Avoiding Hyperbole

May 8, 2014| cometary| 0 Comment | 4:36 am

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OK, right, it’s been so long since the last post that even my backup program is writing me off as too far gone. Too bad, Updraft, back to work, you lazy batch of code.

True, some comets hare off to interstellar space on hyperbolic orbits. However, two or three things:
1) There’s much to be said for the sweet homey stability of an elliptical orbit.
2) On a hyperbola, there are two arms, and who’s to say if you’re on the right one?
3) My top speed is less than 2 m/sec whereas an escape trajectory on Earth demands moving at about 11,500 m/sec.
4) I’m not actually a comet, I’m a human being who is interested in comets both as astronomical objects and as metaphorical images.
5) That’s four or five things.

Redlining on a hyperbola. Aieeee!

Stuff happens, and it’s not exactly a huge crime to neglect a blog that no-one is reading. Last year, I whined about the inconveniences of having a broken arm. Well, there’s worse stuff than a broken arm. Besides, I needed time to read other people’s websites. Like catching up on the doings at Gunnerkrig Court. Like reading anything about robots that turns up on IEEE Spectrum. Or reliving grad school days on Jorge Chan’s Ph.D. comic. Or vacillating between reading Allie Brosh’s hardcopy book or her online stories at Hyperbole-and-a-Half.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to keep up a little better on the easier-to-maintain Facebook & twitter side of things, under the Pixel Gravity moniker.

But it’s time to dump more stuff out on the world and see if anyone who isn’t a spammer notices.

Here’s the deal: I’ve got a year’s worth of science projects for kids that I want to share. Maybe they’ll be a book too, some day. (Insert self-knowing laugh here.) I’m a year behind on delivering my Grand Canyon stories & pictures, which I promised my fellow-travellers would be “up” by the end of last summer. But there’s other stuff I want to address as well. So there will be a little discipline applied, in a way that would help any of my imaginary readers look ahead for the next entry in a category of interest.

First week of the month: One “Messy Monday” project

Second week: One “Grand Canyon” entry–either a half-day of storytelling or a photo album.

Third week: Science & fiction stuff–the science fairly topical, the fiction

Fourth week: An extra week to play catch up, first on the Grand Canyon, and later on Messy Monday, but also a piece of flexible time for interesting stuff of the moment. For instance, Memorial Day Weekend will yield four days of BayCon 2014.

Next up: Comets in orbit…

Two Poems by AnwegweTwo Poems by Anwegwe

Sunset #734

the fire dies down, and the colors rise up
rivers flow amber, gold, and blood-rose
cascading one upon the other
wave upon wave around the sky
pushing back the eastern dark
holding the light for one last hour
giving us time, time to remember
all of the days we have had together
the glorious days beneath the sun

The main character in my recent book, All That Was Asked, is a poet. It’s a first-person narrative, and he keeps mentioning how people reacted to a poem, or how much he enjoyed writing a poem, or that he likes to watch sunsets because they inspire poetry. But . . . there aren’t any poems in the book itself. It seemed to me I couldn’t quite measure up to the standard implied in the text . . . one gets the impression, although Ansegwe is self-effacing about it, that he’s actually rather good.

Still . . . it’s nagged at me, that I didn’t have any poems by Varayla Ansegwe. After spending hours and days and weeks and months with him, I’m sort of a fan, if you will. If I were a real fan, I’d have his work, wouldn’t I?

So I gave it a try. It’s interesting, to try to write personal-style poetry from someone else’s perspective. The one above results from all those mentions of poetry related to watching sunsets. Imagine our hero trotting down the hill after enjoying a really nice day’s-ending light show, muttering to himself, wriggling his fingers, anxious to scribble down this latest idea. We can leave it to your imagination how he improved this “draft”.

For a second poem, I tried to combine two things from his background. First, it seems Ansegwe had a fairly decent collegiate-level ranking in, well, whatever ball game is popular in Korlo. I envision it as sort of like baseball, maybe like an upsized version of kickball, with a larger, rugby-sized ball. Lots of running, jumping, catching, throwing–very energetic. Second, it’s evident that he was quite the one for romantic entanglements.

If I can gather enough of these, I’ll put together a little “collection” that I can share at events and such. Oh, and as a reminder . . . consider these as translated from Korlovian.

(Photos are mine. All from our own universe, alas.)

Intercept

In this moment,
there is only the ball, gliding on its parabolic arc.
It requires all of your mind to calculate the leap
the extension of your arm, the stretch of your fingers
the breath you draw at its approach
the strength you need to hurl it to your comrades.
 
For this moment, you do not know that she is gone.
For this moment, your heart is no more than a muscle.
Whether the ball glides into your hand
whether it skims your fingertips and caroms off under the lights
either way, you will crash to earth again
the world's gravity will bear you down
the moment will end
and you will know.
 
But in this moment, you leap
and time stretches to meet you.

The pre-midnight roll-out

One thing about the global economy…it’s January 31st in some places already. Barnes and Noble has the paper editions as well as the Nook version ready to go.

Get it at Barnes and Noble

Meanwhile, Amazon is lagging behind, with just the Kindle version and it still is tagged as “preorder” . . . in the U.S. C’mon Jeff, don’t you want more money for your rocketship project? UPDATE: Amazon is up, in Kindle and Trade Paperback editions.

But you can download it from Amazon’s sites for the UK or India.

