Hello From the Hurricane!

31 Days of Planets: Imaginary

Day 22

I think that everyone would benefit from an imaginary planet. The thing about imaginary planets is that you get to rule them - you're the boss! It can look like anything, be anything - it can be filled with people or have none, and the possibilities are only limited by the capabilities of your imagination.

I have an imaginary planet. I call it Sagitta (I stole that. It's the name of a constellation inside the Milky Way). Sagitta is shaped like a donut.

That's right. A Krispy Kreme. On the inside (the Inner Rim), there's an ocean. And let me tell you, they have some pretty awesome and weird fish in that massive ocean.

I know - looking good, right?

On the Outer Rim, there is a desert. There may also be some dessert out there, if you're lucky. Like a cupcake. Or dried ice cream. 

Then there are, of course, forests, and plains, and mountains, and rivers, and everything in between (literally - in between the inner and outer rim). Their animals are vaguely similar to those of Earth's but they evolved differently.

And just a few miles off of the ocean, Pomegranate City squats uncomfortably under the crazy thunderstorms and massive rainbows, and her people live for 1000 (Earth) years. 

But how did this majestic planet come to have a hole in the middle - missing a chunk of its soul? Well, it used to look more or less like this:

And then a massive asteroid came out of no where...

And KABOOM.

Which left only a very large mess behind.

After a few million years of spinning, the stuff all clumped together to become the donut that we all know and love today. 

In conclusion, what does your imaginary planet look like?

Pictures by me, except for first donut which was from here, and the ringed planet which was from here.

31 Days of Planets: Venus

Day 21

Venus: our sister planet, named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. She is quite similar in size and shape to Earth, but she is surrounded by clouds of sulfuric acid, with a dense atmosphere of largely carbon dioxide. Imagine what that would do to your complexion. You trying to lose weight? Don't go to Venus. The atmospheric pressure on Venus is 92 times that of Earth. She has no carbon cycle, no organic life to absorb biomass, her oceans vaporized, free hydrogen has been swept away into interplanetary space by solar winds... but she does have rocks and volcanoes. 

There is one other thing that Venus has: she looks magnificent when she crosses paths with the sun.

I have a sticker of Venus. It looks like this:

In conclusion, Venus might be the goddess of love and beauty, but she probably won't do much for you.

Pictures from Wikipedia.

31 Days of Planets: Pluto

Day 10

Pluto is still a planet. I know everyone was so upset when Neil DeGrasse Tyson fought to "de-planetize" Pluto, but that's not what really happened. What really happened is that Pluto became special. Pluto became a dwarf planet - one of only two others (maybe). Of course, there are probably billions more dwarf planets, but Pluto gave us the deliberate ability to classify small planetary bodies as "not Earth-sized" and "not-gas giants." Instead of wandering around saying, "well, I guess we should call it a planet because it orbits the sun even though it's super small and different and doesn't really meet the criteria for a planet" we were able to definitively say: "Pluto is a dwarf planet."

It's like saying, "well, I guess we'll call you a hippie because you eat organic food and don't like war and ride bicycles, but your hair is too neat and your clothes are too carefully chosen," instead of "you are a hipster."

Pluto is in fact smaller than Eris and composed primarily of rock and ice. In fact, Pluto may host a hidden ocean. This means, if we run out of water because we humans are good at making bad decisions, we can mine Pluto. But then imagine the price of water! We'll be watching it like we watch the price of gas. 

"8.57 a gallon! Good heavens!" 

"Well that's what you get when you have to mine it from Pluto."

Pluto's atmosphere plays host to nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide. There may even be wind on the surface of Pluto.

In conclusion, just remember: Pluto is still a planet - just a dwarf planet.

Image from zmescience

31 Days of Planets: Nibiru

Day 9: Nibiru

Nibiru is a special planet. The reason? Because it's imaginary. It's an imaginary planet that is supposed to collide with Earth in, oh, give or take two months (December 12, 2012). This sneaky planet has decided to do a flyby of Earth, causing us to stop orbiting for five days and switch magnetic poles. The oceans would then migrate to the poles, creating two polar oceans and one giant center continent. And a day would be the length of an entire year - unless of course the planet started spinning again after five days, in which case the oceans would wander back to their original locations and Daylight savings time would be pushed back a few days.

