Calling all grammar geeks!

Growing up with a surname that ended in the letter “s”, it was drilled into me from an early age that one does not add the superfluous “s” after the apostrophe to indicate possession in this situation. Now, it seems common usage prefers the additional “s” after the apostrophe: i.e. Lucas’s breakfast.

Discuss: the correct way to use a possessive apostrophe with a singular proper noun ending in the letter “s” is to use only the apostrophe. i.e. Lucas’ breakfast.

The sky is falling!

No, not really, but there are two really cool reasons to look up into the night sky tonight.

Way back in the day, blog used to cater more to my inner geek. I wrote about why we should explore space, and ranted about the evolution versus creationism debate. I don’t remember when I last wrote on the subject, but when I saw this meme at About Miche, I couldn’t resist:

JustSayHi - Science Quiz

(I would’ve done better if there were more astronomy questions! Theoretical astronomy and cosmology – stuff like chaos theory and string theory and the origins of the universe – have long been a fascination of mine.)

So, back to the free show in the sky tonight. First, there will be a gorgeous total lunar eclipse tonight, and for a nice change it is both at a reasonable hour AND at least here in Ottawa, the skies should be clear. The eclipse will be visible from most of North America, as well as South America and Western Europe, and the next lunar eclipse visible in Canada won’t be until December 2010.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes into the earth’s shadow — that is, the earth comes between the sun and the moon (as opposed to a solar eclipse, when the moon passes between the sun and the earth.) The moon won’t disappear completely, but will become a deep red or orange colour. You can see the earth’s shadow take the first ‘bite’ out of the moon starting at 8:43 pm EST, and totality begins at 10:01 pm and will last until 10:51 pm. For more info on lunar eclipses, see this excellent primer.

As if that weren’t cool enough, you will also be able to see the American military spy satellite USA 193 as it passes over Ottawa starting at 6:06 pm EST tonight. (You can get information about tracking the satellite in your hometown’s sky starting here.) This is the satellite that’s been in the news lately for its decaying orbit – either the US military will shoot it down in the next couple of days, or it will crash to earth some time in March.

You should be able to see the satellite with the naked eye. It will be about as bright and the same size as the brightest stars, and will take about five minutes to move across the sky. It will rise in the southwest and rise more or less overhead across the southeast sky before disappearing to the northeast. This website has a star chart with the path marked across it.

Cool stuff!

An open letter to John Tory

Dear Mr Tory,

This is my happy little blog, which tends to be very non-political. Unless you get me riled up about daycare. Or reproductive rights. But mostly, I’m pretty happy to hang out here and tell my stories.

I’d say probably half the people who read this blog don’t live in Ontario, so they don’t know that you are running for Premier of Ontario, as leader of the provincial Conservative Party. They might not have also heard that you recently stated that publicly funded Christian schools would be able to continue to teach creationism within the guidelines of the Ontario school curriculum.

Creationism? Seriously?

So when the Liberal folks came by yesterday and asked me if they could stick a sign on my lawn, apolitical as I usually am, I said yes. Because this single issue is enough to sway my vote. It’s not that I’m not open to other points of view, and I fully support teaching kids to be open minded and critical thinkers. But creationism has no basis in fact. It’s completely fallacious and flies in the face of hundreds of years of scientific theory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fantasy. And there is no place for it in a publicly funded school.

But I’m willing to make a deal with you. I’ll take down that Liberal sign and put up a Conservative sign, and leave it there all through the election, even though my skin will crawl just a little bit every time I look out my window. And all you have to do is confirm that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism will also be taught in publicly funded schools. I mean, that’s only fair, right? Balanced.

wwfsmd2.jpg

Sincerely yours,
DaniGirl

Thirty years of Star Wars

I’ve been meaning to blog for a few days about the 30th anniversary of the release of Star Wars.

Thirty years.

Thirty!!

Star Wars is, hands down, the single most influential movie in my life. It also happens to remain my all-time favourite movie. My childhood memories are tightly woven into a backdrop of Star Wars movies, toys, books, bubble-gum cards and mythology. On this anniversary weekend, there have been plenty of articles in the media about how seminal Star Wars was, and how it changed the movie landscape forever. From an article in the weekend Citizen:

No wonder the U.S. Library of Congress’ National Film Registry has named Star Wars “a culturally, historically, and aesthetically important” film, or that the American Film Institute placed it 15th on its list of the top 100 films in the 20th century. And then there’s that ubiquitous line from the movie: “May the Force be with you.” The AFI ranks the phrase as the eighth-greatest quote in American film history. In this light, it is no exaggeration to say, as film critic Stephen Greydanus puts it, “the Star Wars universe remains a cultural institution of immense proportions.”

I clearly remember going to see it for the first time. We went with another family, and on the way to the theatre the four adults sat in the front and back seat of our wood-panelled Cutlass Ciera station wagon (it was, after all, 1977) and we kids rolled around like peas in a 10-gallon tub in the back. Return of the Jedi was the first movie my brother and I were allowed to attend without parental supervision; I remember my father dropping us off in front of the downtown cinema – in the days before the mall-based multi-plex – for an 8:30 am showing.

