Space is Awesome

You may or may not be aware that space is awesome.  Moons, planets, stars,  magnetars, black holes, planetary nebulae, supernovae, galaxies, clusters, superclusters.  Well maybe not so much the "space" itself but the things that are found outside of the Earth in what we refer to as space.  The massive magnetic fields, the crushing gravity and ridiculous amount of energy and distances are nothing like we experience in everyday life.  It's so far removed that we don't even think about it, maybe only briefly when there is the occasional mention in the news.

One thing that is difficult to convey is the scale of space.  "Space... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is...".  I think this website does a good job at getting a sense of the size of our solar system and how small we actually are.  After looking at that you can watch this and realize just how small the Sun is compared to other stars.  Then remember there are around 300 billion stars in the Milky Way and there are over 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe...

What's cool though is that we can and have sent spacecraft to check out nearby planets, moons and other interesting objects.  Right at this moment there is one orbiting Mercury, a few orbiting the Moon, one roving around Mars, a couple orbiting it and one that's going to land in August, one that's in the asteroid belt, one on it's way to Jupiter, one flying around Saturn and one closing in on Pluto.  We have landed things on the Moon, Venus, Mars and Titan.

For better or for worse (I think for better) the space shuttle program was shut down and people seem to think that NASA must not be doing anything then!  Although it's true that the overall human spaceflight capability is quite crippled right now it's encouraging to see the commercial space industry up and coming with companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.  In fact SpaceX is testing it's space capsule (unmanned for this test) and attempting to dock at the International Space Station within the next week or two.

Although human spaceflight is much more difficult then sending robotic probes I think it is also much more inspiring.  Landing a person on an asteroid or Mars is such a massive undertaking that it would likely require international cooperation and is something that I think the planet as a whole can rally around.  Yes there are problems on Earth and there always will be, but I think humanity is capable of multitasking.

Duotangs

Brightly coloured with those metal fastener things.  I have fond memories of colourful title pages and forcing holes into unpunched pieces of paper.  I was wondering recently, do kids still use duotangs?  I remember using them in elementary school, and I think around high school I switched over to binders so it might just be an elementary school thing where they're alive and well?


After having switched to binders I wonder why anyone would actually want to use duotangs over them!  I'm having trouble remembering exactly, but were you even able to put a new piece of paper anywhere in the middle?  It was also annoying having to open and close all the fasteners every time.  Blegh.  I suppose they're better for compactness.  And they were often quite colourful which could be considered a plus.

One thing I do remember is that each fastener had two separate metal things to fold over to keep the pages in place.  What I noticed was that there was a distinct divide between kids who would fold both of them to the same side and those that folded them in opposite directions.  I tended to do the latter and it always felt wrong to me that there were people out there that would fold them in the same direction!  There are two of them!  Why are you folding them the same way!?!

My new favourite animal

When I was younger people would sometimes ask what my favourite colour was, or what my favourite animal was. I don't know I guess that's just what you ask kids or what kids talk about at school. Anyhow I decided that my favourite colour was green in case anyone ever asked and that my favourite animal was the king cobra. I guess I thought snakes were pretty cool and that they looked awesome when they expanded their hood (or maybe I watched too much rikki-tikki-tavi).

Regardless, I had never spent any time reflecting on this choice and possibly dethroning (har har) the king cobra. Recently though, in one of my classes, the prof showed a short video of a cuttlefish blending into their surroundings. This piqued my interest because I had always liked chameleons and I actually knew very little about cuttlefish aside from this.

I have since learned that besides being able to change colours very quickly to match their environment, cuttlefish:

• have a cuttlebone which allows them to adjust their depth
• can see the polarization of light and can adjust the polarization of light that reflects off of them to communicate with other animals
• have w-shaped eyes
• have three hearts
• have fully developed eyes before they're born and can look around while they're still in the egg
• are the original creators of sepia
  
• have a large brain to body ratio
• have green-blue coloured blood

So after all of this I have decided that cuttlefish are my new favourite animals. It also might be time to reevaluate some of your "favourite" things and see if they've changed since you last made up your mind.

Gray vs Grey

To be quite honest I was having trouble thinking of things to write about and this just kind of popped into my head. TLDR; grAy = America, grEy = England or gray is a color and grey is a colour

Apparently they both have origins in the Old English grǽg but gray started to become the preferred spelling in American English around the 1820s. Somewhat interestingly the word greyhound is always spelled with the letter e and the unit of absorbed radiation dose of ionizing radiation is spelled with an a.

Also apparently the spelling gray was promoted by English lexicographers but grey became commonly accepted anyway. At around the same time in the US the 1867 and 1897 Webster's dictionaries include grey but have it refer to gray. What can we conclude from this? I have no idea. However the Google Ngram Viewer is kind of cool.