Nibiru is a hoax. But Nibiru would make a great science fiction TV series, if anyone is interested. Maybe I'll write a book - Incoming Planet. Watch your nearest amazon.com. 

As for what Nibiru looks like, I did a simple image search It's quite lovely. It looks like a marble: 

And it comes from a really reliable-looking website.

This one is a "real photo" from NASA, found on ufodigest.com.

And if you're still dying for evidence, check out this one. You can't deny that this is a real picture:

For more information on this impending disaster, you can read this article, the Wikipedia page, or the news.

In conclusion, Nibiru is going to be great fun.

Backpack Across the Universe

The other day, I was thinking about Scotland. It's full of castles and sheep. I wish I could take Rutherford there--maybe then he could find himself a girlfriend.

While in Scotland, Leslie and I rode on trains. I was inordinately excited about this, because I had never been on a train before (except for that time in third grade which I don't remember) and because trains are a rather weird form of transportation. Basically, somebody takes a bunch of boxes, hooks them together, and drags them across the countryside on really, really long metal rods. And people sit in them and eat and read and play bridge. I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I saw castles and sheep and a few beehives.

I fully believe that humans will go to space, one day, and build colonies and eat weird tasting potatoes grown in an artificial environment or eat weird tasting potatoes that aren't actually potatoes because they are native to Caprica, not Earth. All the common theories of space travel tend to lean towards space ships: big ones, small ones, ones with sails and nuclear engines and jump drives that allow them to skip over massive chunks of space or fly faster than the speed of light (a very useful trick, considering the size of the universe).

But what I want is a space train--a number of boxes run together in a chain and dragged from here to there by a massive engine harnessing the power of a star.

It makes sense: each car would explode away from Earth separately, and they would then be assembled while in orbit. Once assembled, the engine would leave orbit dragging a number of boxes and people behind it. Then, if one car exploded while taking off, only a few people would die, but the whole train wouldn't be ruined. If it were a big enough train, entire colonies could start out, ready and willing to colonize New Scotland and New China and New New England.

And when they look out the window of this train--the space train--instead of sheep and castles and beehives, they would see stars and spaceships and gravity whales, and on their way to New Scotland, they could make a stop at New New York and visit the black statue of liberty that sings when the wind whistles through her teeth, or visit the Big Apple which is actually the original, red spaceship that brought everyone to this planet.

New Scotland would be a planet of rolling hills and sparkling crags, with boiling water in Equatorial Ocean, and massive spheres of ice in the North, home to a particularly ornery species of furry dinosaurs. They would keep their royal crown, scepter, and stone in a sacred box hidden in a secret spot on the highest mountain in the world, and Great Britain would not rule over her any more. Then children would learn how their ancestors escaped from the rule of the Queen of England by traversing a billion miles across the universe and settling here, on the beautiful blue-green planet of New Scotland.

So if we could maybe hurry our technological advancement up a bit, then maybe someday, instead of backpacking across Scotland, I could backpack across the universe.

And for your entertainment, I have included this video about the Scottish boy in the Scottish McDonalds. 

Administrative Note: posting schedule will be changing, but I don't yet know to what. Thanks.

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.

2011: Soon I will be writing the wrong year on all my checks

Someday I will be able to reminisce like this: "While I was on the moon I wrote a postcard to Mom; then I traveled through the tail of a comet and skirted the tongue of the sun as it lashed out into the darkness. My new novel was a rip-roaring success, selling over fifteen copies to people who are not my relatives! And I managed to find time to visit my brothers in TN, PA, and CA."

I have not done any of these things. This is what I did do this year:

Wrote novel #2.

Watched Battlestar Galactica.

Drove a boat- Rob's boat, on Great East Lake.

Babysat.

Went to NC.

Ate at the Cheesecake Factory.

Closed my knife on my finger.

Went to Canada.

Rewrote novel #1.

Went to Long Island.

