and absolute vacuum. We saw something we wanted and we went for it, and we kept going until we got there, and is the response to victory to simply stop?



No. We keep exploring. We set our sights on Mars, on the next solar system over, on things constantly bigger and better.

Because it's awesome.

Tornados suck

For reference, here's what a train can do to a typical, modern automobile:

The moral: don't screw around with trains, because trains are big and heavy and if you get in your way they will stomp the life out of you, continue on over your corpse, and not really even notice that they've done so, because they can move quite quickly and even when they're not, they're still really quite large.

Now here's what a tornado can do to a freight train:

The moral: sometimes nature just says 'screw you' to human progress and ingenuity, grabs a freight off the tracks and throws it, just like an elementary school bully knocking a couple first-graders out of the lunch line.

Some good news items

Apparently, someone with lots of money is going around giving huge anonymous donations to universities run by women. Not even the financial people at the chosen schools know who it is, so there's really no reason to doubt that the donor's stated motive of making a difference to the students is phony.

The Phillies have had a not-awful season thus far, and are currently wrapping up a three game series against the Marlins in which they engaged in a bit of a 9th-inning slugfest, in game one turning being down 3-0 into a 7-3 win. As I type this they are finishing up the third game and have decided to stop screwing around with coming from behind, and are up 8-1 in the top of the 8th. I like it when the Phillies get a lead early on and hold onto it.

London!

Google Streetview has expanded to a number of UK cities, including London.

*sigh*

This makes me literally feel an ache to be in London again.

I think that, like many things, you Get It, or you don't. Either you see pictures like that and just yearn to be there in them, or it's, "Eh, pretty nice photos."

I love living in the mountains, and despite not wanting to live there Philly will always hold a spot in my heart...but there's no place in the world that can compete with London. I can't even describe why, and I think that's fairly common. I believe Peter Ackroyd tried in this book, and it took him some 800 pages (a fantastic book, by the way - I hugely recommend it). No matter how many times people try, no matter how many words are spoken or pages written, London will just remain something too big, too vibrant, and too alive to truly describe.

Godspeed, Endeavour

From CNN:

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) -- Riding a brilliant tower of flame into the night sky, the space shuttle Endeavour left Earth on Friday, carrying seven astronauts on a 15-day mission to the international space station.
...
The shuttle is also bringing Thanksgiving dinner, with irradiated turkey, candied yams, stuffing and dessert, because it won't be returning to Earth until November 29.

The food might not be just like Mom cooks it (mmm, radiation), but those guys are going to have the best view that anyone has ever had from their Thanksgiving day table.

Hooray Science!

Hey, we've got some new planets!

And a shuttle launch tonight!

Good week for non-terrestrial stuff.

Darth Vader will teach you the Pythagorean theorem

I have no idea what possible reason or context there is for this, but it doesn't matter, because it's Darth Vader teaching you geometry, and therefore it's one of the most awesome things ever.

Click click click

I love science so much sometimes.

Teaching not to the test

A teacher in Seattle refused to give a state-mandated standardized test, and was suspended without pay for doing so.

Still, Chew said his moral and ethical objections to the Washington Assessment of Student Learning have grown in recent years, and he decided that he finally had to take a stand.

Obviously I'm just speculating blindly, but I'm willing to be that Mr. Chew will be one of those teachers his students remember for a long time afterwards. A teacher who teaches and teaches will is one thing, and certainly admirable. But a teacher who demonstrates that they're not just a real person, but a real person with real morals, and willing to stand up for them? A teacher who sees a problem, and even if it's not to their immediate benefit, does everything they can to try to correct it? That's admirable, and that's a teacher that remains in students' memories.

In Seattle, Eckstein parents said they learned of Chew's actions Monday. Barbara Albertson, whose daughter is a sixth-grader at the school and one of Chew's students, said she admires Chew's courage.

"It's a wonderful example for the kids, whether they believe in it or not, to see a teacher they respect stand up and do this," she said. "This is an age group where they need to see role models like this, people who aren't afraid."

Damn straight. I'm sure that there will be some parents moaning about it, but I think that embracing it, even if it's just on principle, is the right attitude.

Also..."Washington Assessment of Student Learning"? For some reason that seems like it should be grammatically incorrect.