And it’s up at Canada’s Biggest Bookstore, !ndigo.

And in Australia at Angus & Robertson.

No problems at Smashwords, either.

And you can use Paper Angel as a home base, plus a place to read the sample or order a signed copy direct from the publisher.

My favorite, though, is the listing on Rakuten-Japan. Though of course it’s on “regular” Rakuten, too (i.e., Kobo).

View looking down of supply kit: pink powder (gelatin) in a white up, water in a clear plastic cup, a round red plate, two wooden skewers, two marshmallows, four small candies in a small container. — The Atomic Marshmallow Kit

Now that you have all of your supplies ready, it’s time to guide your group through the construction of a model atom.

Start by handing out the marshmallows and ice-cream topping pieces. With younger participants, it can maintain focus if you mention that there are extra supplies for snacking on afterwards.

Start with the marshmallow. Most of an atom is empty space. And most of a marshmallow is nothing but air frothed into sugar. So this marshmallow represents the “empty” space of an atom. For older participants, you can encourage them to think of the sugar of the marshmallow as representing not only the energy that permeates what we call “empty” space but also the forces that hold the atom together.

For a very long time, the atom was believed to be more-or-less of uniform density, an amorphous mixture of tiny negative particles called electrons swirling around in a positively-charged “pudding.” In 1911, Ernst Rutherford and his team completed a series of experiments that shocked the physics community by revealing that most of the mass of an atom is concentrated in a tiny, central nucleus containing all of the positive charge. For our model, in honor of Rutherford, we’ll build a helium (He) atom, which has a nucleus containing two protons and two neutrons. (Much of Rutherford’s research focused on the alpha particle–which happens to be exactly the same as a helium nucleus.)

Let your dark-colored candies be protons and your light-colored candies be neutrons. (It doesn’t really matter, but textbooks often draw protons as dark dots and neutrons as white dots.)

Assorted small candies in various colors, blue, green, purple, white. — Candy Nucleons

Two dark and two white little candies (close-up) — Candy Nucleons

Using the wooden skewer or toothpick, drill a small hole in the side of the marshmallow. Now use the same toothpick or skewer to push those nucleons (a word which here means “candy pieces representing protons and neutrons”) into the center of the marshmallow.

Close-up of marshmallow with hole poked in center, showing marshmallow-covered tip of wooden skewer. — Pathway for the Nucleus

Close-up of marshmallow, with one dark candy visible inside hole in center, and two white and one dark candy waiting on top. — Pathway for the Nucleus

This is a good time in the activity to stop lecturing and instead gather suggestions from the participants and sketch their ideas on a board if you have one, or to gather around some sketching paper for discussion purposes. You can expect to see pictures that look much like a planetary system, because that’s the way the atom often (still!) is drawn in textbooks. You might have a knowledgeable participant who’ll shout out something like, “Shells! The electrons are in shells!” or “They’re in the Cloud!” Regardless, during the discussion, build on these volunteered suggestions to reach a description of the electrons as whirling around the nucleus in a cloud, going so fast that you can’t really tell exactly where they are, only that you know roughly how far they are from the nucleus.

At this point, we have a positively charged ion, because we haven’t added any electrons yet. A helium atom needs two electrons, negatively-charged particles, to balance out the two positively-charged protons. Once it was established that the positive charge is concentrated in the nucleus, where did researchers decide that the electrons belong?

Our helium atom’s two electrons do indeed share an electron “shell”, a layer of electrons a known distance from the nucleus. So let’s put a very thin, energetic, sparkly shell around our atom.

Before setting up the shell supplies, pause to demonstrate the procedure. If you’re working with younger students, you may need to stress that everyone will get their turn. If the “mess” part of the activity is an issue, set up a protected area where the messy activity is OK and let the participants queue up to build their atoms in assembly-line fashion.

To create the “electron shell” skewer the marshmallow firmly on the wooden stick, then very briefly dunk it into the water, then tap off any excess water into the water container. Tapping off excess water is important, because otherwise the marshmallow can get soggy, which makes for a less-attractive candy atom.

Marshmallow on skewer dunked into clear plastic cup half-full of water. — Dunk

Wet marshmallow held by skewer on edge of plastic cup of water, drops of water dripping off. — and un-dunk.

Each group needs a container with about a cup of water in it and another container with a packet of dry gelatin mix emptied into it. (For fun, choose a gelatin color in keeping with whatever events are ongoing, or a local sports team’s colors…anything to drive interest.)

Finally, gently swirl the damp marshmallow in the gelatin mix.

Marshmallow on a skewer, being rolled in pink gelatin in a round white bowl. — Adding the Electron Shell

Set the decorated marshmallows aside on a sheet of waxed paper or a plate.

Two gelatin-coated marshmallows, on skewers, set to dry on a round red plastic plate. — Two Finished Helium Atoms

As time permits, participants can make other atoms…stuffing different numbers of protons or neutrons into marshmallows and adding a shell of electrons.

Avoiding Hyperbole

You might also like to read:

Two Poems by AnwegweTwo Poems by Anwegwe

. . . GO! “All That Was Asked” is out, now!. . . GO! “All That Was Asked” is out, now!

The pre-midnight roll-out

On Aisle 42, Universe Components: The Atomic Marshmallow ProjectOn Aisle 42, Universe Components: The Atomic Marshmallow Project