Though it seems I just got started on the Grand Canyon project, this day is one to set aside for thinking about tornadoes.  This afternoon, I listened on the radio to an interview with a recent immigrant from California to Moore, Oklahoma. With tears in her voice, she spoke of how “scary, really scary” she found frequent tornadoes in her adopted home state.  When I interned at Argonne National Lab many many many years ago, a local described the tornado that had passed through the fringe of the lab a few years previously. He said the noise of the approaching tornado made him think of a T. Rex roaring through the forest. This was before the Jurassic Park movies had transformed T. Rex into a helpful bad-guy removing plot device. Â
On the positive side, just down the road from Moore, college students at the University of Oklahoma are designing ways to use the DOD money invested in drone technology to create drones capable of collecting essential data which will vastly improve the ability to forecast tornadoes and predict their motions more accurately. Check out their work at the Government Technology e-mag page.  To understand how important it is to gather data to analyze, consider this NOAA consolidation of data over time which suggests when and where tornadoes are most likely…you can check in on these data on NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center site, daily.
Compare the sizes of Earth and Pluto & Charon (Pluto’s shadow isn’t that big on Earth!) Image Credit: NASA
It’s been a super-fantastic #PlutoFlyby day (see the video for a Pixel Gravity simulation of New Horizons’ close approach path on 7/15/2015), and I can’t resist going to one of my favorite astronomy projects: building a scale model of the Solar System that takes you out of the house, out of the classroom, and under the sky. (Where maybe Pluto’s shadow, cast by a distant star, will pass over you.)
As a reminder, you can look for the following in any Messy Monday project:
A set of notes for project leaders, sketching the key elements of the project and the science topic it is meant to address
A detailed supply list, structured to make it simple to purchase supplies for either a one-shot demonstration or for a classroom-sized group activity.
A set of instructions for working through the project with students, including commentary to help cope with common classroom-management issues, questions that are likely to arise, and issues to keep in mind from safety to fairness.
A rough estimate of the cost to run the project.
As before, I’ll break down the presentation into four postings, to spare readers trying to scroll through a 5000-word document, but I’ll post them quickly, so you can jump ahead if you are raring to go or want to access the reference materials first. In other projects, we built our own comets. In this project, we travel out into the solar system, hoping to reach the source of that comet.
Step 1: Space is Big
Itâs a long way to Pluto. But as far as the Universe is concerned, Plutoâs in our condo’s tiny back yard. What would it be like, though, to take a hike to Pluto? Like the New Horizons Spacecraft spacecraft buzzing past Pluto and its cluster of moons, but, well, maybe taking a bit less time about it. Nine years (the explorer was launched in early 2006) is longer than even the above-average studentâs attention span. What if we could shrink the Solar System down to a reasonable size for nice walking field trip?
Paths of the nine planetary objects orbiting the Sun for many years (A Pixel Gravity simulation result.)
No surprise here: itâs been done. Six ways to Sunday, in fact. While no one person claims to own the idea of building a scale model of the solar system, my favorite advocate of such models is Guy Ottewell, who likes a scaling factor that makes the model a reasonable size for the average person to walk. You can buy his book on the subject (now with cartons!) at the books page on his website. As a bonus, youâll also find the most current editions of all of his other books on astronomy and much more.  (He self-effacingly describes his annual Astronomical Calendar as âwidely usedâ; a more-accurate description would be âfanatically used by serious amateur astronomersâ.) No disclaimer necessary; we’re not friends, I’m just one of his (many) Twitter followers.
The goal of this project is for everyone involved to obtain a personal sense of the feature of Outer Space that is hardest to conceptualize by reading books and trolling the internet: Space is BIG. (Yes, you may pause to reread the opening to The Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.)Â Indeed. Really Really Big.
On top of that, the places you can stopâthe non-empty bitsâare few and very tiny compared with the distances between them. And it takes a long time to get from one stop to another.
So, when assembling materials and presenting this project, keep these two key goals in mind. Itâs not important whether you model Earth as a peppercorn (Ottewellâs model) or an allspice seed (easier to find in my own kitchen) or a spitwad from the ceiling that happens to be about a tenth of an inch across.  Whatâs important is that the Earth is not only extremely teensy compared to the Sun, but you canât even fit the Sun and Earth into an ordinary classroom. And you have to hike at least a half a mile (a kilometer) if you want to make it to Pluto. With any luck, you can make practical use of the excess energy in a classroom-full of kids and also amaze them. If youâre doing this as a classroom helper and the teacher is used to taking advantage of the time to catch up on infinite paperwork, this is a time to persuade that teacher to shove the paperwork aside and join the expedition. There will be no regrets!
The objects used to represent planets and other bodies should be chosen for familiarity, because you want the participants to absorb the scale comparisons effortlessly. âEveryone knowsâ how big a jellybean is, a pin is familiarâboth the pushing end and the painful poking endâa soccer ball is a known object, and so on. It doesnât matter if the object you use is not exactly the design diameterâand no one is going to care that jellybeans or coffee beans are bumpy ovoids, not spheres. The next time youâre eating a jellybean (or slurping a Starbucks), at the back of your mind will be âI had to hike a half-mile just to get to this little Neptune hereâ.  Plus, âYum, astronomy is delicious.â
If youâre interested in the underlying concepts, I encourage you to stop by the National Optical Astronomy Observatoryâs website and read Guy Ottewellâs original 1989 description of his Thousand Yard Model; however, if you consider yourself a mathphobe, donât let the arithmetical computations worry you. Iâve made you an Excel worksheet to do that task. Running a mind-expanding science project should help relieve that condition, not make it worse.