Godspeed, Endeavour

Say what you will about the cost, about the risk, about any of that.  Space flight is still truly, literally, awesome, and makes me kind of squishy inside.  

A shocking experience!

In lab class today, we got to play with electricity and magnets!

One of the toys we played with was a thing that I'm sure has a name, used to charge up Leyden jars (which are a whole new type of awesome).  It was a contraption with two adjacent, parallel wheels mounted vertically, each embedded with magnets of opposite polarity.  You turn a crank, the magnets do their thing, a little brush collects the charge and funnels it into a Leyden jar.  Already neat (seriously, Leyden jars are mind-boggling.  You can store electricity in a piece of plastic.  Take it apart and it's fine.  Reassemble it, touch both metal parts at once, and shock!  It's like reassemble-able electricity.)

So, what we did, in the name of science and class unity, was get one of the jars really charged up.  Then we all - all twelve or so of us - held hands, other than the two people who held the jar.  The instant that the second hand touched the second part of the jar, we all collectively flinched or cried out, because you could feel a spasm of electricity going through your wrists/hands.  It was really ridiculously cool.  

New toy!

Oh my goodness, I can type in Blogger, at whatever speed I want, and not have my computer freeze up on me!  It's glorious, and powered by a new MacBook.  

It's going to take some getting used to, but I'm happy with the choice.  I absolutely adore Leopard so far.  I think one of the fundamental differences between Windows and OS X is the interconnectivity.  Windows seems like more of simply a tool to launch other programs which exist and run very separately from each other.  OS X, on the other hand, seems to act like more of a uniter.  You can keep things running-ish in the background.  As someone who is generally listening to music whenever I'm at my computer, I really like the way iTunes is so integrated.  I also am enjoying not having a whole slew of crap on the desktop.  Of course, the no-right-click thing with the touchpad is going to take some getting used to,  as is the different keyboard functions and whatnot.  

Overall, though, it's fantastic.  Still to do: see if I can create a partition on my external HD without it deleting everything, so I can use Time Machine to automatically backup onto that; figure out how to do the whole Boot Camp thing so I can can revisit Windows if needed.

Ooooh.

Normally, I don't really like big lawsuits, especially not ones that involve emotional distress and freedom of speech issues. In fact, with most freedom of speech issues, I'm pretty likely to come down on the side of the accused.

But man, Westboro Baptist losing a nearly 11-million dollar lawsuit? I'm having a really hard time mustering any outrage whatsoever about that.

Mach Day

60 years ago today, a guy in a plane over a big empty desert went faster than anyone else ever had. Faster than they thought was possible. That's a hell of a thing to have on your resume.

And yet I still can't get from Albuquerque to Philly in fewer than six hours.

Awesomeness abounds

From a math handout:

What happens if we put a fractional exponent into the formula for the binomial expansion? Or a negative exponent? Needless to say, there is no justification for doing this. It would be like trying to run your automobile on guacamole, or worse, drinking gasoline in the hopes it will make you run faster. The machines were designed for certain fuels and not others. The other formula for binomial expansion was designed and built by a means of successive multiplication by (a + b), a process that yields only whole number exponents.

The peculiar thing about putting fraction (and even negative) exponents into the binomial expansion formula, however, is that it seems to work.

I swear math was not in any way interesting or cool back in high school.

Not all teenagers suck

New kid at a high school gets harassed by a couple older students for wearing a pink shirt ("huh huh fag," I'm sure).

So when another student heard about it, he and a buddy went out, bought dozens of pink shirts, and distributed them to students before school. "Our intention was to stand up for this kid so he doesn’t get picked on."

That's just nice; the world could use a few more people like these guys.

This post contains everything that is good in the world.

Neil Gaiman and pandas. *swoon*

Wheee!

Endeavour is back on the ground, safe and sound in Florida. My inner space geek* is deeply pleased with remembering it was today and being able to watch it online.

*Which is rather over-developed for a liberal-arts type such as myself. But considering that one of my parents used to build satellites and stuff and my sister now does build rockets and stuff, and knew she wanted to do so since she was born, it's kind of inevitable that I feel a certain amount of glee at space-program stuff.