31 Days of Planets: Ceres

Day 29

I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL 2015!!! That's the year the Dawn probe reaches Ceres! Can you imagine the math it must take to calculate a path to get to a planet? Incredible. It's like aiming for a moving target and taking it fifty years to get there. Actually, NASA launched Dawn in 2007, so that's only eight years, but still! Magnificent. And it stopped at Vespa on the way - a bit of a detour. But still! Magnificent. I'd both love and hate to see the equation.

Now Ceres is a dwarf planet - the only one inside the inner solar system, in fact. It is also the largest asteroid. It was named after the goddess of growing plants, the harvest, and motherly love.

I know the picture is blurry, but just imagine. In two years, we'll have magnificent pictures of this beautiful dwarf planet - close up!

In conclusion, "let's go see the asteroids, let's go see the star-ar-ars! Cowboys, heroes, cops and robbers! Glamour and strife! Bigger than life!"

Pictures from Wikipedia.

Hello From the Hurricane!

First Date Small Talk

I am not a fan of small talk. It is awkward and extremely boring. So, I have compiled a list of conversation starters for next time I go on a first date or for an awkward company car drive, or to use as vacation time killers or for random people on the street to start random-people-on-the-street conversations. These are questions you can ask me to peak my interest. These are not applicable to everyone. Make sure you actually can discuss the topic, however; otherwise, you will lose the game. Which I just lost. Also, most of these questions can be followed by the question "why?".

1. Who is your favourite Doctor Who character?

2. What is your favourite type of precipitation?

3. If you could go to any fictional planet, which one would you visit?

4. What do you think of outer space?

5. What do you think of the recent political changes affecting NASA?

6. What is your least favourite type of small talk?

7. What is your favourite word?

8. What word do you think best describes tornadoes? Spring? Space? Battlestar Galactica? Etc.?

9. Where is Carmen Sandiego?

10. Tell me about your family.

11. What do you think of rock walls?

12. Who is Rutherford the Unicorn-Sheep?

13. What methods do you think we as a society should enact to get to space?

14. Let's discuss asteriods.

15. Which is your favourite real planet?

16. What is your favourite non-profit organization? Why?

17. If you could pick three mythical creatures to be your roommates, which ones would you pick?

18. What is your favourite piece of theatrical lighting equipment?

19. Which do you like better: a Source4 Parcan or a PAR 64?

20. What was your favourite class in college?

21. Which King Arthur was your favourite: the one from The Sword in the Stone, Merlin, Cretien de Trois, or Gerald Morris' books (The Squire's Tales)?

22. If you could learn any language, which one would you pick?

23. What is your favourite memory of beekeeping?

24. Where's Waldo?

25. How do you plan to get to space?

26. Tell me about your cat.

27.  Which do you think is more important: society going to space or animal rights?

On the same note, a first date/car ride/vacation conversation/random-people-on-the-street conversation can be just as boring if the topic is unpleasant or awkward.

This is a list of things you should not ask me about:

1. Politicians.

2. Terrorism.

3. Rick Perry.

4. Hormones.

5. Sharia Law.

6. The number 4.

7. Country music.

Who wants to bet that next time Dave comes over his first comment will be, "So Ariele, I read this really fascinating article today, in which Rick Perry and a bunch of other politicians were discussing the interrelated nature of terrorism and Sharia law while listening to country music and complaining about their wives hormonal mood swings. Also, four. Four. Four, four..."

Nah. Dave would never use the phrase "in which". But he might just start chanting "four, four, four four..."

Last Minute Valentine's Day Post

Oh crap, Valentine's Day is this week. 

Actually, this isn't really last minute. You still have over twenty four hours to prepare. I, however, don't care about Valentine's Day at all, so instead I'm going to talk about cockroaches.

I used to live in this tiny house. It had one room upstairs, with a porch and set of stairs leading up to it. Inside this house was a very narrow closet, a bathroom with a toilet and a shower that was slightly larger than I was (every so often the sewage would back up into it and the only time I bothered to call the landlady, she was on vacation on Puerto Rico), a fridge about the size of glove compartment, the tiniest stove I have ever seen in my life, and a sink.

I slept on an air mattress on the floor, with a very short stool next to it which acted as a night stand. I also had a chair. The first night I lived there, I had no electricity. I lit tea candles and placed them all over the counter and the floor. It was quite Bohemian, in fact.

But the truth is, I did not live here alone.

In fact, my roommates were quite numerous, and rather unscrupulous, when it came down to it. If I locked the doors, they slid underneath. If I tried to poison them, they got tougher. Yes. My roommates were cockroaches.

One night, I woke up thirsty. As I took my two steps across the floor to get to the sink, I stepped on something that moved. If you have not had this experience, I recommend trying it once (just to get it out of your system) and then never doing it again. It's quite unnerving. I never understood why a creature that could see in the dark would just let itself get smashed by my foot. Of course it didn't die. So I turned the light on, caught it in a glass jar, and dumped it into a pot of boiling water--a very quick and painless way to die (I hope). Also it doesn't smear bug guts everywhere. Then I dumped it and the water off my porch.

But this isn't the most terrifying incident.

One evening, I arrived home late. I turned on my light before stepping into the room (a safety precaution which I learned quite rapidly after moving in) and glanced around. I saw, to my dismay, two of these nasty little creatures. The first was an easy hunt and kill. It only took about two minutes. But by the time I was ready to stalk the second, it had already climbed 3/4 of the way up the wall. Gross. But no problem.

