Marichka Will Fix It

April 19, 2022| cometary| 0 Comment | 11:50 am

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Ever since my story “Coke Machine” came out, I’ve been feeling pressure to share more about life in the Truck Stop Universe. Marichka, of course, is the talented engineer who’s at the center of that story.

Just to be clear, she’s not too enamored of rule books.

Here are some rules she knows about that perhaps you’re not aware of. I’m not sure you’ll want to follow her example.

Do NOT criticize the formatting of the Handbook for SkipShip Operators. It has to be cute or nobody will even open the thing. Do NOT mistake cuteness for mild, gentle, tentative advice.

RULES FOR INCURSIONS BY GOD-LIKE ALIENS

DO NOT ENGAGE
- All interaction is engagement.
- (Worship is engagement.)
- Do NOT do what they tell you to do
- Do NOT accept “assistance”
- Do NOT accept gifts
OBSERVE AND TAKE NOTES
- Do NOT allow the entity to know you are observing
- Keep all communication lines open to your shipmates
- Compare notes with your shipmates
- Do NOT attempt to reconcile notes; Notes will never agree
REPORT ALL INCURSIONS TO AUTHORITIES
- Surrender all information or objects acquired
- Erase all records of the encounter
- By NO MEANS tell anyone else
- Oh, my god, do NOT tell everyone
DO NOT FOLLOW ALIEN TO ITS BASE OF OPERATIONS
- Leave that to the experts
- Absolutely, don’t do this
- Don’t even imagine doing this
- Don’t believe any suggestions the alien has what you want there

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

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.

It’s a Sign From NASA

As of BayCon 2014, Saturday’s big event is the Variety Show (the event formerly known as Masquerade), so the halls of the Hyatt are full of costumed characters. My husband’s coming tonight, just for the Show. In the meantime, I need to cram in some of my own Con activities, beginning with a kaffeeklatsch (small-group discussion) with the artist guest of honor, Ursula Vernon. Then there’s that one panel discussion (I’m not generally keen on panels, but Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is on this one). And I have my eye on a session about cool Arduino projects, not to mention showing up for a presentation by some friends and acquaintances from the Bay Area Lego User Group.

Does this mean I’m not Gofering at all? Nope. Gofering is a flexible commitment. I can sign in just for the time block I expect to be free. And the Art Show happens to need an extra hand just then.

The Art Show is one of my favorite venues, always with something new to see. Plus this particular day began with that awesome-artist kaffeeklatsch. The only downside? No photography, for obvious reasons. It’s light work, helping things get organized. Sorting collections of paper, helping the Art Show leaders check that all the forms are there and all the pieces have their bid sheets and all the pieces on display are included in their records. There’s an old computer that needs someone to keep trying to get it to boot up. And finally, I’m entrusted with the queue of members needing to be assigned their bidder numbers and to be reminded of how the bid process works. My qualifications? Being an experienced art-show bidder, and relatively fussy with paperwork.

By the time the queue was down to the occasional new arrival and my services weren’t needed, it was time for the afternoon programs I wanted to attend.

More Fun With Arduino

And then I had the whole evening free to spend with my husband, who used his one-day pass for the variety show,

Vader & Son with Garcia

a tour, some pictures of paparazzi,

Dot Matrix & Her Fans

and an introduction to boffers, where a pair of energetic youngsters thoroughly trounced us both. He drew the line at staying for the midnight reading of Eye of Argon. Being a simply horrid spouse, I sent him home alone and dropped in on a few parties after that quiet, sedate, restful hour of reading, to whit:

The Eye of Argon appears at midnight

Gofer Lesson of the Day: Let yourself enjoy the convention, too.

Secrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand CanyonSecrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand Canyon

So, for the next month and more, this blog, or at least most of its available posting space, has been claimed by a fan of the Grand Canyon. Yes, a fan of a really big hole in the ground. It’s not as big as Valles Marinaris, but there is still a river at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which greatly facilitates travel by river raft. The goal is to take you along on a fourteen-day expedition, from Kaibab Sandstone to Vishnu Schist, through rapids, slot canyons, waterfalls, and thunderstorms, and along the way reveal a few of the deep dark secrets of these trips so few of us take. We’ll cover over 180 miles on the river plus many miles afoot on canyon trailways. Why use up a month to take you on a two-week trip? Because that’s what it feels like. You forget what day it is, how long you’ve been gone, how much time is left. If you don’t keep a journal, you’re lost.