Theatre: Man of La Mancha (ME, board op), Wizard of Oz (ME), Spelling Bee (ME, board op), Hairspray (ME, ASM), Cabaret (ME, spot op), A Christmas Carol (ME, crew).

Hunted lobsters.

Found a shark on the beach.

Learned 200 new words: petrichor is my favourite.

Watched my friend get married; I also threw a bridal shower.

Stuck my feet in the ocean.

Got a ginormous blood blister.

Interned at Calypso.

Almost fell out of the grid.

Walked in the rain.

Moved into an apartment.

Worked at the gym (I lead a thrilling life, I know).

Got a cat and named her Goblin*.

Learned ever so much about space.

Went to the zoo! Got a free ticket!

Climbed Mount Major (which is not quite as tall as Mount General).

Went to Boston.

Celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Turned 23.

*This is my cat, Goblin.

Call Me When I Can Hang My Laundry By The Giant Space Ocean

I love New England. These are my reasons:

Reason #1: There is always weather. Always. Rain, fog, sleet, snow, hail, sunshine, wind, weird cloud formations, hurricanes--everything. And I love weather. In fact, this morning I walked out the door at 4:36am, and got slammed in the face by a sheet of water--wind and water at the same time! Fantastic.

Reason #2: The ocean. The ocean is everywhere. It doesn't just stay in the giant crater where it lives. It sneaks up through cracks in the sidewalk to tickle your bellybutton, it leaps over the pier and sneaks into your socks, and it has this way of latching on to the air and grabbing you from behind in a damp, salty hug. You can taste it in the fog, you can smell it in the air, and if you're feeling ambitious, you can stick your feet in it.

Reason #3: It's gorgeous. The sky is gorgeous. The ocean is gorgeous. The mountains are gorgeous. The snow is gorgeous. The hills are gorgeous. The countryside is gorgeous. Magnificent, wonderful, glorious, majestic, resplendent, astonishing, splendid, formidable, awesome, breathtaking, transcendent, pulchritudinous, imposing, etc. And you can drive over the ocean!

Reason #4: Pictures like these.

You may have noticed that all of my reasons have to do with water. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a fish. I am, however, made up of 70% water. It's likely that you are too.

The coolest thing about water is probably the giant space ocean. If I were a few million times larger than I am and could live on the edge of that space ocean, watching a billion stars set over a glittering cloud of water vapor so big it could supply 140 trillion Earth-sized planets with oceans and oceans of water, my life would probably be perfect. I might even sell everything I own and buy a space ocean houseboat so I can hang my laundry out to dry by the light of a few galaxies.

That said, if you happen to invent a "make something a million times larger" machine that is shaped like a houseboat, with an "anti-asphyxiation" button and a stick shift that goes 1-2-3-4-speed of light, call me first.

Levi the Cactus Can't Eat Bagels

There is a cactus, who I have good reason to believe has named himself Levi, that has been staring at me for four days. His pot has swirls of blue and orange and white and brown which remind me of a planet that has a lot of iron floating through the sky. Now, I don't understand anything about planetary physics, but I imagine that a planet with a skyfull of iron would probably be quite hot and dry--and Levi would probably like to live there.

Here on Earth we have a skyfull of water, with clouds always moving around and picking up more water and then dumping it on the ground, and we keep loads of it in giant buckets named Atlantic and Pacific, and smaller buckets like Huron and Baikal. I like water because it's romantic to look at street lights in the rain, and because puddle jumping is a delightfully endorphin-releasing activity.

Sometimes I dance in the rain, too. I like to swirl around and pretend I'm flying, as if the floor melts away from under my feet, and all I have left is the strength of my arms and the spinning of the universe to keep me from falling. My hair flies out around my face, and my skirt sparkles in the dim light of the stars, and I dip my fingers briefly into the pansophy of movement, the pansophy of time; I come to a halt and watch the atoms and the galaxies whirl past, but only for a moment because I can't stand to not join in.

Then I hand Levi an umbrella because he drowns easily, and we dance together down the street of Universe City... and then I'm ejected from my daydream because Dave shows up with a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. Yum. It's too bad Levi can't have some too.