I grabbed a chair and climbed up with my jar in hand. I almost had it, and then it jumped. I ducked, but would you believe it--that nasty little sucker flew! It sprouted wings! And then it landed on my back!!!

This was the first (and hopefully the last) time I ever screamed for a bug. Admittedly, it was more of a loud squeak, followed by flailing arms and swatting hands, but I promise, I took a very long shower afterwards. Oh, I caught it, by the way. Eventually. With a lot of stalking and jumping backwards. It was with ever so much pleasure that I watched it slide into the boiling water.

But you know what I will always remember? I will always remember the shape of its wings as it flew at my face. They were in the shape of a heart.

So if you're in need of a last minute Valentine's Day gift, just run outside, catch a cockroach, and give it to your favourite person in the world. If you're smart, you'll even dip in chocolate. Or gold. Or boiling water. 

Won't Dave be surprised. ;)

Stripes Had Better Be In

On Friday Dave took me to the beach. The water was a bit chilly. I know this because I took off my shoes and played tag with the ocean. I also picked up a rock. It has stripes.

You know what else has stripes? The sky. 

Last week the sun blasted us with charged particles. It disrupted high frequency radio waves for two days. The sun is beginning a cycle of regular solar storms, which should occur about once a month through 2013. They won't all hit us, of course--the sun is a sphere and could hiccup in any given direction, towards the Earth or not. These light shows--called aurora borealis in the North and aurora australis in the South--create some of the most beautiful skies ever visible on Earth.


Awesome thing number one: one charged particle is just a charged particle. But a collection of charged particles is actually plasma. A lot of science fiction stories include plasma guns--weapons that spout ionized gases that disrupt robotic systems, destroy living matter, and generally cause all sorts of excited chaos. Well guess what. The sun does this to us all the time.

Awesome thing number two: the sun does not hate us (or love us, take your pick)--other planets have auroras too. Jupiter continues to be my favourite planet. Check out this sweet picture of Jupiter's aurora:

 

 That made me think, "I wonder what our aurora looks like from space?" Someone else thought of that too. Someone who actually gets to go to space.

 

Awesome thing number three: sometimes the Sun practices exploding. On these nights the Earth dresses up, like for a fancy dress party, sparkling with gems and plasma jewelry, the princess of the solar system. And we are just little germs, scurrying around on the surface building castles and highways, afraid that our communications systems will be disrupted by the sun.


One day I want to go to Alaska. I will plan my trip around projected solar flares. If I do it right, maybe I can see the aurora over the ocean. I'll take my striped rock and wear pinstriped pants and a striped scarf. If I'm lucky, stripes will even be in that season. Otherwise I will have to be uncool. Uncool, perhaps, but happy.

I Wrote a Text Message for the Aliens- Does anybody know their number?

The problem with my microwave is that it beeps five times. It annoys me more than the rotting smell that sometimes pervades my kitchen due to the terrible plumbing in my building or the way my cat sits against the wall and locks her unwavering stare on me with her unremitting eyes, without blinking, for indefinite periods of time.

In addition to beeping five times (instead of four or six or one), it doesn't stop beeping even when you open the door or hit clear. In fact, I firmly believe that I could take a sledgehammer and smash it into tiny, tiny pieces, and it would still finish all five beeps. Other people believe that if you gave a family of monkeys a typewriter and convinced them to bang on the keys, eventually they would produce the works of Shakespeare- bound in leather, of course.

The funny thing is, if you add Evolution into mix, a monkey of sorts named William did produce the works of Shakespeare--he just did it after he technically was not classified as a monkey, and with a quill pen instead of a typewriter.

Last night, I was grumpy.

So was my phone. Or, as it said, "FGERUMPY."

My cell phone and I were having the sort of evening where you break glasses, spill beverages, and have to dig through the trash to pull out something which you should not have thrown away; and, after having a large amount of juice poured all over it, my phone was not feeling very amiable. It was feeling so irritable it decided to translate all of my texts into Azerbaijanese. How? you ask. Simple, by adding a 'z' everytime I typed 'a', an 'r' to every 'e', an 'f'' to every 'g', and some weird combination of 'b', 'v', and 'c'. In addition, instead of exclamation points, I could only type upside down question marks.

My text to Dave, explaining why I was fgerumpy, looked something like this:

"I beroker az glazss, fgot chocolazter on my paznts, threrw azwazy az pererfgerctly fgood pazckazfger aznd spillered juicer on ERVBERERY THINFG so now my phoner wont stop azddinfg as aznd zs aznd es eznd rs im fgoinfg to fgo inlsazner¿b¿b¿b seriously? upsider down querstion mazerk? ¿b?¿b¿b¿b noooo (thoser ¿b wererer suupposerd to bver erxclazmaztion points. so mazny azazazazazaz hazhazhazhazh¿b¿b¿b kill mer now."

That last bit was supposed to be "hahahaha!!! kill me now."

This text could be very important, crucial even, to the development of human civilization. A cell phone zaps the information being sent to the nearest cell phone tower. If monkeys can write Shakespeare, then I could be, purely by accident, writing a message in an alien language. And if my call were to be intercepted by, say, a radio signal being sent to outer space, then perhaps it would get beamed all the way to another planet and received by an alien civilization.

Perhaps my message says, "Hugs and kisses! Miss and love you! -Earth". Or perhaps it actually means,  "Doom on you!"

Either way, first alien contact could be all my fault. Let's just hope they're nice.