I kept a journal.

I also took about 3,000 photographs and an hour of video.

Yes, there will be a fair amount of “what we did”, but I also want to share the background information the guides (and other travelers) shared with us, the additional tidbits I’ve gleaned from research (the addiction of the Ph.D.), and perhaps even paint the picture well enough that if you can’t go on this trip you can claim you did and provide your friends with a verisimilitudinous description. Just pick one of the falsified names in the diary segments & say “yeah, that’s me”. Also, if you’re a well-heeled adventure traveler planning your own expedition, I’d hope you’ll come away with enough information to know where you should not take short-cuts—and with some clues about how to find experienced, capable guides to get you through safely.

In the meantime, I don’t want to wear out your eyeballs with more than a few photos and a thousand words of gushing per post. There will be directions to see more photos, but, I promise, this won’t be a session of “Watch my Vacation Slideshow”.

Time for the first installment of Secrets of Grand Canyon River Rafting.

Deep, dark secret #1. Not everyone wants to go on this trip. Three husbands who could have joined their wives refused the chance to walk away from work, television, and electronic connectedness for a week. A young backbacker—who had completed the climb of Mount Whitney with his mother just a few months previously—turned down a free ticket and sent his retirement-age Mom on her own. She said he didn’t like the idea of not being in control on the trip. Another traveller’s wife sent him off with a (female) friend he’d recently reconnected with after a thirty-year hiatus, because the wife just can’t stand camping. His son, a golf enthusiast, only agreed to chaperone them if they took the shorter trip, to be sure he’d be home in time to watch the Master’s. Me? No, actually, I didn’t want to go on this trip. The only person who couldn’t tell was my husband, he was so excited about going. Why would this nature/science/ancient-peoples-loving photographer want to sit this out?

First of all, it’s frightfully expensive—if you want to travel the Canyon and not spend a fortune, you need to be able to work there. I am not the correct age or physical type to start a new career as a river guide. Nor do I have the right background or training to get hired by (or even volunteer for) the Park Service or any of the scientific research teams with feet on the water down there. So when my husband Clark declared that it had “always” been his wish to make this trip and that he had, after all, a big landmark birthday coming up, I made him pay for it out of his IRA. That was the only place we had enough money set by.

Second, Clark got the idea from a friend of his, a childhood friend who’s facing the same landmark birthday this year. When these two get together, they tend to devote a significant amount of our time to recalling those good-old-days. Days I did not share. Oh, great, my jealous heart predicted: two weeks of traipsing along behind while they play “remember when.” Well, I did end up trailing along behind, but not quite the way predicted. You’ll see.

And the third and most sensible reason: I broke my shoulder in January and my orthopedist’s solid opinion about my going river-rafting in April was: “I wouldn’t recommend doing that.” The bone knitted on schedule, but shoulders are complicated messes of tendons and muscles that don’t take kindly to the whole process. I was told it would be a year or more before I’d be back from this injury. My physical therapist did what he could to get some of my range-of-motion restored and added a couple of exercises to build back a little strength, but I went off with one arm fully-qualified to hang on tight and one that complained bitterly about any extension beyond a basic stretch while it simply refused to raise my hand beyond about 80 degrees. One upside was that Clark got to haul all my gearbags, because I just couldn’t handle them.

The other upside is that I would not want to have missed out on this trip. Even though we couldn’t afford it, it was worth it. Does that make any sense at all? Well, it will.

So, all right already, let’s go. For a teasing sneak-peek, here is a picture from Day 5. Oh, aye, it’s the Grand Canyon.

Marichka Will Fix It

You might also like to read:

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

Lessons of a BayCon Gofer: You Do What You ConLessons of a BayCon Gofer: You Do What You Con

Secrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand CanyonSecrets and Mysteries of Rafting the Grand Canyon