When we got our first VCR in the early 1980s, one of those giant ones with the square buttons you pushed down and held to make them stick and where the lid opened upwards to accept the cassette and the ‘remote’ was attached by a long cord and consisted of an analogue switch with two options ‘pause’ and ‘play’, Star Wars was the first movie we rented and later copied. I lost count of how many times I watched it through high school, but it was in excess of 120 times. (I may have mentioned I didn’t get out much in the earliest years of high school, and by the time I had a pack of friends, they were the kind of good-natured geeks who loved nothing better than to watch Star Wars again and again right along with me after hours spent playing D&D.)

Growing up, my brother had tonnes of Star Wars action figures and playsets. We (note the plural possessive – they may have been gifts for him, but we played with them together) had the ice planet Hoth, the Death Star, and of course, a Millennium Falcon. I had a wicked crush on Luke Skywalker through the first two movies, but as I entered my teen years my tastes strayed from Luke’s clean-cut innocence to the roguish worldliness of Han Solo… because in the end, no matter how good the girl, she always likes the bad boys the best.

All these years later, I will still queue up Star Wars in the DVD player if I have an open stretch of evening and feel for a little cinematic comfort food. I think it’s safe to say that I would personally rank the movies in the descending order they came out, except that I liked Episode III more than Episode I. I’m a purist, though. The new series, the Anakin stories, are good movies in and of themselves, but they don’t hold a candle to the original trilogy.

The Interwebs are full of Star Wars tributes and memes, but these two I couldn’t help but share. Have you seen this this hilarious photo from Flickr? Apparently the US Postal Service decorated mailboxes to look like R2D2 in honour of the movie’s 30th anniversary. The photo is clever, but the comments embedded into it are hilarious. (Note to self: figure out how they did that – very cool!)

And one last treasure to share with you: this clever little plot comparison between Star Wars and Harry Potter from Neat-o-rama. Perhaps this one appealled to me in particular because I’m deep in the heart of the Harry Potter books, currently in the thick of the Goblet of Fire, working my way through the series in anticipation of Deathly Hallows this summer. Funny to think that Harry Potter may be for this generation of kids what Star Wars was for me!

This post is getting unweildy and I still haven’t examined how Star Wars influenced me spiritually, or how Beloved and I still compare and contrast what the movies meant to us growing up. I haven’t had a chance to talk about the quotable Star Wars, and how the language of the movie introduced me to a world of rebel alliances and emperors and bounty hunters and cantinas and smugglers and ambassadors – words I learned for the first time through Star Wars and that coloured forever my understanding of them. I haven’t gotten into how Star Wars made me curious about life on other worlds, and inspired a life-long love of astronomy and fascination with SETI… I could go on for two sets of trilogies!

What does Star Wars mean to you?

You can’t get there from here

Link surfing is a wonderful thing.

I can’t even remember where I was, but I caught sight of something about a lunar eclipse on March 3. Turns out it wasn’t visible from here, only in a wide swath on the other side of the planet through Europe and Africa. Disappointing. I love stuff like eclipses and meteor showers and the northern lights.

Then further down on the same page, I was reading about the solar eclipses for later this year. (Did you know that there are two lunar and two solar eclipses every year? A lunar eclipse is when the moon travels through the earth’s shadow, and a solar eclipse is when the moon comes between the earth and the sun.) Unfortunately, the solar eclipses for this year will only be visible in eastern Asia and South America.

And THEN, I saw that there will be a total solar eclipse ON MY BIRTHDAY next year, AND it will be visible from Canada. Now that’s way wicked cool.

Except, I kept reading and found out that it will only be visible from the very northern tip of Canada, through Nunavut. And I noticed that the path of totality runs right across Alert, Nunavut, which is the northernmost settlement not only in Canada, but in the whole world. It’s a mythic sort of place, this northern outpost, and I started to think about how I’m always saying that I haven’t seen nearly enough of this gorgeous country of ours, and how I’ve always wanted to see the far north, and an embryonic plan started to hatch in my busy little brain.

Wouldn’t it be way wicked cool to make a family vacation out of going to Alert for my birthday to see the solar eclipse? It’s north of the Arctic circle, but it would be high summer, so not only would the temperatures be moderate, but there would be 24 hours of sunlight – and then an eclipse. Really, could you imagine anything cooler than that? It’s Canadian, it’s astronomical, it’s my birthday: three of my favourite things. This was obviously meant to happen.

So I set out to find out how to get to Alert. And that’s when I started to grasp just how big this country of ours is, and that north as I know it really isn’t so very north at all. I mean, Alert – that’s seriously North. Let’s put it in relative terms. Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is just over 2000 km due north of here. (By comparison, Miami is just about the same distance due south.) Well, Alert is DOUBLE that, more than 4000 km due north. In fact, it’s only about 800 km from the North Pole.

