Poem of the Week: Happy Mother's Day!

The Lanyard

by Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

HT: The Writer's Almanac

The Big Trip: Amazing Australia

We had a fantastic time in Australia!  On Tuesday we said farewell to Sue and her lovely family (Happy Birthday, Sue!), and set off for Canberra.
I have to say that one of the great things about staying with real people (instead of hotels) is getting to see more of normal life.  I grew up in a forested area, and I am always fascinated by the ways that forests are different  (even where I live now) from the one I grew up in.  Seeing the eucalyptus trees in Sue's forest (bush!) was amazing - it smelled so different!!  Very fun!

Canberra is a lovely "planned" city.  Washington DC was planned in a similar way, but 200 years earlier, before there were cars.   I much preferred driving in Canberra- they have better traffic circles!  Also, they designed their capitol with more of an eye towards green space, something that wasn't really an issue when they started building DC in a rugged swampy wilderness.

We weren't there long, though.  We hopped a plane and flew to the center of the continent to see Uluru (Ayer's Rock). We had tickets for the  Overnight Uluru Safari.  It was wonderful: we loved seeing  the differences in the rock at sunset and sunrise.

An unexpected bonus was that we were so far from light pollution that we really got to see the southern constellations: the Southern Cross, and the Magellanic Clouds!

I can't describe what it's like to see different stars in the sky.

We hiked around a bit there on Wednesday (although we decided not to climb on Uluru), then flew overnight to Cairns, in the far north east corner of Australia, near the Great Barrier Reef.


We spent a day, relaxing and recovering in Cairns, then took an overnight sailboat tour of the Great Barrier Reef.  This was amazing!

 We slept, rocked to sleep by the boat - just lovely. We all learned how to snorkel!  We loved seeing the fish up close.





And then it was time to move on - we could have stayed in Australia for month, rather than the week that we were there!  But we had a wonderful time, thanks so much Sue and Bill, we hope we get to come back some day!

Saturday evening we flew from Cairns to Osaka, Japan.

 Total so far: $32,606

If you've just joined us on this trip, here's what you need to know!

Poem of the Week

Spring

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Image by Mxyl

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         

   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         

   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         

   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.    

HT: Poetry Foundation

Kid's Rocket Science: First Law of Motion

 Shifting gears from Astronomy to Physics, today's class was about Newton's First Law of Motion: a body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force.

We started out defining force as a push or a pull on something (although there are forces like drag that are a little less straight forward than "push/pull").

And we defined mass again: it's how much "stuff" is in you (as opposed to volume: the amount of space you take up). So, you can see that the scale measures a force (gravity pulling down on a certain amount of mass), while the balance measures mass (this much mass over here is equal to that much mass over there).

The first half of the law is easy to demonstrate: a body at rest (a lab assistant) tends to stay at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force (alarm clock).   I also set up a model rocket and let the kids do a countdown to... nothing happening.  Without the engine to provide an outside force, it just sits there!

But there are more fun ways to show this: we gave each kid a cup, a card (to set on the cup) and a quarter (to set on the card).

When you flicked the card away, the quarter tended to stay in place until acted upon by an outside force (gravity), at which point it fell into the cup.

We also did the quarter on the elbow trick. And I used a string of rubber bands to drag a large (smooth bottomed) rock.  You can measure the force it takes to move the rock by the length of the bands.  The bands stretch a long way to get the rock moving, but then they shorten up as it continues moving.

The fancy term for the first half of Newton's First Law is inertia, while the fancy term for the second half is momentum.  Once you start looking, there are practical examples of both everywhere!

Think about how difficult starting a hula hoop versus keeping it going or balancing a still bicycle, versus a fast moving bicycle.

Let alone biking up a big hill from a standing start!

Perhaps most importantly, these laws tell you exactly why you should wear seat belts.  To demonstrate this, we played a game I'll call Train Wreck.

I had a ll the kids form a train behind me, an off we went.

After we picked up some speed, I stopped quickly.  Train wreck!

There are some other fun ways to use momentum.

 For example, eggs.  Of these 18 eggs, 6 are hard boiled.  I had the kids spin them to determine which ones were raw( how's that for bravery in the name of science?!).

If you spin a raw egg, stop it briefly (with a light touch), and let go, the liquid inside will continue to spin,and the egg will turn.

You want us to what?

A hard boiled egg will take a tiny bit more energy to stop, but it will stay stopped.

 And, of course, there's always spinning around until you get really dizzy.  That's the momentum in the fluid of your semi circular canals, incidentally.