If you have visited a museum’s scale model, read Ottewell’s book, or done a similar project in the past, there are a few differences you may encounter in this project. In particular, I suggest you avoid having planets represented by peanuts. Including nuts in school projects, can be problematical if any student (or parent helper) with nut hyper-allergy could possibly be affected. (I have relatives with this allergy, and there is nothing quite like coping with anaphylactic shock to ruin a dayâs outing.)
Iâve included a few more âdestinationsââsuch as the ever-popular asteroid âbeltâ and my personal favorite of Plutoâs fellow dwarf planets. The number of steps taken between planets (and other destinations) is greater, because kids take shorter steps than grown-ups. (Also, other models Iâve seen assume a stride length more typical of menâand the majority of teachers and parent volunteers are still women, with shorter strides than men.) And Iâve included the current (for now, at least) locations for a few more distant âdestinationsâ that we can look out towards from our turnaround point at Pluto.
The tables Iâve provided are in both English and SI units. The scales are slightly different between the two, in order to yield intuitively-scaled results in either set of units. And Iâve provided a âcheat sheetâ of the key data for a teacher or other presenter to carry as a reference source on the walk. If anyone would like to get completely precise and build their own model matching their pace length exactly, or adjusting to a different scale, you can request a copy of my Excel workbook for this project to create your individualized pace-off. Or if you know a Senior Girl Scout or Boy Scout in need of a Gold Star or Eagle project, a community solar system model would be a very cool service project. (Câmon, Scouts, do you really want to build another park bench?)
Speaking of space, and coolness, and peanuts, and bigness, by the time your group finishes this projectâeveryone who participates should wholeheartedly agree:Â Space is Big
Sharon Manders is having a very bad day. She’s been drop-kicked into the distant future–a thousand years out of time–and has no memory whatsoever of making any plans to go anywhen. She’s an archaeologist with a thriving career in good old 21-century Earth. And here she is in the 31st century, where everyone’s calling her by some other name that she doesn’t recognize. And she’s accused of treason, sabotage, terrorist acts. She has a lot on her plate, and she’s going to have to move fast while trying to figure out just what happened.
And you’ll be reading along, trying to figure that out, too. When she finally solves the last layer of that puzzle, you’ll lean back and say, “Oh, yeah, why on Earth didn’t I think of that?” But you won’t have thought of it. Andrea Monticue leads you quite a merry chase. I really can’t roll in too much detail without spoiling the whole thing for you.
Let’s just say a woman from our time finds herself plunged into a high-tech future with AI, biological engineering, and dangerous politics. Just when you think you have everything figured out, Monticue rotates the horizon by 37 degrees and you’re floating in space again, looking for answers. The book has to end (which you will not want it to do) and she ties all those twists and tangles together in one stunner of a unique conceptual shift.
Engaging characters, complex political situations that nonetheless remind you of the mistakes humans make right here on Earth in the “distant past”, and a plot that moves ever faster–all that will keep you glued to the page/e-reader.
At the very least, if all you take from this story is the tech (and there’s way more to it than tech), you will not think about artificial intelligence the same way, not ever again.
I got my copy directly from the publisher, at last year’s Bay Area Science Fiction Convention (BayCon), and was lucky to meet the author, who has the experience and technical background to make this story come alive.
So . . . my copy is autographed. You can get a signed first edition, too, direct from the publisher, at Paper Angel Press. Or you can choose your favorite digital medium or snag the trade paperback from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Full disclosure: at this point, I’ve also had a book published by Paper Angel Press. I was impressed by Monticue’s book and her publisher, enough so that I submitted my own book, hoping to follow in her footsteps. Rest assured there are way, way more explosions (literal and metaphorical) in Memory and Metaphor!
BayCon 2015 looms on the horizon.  The increasing pace of email updates from the registration staff is bringing on flashbacks of the olden days, at BayCon 2014, when I fell deep into a gopher hole and didnât emerge until the sun was fading on Memorial Day.
That is, last year I was a Gopher/Gofer/Go-fer at my local science-fiction convention. (Spelling must remain inconsistent & unimportant in this instance.) This year, Iâm On Staff. Itâs remotely possible that the two conditions are related, what the docs call âcomorbid conditionsâ. Perhaps itâs worth revisiting, to give folks a glimpse into the life of a convention Gofer. Or to enable recognition of incipient volunteerism.
It all started on check-in day, the Thursday evening before Opening Day.
ED-209 from RoboCop looms menacingly.
Inauspiciously, my badge was not waiting at the check-in table; something had gone wrong with the printing, and it was queued up with several other reprint orders. That meant I had nothing to do for a half-hour or so. Rather than sit patiently, I roamed the halls. The week before, Iâd emailed a randomly-named staff address to ask about working as a go-fer, and the reply was fuzzy, but boiled down to stop-in-at-the-gopher-hole.  But where was this secret base?
Welcome to Baycon, Sponsored by Adipose Industries
Suffice to say, I failed to locate the base, but the search renewed my acquaintance with the layout of the Hyatt Regency & Santa Clara Convention Center. So I collected my program and newly reprinted badge
Proof Of Membership
& went home to rest up for the long weekend.
Paradoxically, my unfulfilled search actually made me more determined to find the secret lair and get involvedâŚonce things were up and running on Friday. The secret? The Gofer Hole owns one of the smaller meeting rooms in a relatively quiet zone (across the hall from the Bayshore Room at the Hyatt) but during the Con, itâs clearly flagged with artistic signage and new Gofers are welcome to stop in and sign up.
HAHAHAHA Got Badge!
Amazingly, Friday morning, they would even let this demented individual sign up:
Gofer Lesson of the Day: Donât give up, take advantage of âwastedâ time to learn something or, heck, catch some zâs.