So that's about it.  Am I missing something?

Oh, yes, the rockets!!

This week's rocket is the balloon rocket.

We ran strings between chairs for a track (2 tracks per set of chairs so they could "race.").

We clipped a section of drinking straw  and put it on the string to attach the balloons to the strings.

We blew up the balloons (without tying them off) and gave it a go!  And it totally did not work.

I had only been able to find round balloons instead of long tubulat balloons.  The round balloons can't be oriented enough along the track to make this experiment work as planned.

So they took the balloons outside and raced them in crazy patterns on the lawn, so, no harm done!

My young cousin got the brilliant idea to put a penny in the balloon.  It takes a bit of shaking, but once the penny gets going, it spins along the interior of the balloon for a long time: inertia and momentum!!

At the end, we had a bit of extra time, so we threw Oob a little early birthday party, much to everyone's satisfaction.  Balloons and cupcakes, what's not to like?

Marching Through Time

 This year we went forwards, starting with stone age Celts.  The first group to really spark the kids interest was the Romans.

Oob started off saying he was too shy to ask a question, but 30 minutes later, he was still asking the centurion about his weapons!

We spent a little time with Charlemagne's encampment, but the bulk of our time was spent with the knights.

Explaining to Klenda the field of vision

 We visited a squire from the 1300s, and a knight from the War of the Roses.

He was awesome!

He not only let us try on bits of his armor, but he was the only re-enactor who has ever been brave enough to let us try his sword!

We spent a looong time with him!

This was a BRAVE knight!

 
His gauntlets were truly works of art: not only elegant, but supremely practical - easily as comfortable and dextrous as my leather driving gloves.  He explained that the decorations were there to save his life by showing him to be a man worth ransoming.


We also spent a bit of time with his archers.

We got to try to draw their bows.  Try was the operative word!

The standard bow had an 80 pound draw.

The beginner's bow had a 60 pound draw, but they also had a bow with a stunning 120 pound draw! 

They also had a pouch of arrow heads, something I'm always interested in.  We chatted with the bowmen about their arrowheads compared to the Mongol arrow heads I collected as a girl.   But Choclo and Oob were done. For an hour and a half they had been fascinated, asking questions and trying things, and now they wanted to go home.

I do understand the "brain full, time to stop."  I tried a little "let's relax in the shade and see how we feel" (during which Klenda and Leena went off and visited the WWI Tommys), but they were really done.  So we bid the encampment a fond adieu.

And we'll be back next year! This really is my very favorite outing of the year (except maybe shark teeth hunting - I don't know, I'm glad I don't have to choose)!

There weren't many people there this year, which I think was a shame.  Because of Easter, they were moved forward a week and they then coincided with Maryland Day and a big STEM conference down on the Mall, as as well as the Boy Scout retreat (in case you were wondering where Mxyl, Zorg and the Emperor were).

Wordless Wednesday: Azaleas and Dogwoods

Kid's Astronomy: Sun Part 3

I almost forgot!



Or, if you prefer to be more precise:


Although, to be honest, since plasma is just an ionized gas (gas with the electrons stripped away), I prefer the first song. Mostly because it's catchier.

The Big Trip: G'Day Australia!

We ended up flying from Hawaii into Melbourne instead of Brisbane on Friday, and we're glad we did!  We got there in the afternoon and got settled into our hotel before evening, which meant we had time to get to Prince Phillip Island for the penguins.  Choclo and Oob were over the moon!



The next day, we rented a van and visited  the Healesville Sanctuary, a fantastic zoo for all Australian wildlife, but with a special emphasis on platypuses.  We love platypuses!  And koalas, and wombats, and lorrikeets, and all the Australian animals, really!  
 

Late in the afternoon, we started the drive to the Elvis family.  We stopped for the night in Wadonga and went to Mass there at Sacred Heart Wadonga on Sunday morning.  Then we spent most of the rest of the day traveling, getting to Sue's house in time for tea and scrumptious scones by Gemma-Rose!

We are hoping to stay and relax with them on Monday, maybe run with them and ask about all their trees.  Mostly it will be nice to sit and chat and have tea together!  Then on Tuesday, we are planning to return the van at Canberra and fly off to camp at Uluru.

We brought them each imaginary cowboy hats from America!  And some fossil shark teeth, and Old Bay.

Total so far: Plane tickets: $19,000, Other expenses $3800.

And a big thank you to Bill, who loaned us his souvenirs from his actual trip to Australia which helped immensely with the planning!

Poem of the Week

Still celebrating Easter, and now, Divine Mercy Sunday!

Suddenly

by R.S. Thomas

As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker; so, at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must quietly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only, but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea. Yet was he
no more there than before,
his area occupied
by the unhaloed presences.
You could put your hand
in him without consciousness
of his wounds. The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence.

HT: Anita Matthias and the team at Godzdogz

Still Celebrating!

Kids' Astronomy: The Sun and Other Stars, Part 2

We left off with the life cycle of our middle sized star, Sol.  But what if Sol had been a large star?

For one thing, we wouldn't be here.  If you have a really massive star, planets in the "Goldilocks zone" (where you have liquid water) tend to get tidally locked so that one side of the planet always faces the sun.

For another, massive stars (with their massive gravity), squish hydrogen much faster, so they live less long. They live brighter and hotter, but shorter lives.

Incidentally, the color of the stars is directly related to their temperature.  What do you think the

blue where it's hottest

hottest color is?  Most of the kids thought, "red hot," but if you look at a candle flame, you can see this is not so.   The outermost (coolest) edge of the flame is red, the innermost (hottest) heart of the flame is blue.

And so it is with stars: the coolest stars are red - only about 3000 degrees.  Medium hot stars (like the sun) are yellow, about 6000 degrees.  The really hot stars are blue and white, and they can be 30,000 degrees!  These are all surface temperatures, of course.  The core of the star, where the fusion takes place, is much hotter.  Our sun had a core temperature of 14 million degrees!

Back to those massive stars, after their hydrogen is helium and their helium is carbon and oxygen, they can go right on squishing!  Carbon and oxygen become neon, which gets squished into magnesium, then silicon, then iron.  Then the star can't "squish" anymore.  It explodes into a supernova!

The explosion tosses off gas and dust into an interstellar nebula... Which then begins to condense into new stars.

Meanwhile, what is left of the star becomes either a neutron star or a black hole!

I don't know if you've see the wonderful You Tube going around about gravity/ black hole models, but I really wanted one!  The best I could do on my budget was to put the stretchiest material I could find over a hula hoop.  It's gathered fairly loosely with a rubber band under the hoop.

A small mass (a marble) dented the material in the same way that a small object (like a moon or a planet) bends space around itself.  A large mass, like the rock (or star), bent the fabric enough that the smaller mass would orbit around it!

So.  We have all these stars, in all these stages of the star cycle, scattered throughout the universe and clumped into galaxies.  Most of them are millions of light years away, so how do we study them?

We study their light!  With things we want to study here on earth, we put them under a microscope to see their parts.  With light from space, we use a telescope with a spectrometer.  Believe it or not, building four working spectrometers was in the budget!

You take a paper towel roll and cut a slit near one end at a 45 degree angle.  That slit is where you will put an old CD, or part of a CD (I cut mine into fourths to make four instruments).  The CD is going to spread out your light into a spectrum.  You also need to cut a rectangular viewing hole above the CD so that you can see that spectrum.

On the other side of the roll, cover the open end with foil.  Cut a slit in the foil so that it lines up with the CD.  That slit will allow a narrow beam of light into the tube and onto the CD, the CD will spread the light by wavelength, and you will view a column of separated light through the viewing hole on the top.  More detailed instructions here (HT: Aurora Lipper)

Solar spectrum from a professional!

You point the slit at the light source you are interested in.  We looked at a number of florescent lights first, because these lights only emit certain wavelengths, so you get bright bands of widely separated colors.  We looked at warm tone, cool tone, yellow, and "black" florescents, as well as an incandescent bulb (which gives a much fuller spectrum) and then, of course the sun!

Amazingly, even our home made spectrometers, we were able to see the black lines in the sun's spectrum!   These lines are the elements in the sun itself that absorb certain wavelengths of light.  Each star has a pattern of these lines which tell us exactly what it is made of!

We finished up with a brief discussion of constellations.  I showed them some flashlight constellations (you put foil over the flashlight, prick the pattern of holes in it, then shine it on the ceiling), how to use a star chart, and lastly, the constellation illusion.

Not so lined up!

Essentially, the only place the constellations exist is on earth.  At other points in the universe, the stars just don't line up that way.  I used my lab assistants as the stars and had them line up as a straight line "constellation."  This is how the constellations look to us: as if the stars are lined up at the same distance.

Then I moved my assistants so that they were at varying distances.  From one spot, they still looked like they were all in a straight line, but from every other vantage, they were in a different pattern.