Map courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps, used with permission.
Embellishment courtesy of Beloved.

Not only is Alert north, or should I say NORTH, but it’s isolated, and kind of desolate. Just about the only thing that’s up there is a Canadian Forces Base and an Environment Canada weather station. But neither the northness nor the isolation deterred me. I live in a generation of extreme vacations, after all – I never imagined there could be a populated place in this country that doesn’t have some form of tourism. (Okay, so ‘populated’ is a bit of a stretch – according to Wikipedia’s citation of the Canadian 2001 census, Alert has a permanent population of six.)

Typically, all of this actually encouraged me rather than discouraging me from my summer holiday plans. I spent quite a while googling various combinations of terms and surfing travel sites only to find out that for all intents and purposes, you simply can’t get there from here. And even if you could get there, it’s not exactly a tourism hotbed.

Nothing comes up, for example, when you search on “hotels in Alert” or “tourism Alert Nunavut”. And the closest you can get to Alert on a commercial airline is to Iqaluit, about half way. If you’re curious, it would cost a family of four somewhere in the neighbourhood of $6000 to fly to Iqaluit from Ottawa in August. That’s not including the charter flight up to Alert, which seems to be of the principal that if you need to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

Sadly, I think Alert is now off the table as a summer travel destination. Lucky for me, it’s currently -42C with the windchill right here in Ottawa, so I can have my very own Arctic experience simply by waiting for the bus.

Northern lights alert

The skies over Ottawa may or may not be clear over the next couple of nights, but at least it will be mild. That will make it a lot more comfortable for me as I stand out on the back deck, scanning the skies for the northern lights.

According to this article from CTV.com, a significant solar flare will be rushing past the Earth over the next little while. The plasma wave surrounds the Earth and when it collides with the gases in our atmosphere, the collision results in energy being emitted as photons which cause the aurora borealis – the famous and unforgettable northern lights.

Have you ever seen them? I clearly remember my first time. I was driving from Ottawa to Sudbury one Christmas – maybe 1990 or so – with my ex-husband and his brother. It was brutally, bitterly cold and we nearly froze to death standing on the side of the highway where we had pulled over to admire the display. I’ve seen them a half a dozen or so times since then, but never have I seen dancing curtains of multicoloured light like that first time.

According to this observers’ page, last night’s display was seen well into the US. If it’s clear where you are tonight, it may well be worth taking the occasional peek outside to check for the northern lights!

Stardust @ home

This is the most nerdy kind of cool. I love stuff like this.

From the Ottawa Citizen:

Computer users are being invited to join the hunt for minute grains of stardust a NASA spacecraft should return to Earth this weekend.

The Stardust spacecraft should land in Utah early Saturday, carrying in its hold a sprinkling of grains of interstellar dust scooped up during its seven year mission. Researchers are seeking the public’s help in pinpointing the submicroscopic bits of dust, leftovers from stellar explosions perhaps millions of years old, in photos they plan to place on the Internet.

In 2004, Stardust passed through the tail of comet Wild2, picking up samples of the cometary dust that makes the comet’s tail visible. Researches now have to analyze the interstellar dust collectors for evidence of submicroscopic particles using a high-powered microscope. From the Stardust @ Home Web site:

Finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) will be extremely difficult. Because dust detectors on the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft have detected interstellar dust streaming into the solar system, we know there should be about 45 interstellar dust impacts in the SIDC. These impacts can only be found using a high-magnification microscope with a field of view smaller than a grain of salt. But the aerogel collector that we have to search enormous by comparison, about a tenth of a square meter (about a square foot) in size. The job is roughly equivalent to searching for 45 ants in an entire football field, one 5cm by 5cm (2 inch by 2 inch) square at a time! More than 1.6 million individual fields of view will have to searched to find the interstellar dust grains. We estimate that it would take more than twenty years of continuous scanning for us to search the entire collector by ourselves.

So they are seeking volunteers to download a virtual microscope and copies of the images to share the workload. Not just anybody can play. You have to pass a test (I can see what I’ll be doing this weekend) and complete some Web-based training to qualify before registering for the project. The payoff? Anybody who finds one of the anticipated 45 or so interstellar dust particles will be named as a co-author of the scientific paper announcing the discovery of the particle. Way wicked cool. I mean, I’ll do anything to get my name published.

Quite a few years ago, I took a course in astronomy. One of the things we talked about was interstellar dust. It is one of the most primal building blocks in nature – the Sun, the Earth and even we are made of interstellar dust. (Okay, semantic quibble, but I guess the Sun is not made up of interstellar dust, but stellar dust. But, you get my point.) Whenever you see a meteor, a ‘shooting star’, you are likely seeing a minute particle of interstellar debris burning up in the atmosphere. Except it doesn’t burn up completely, it just becomes microscopic dust that settles down and comes to rest all over the Earth, including on your coffee table.

Which is a really great excuse not to be too quick with that can of Pledge. Because you wouldn’t want to disturb something so fundamentally beautiful as interstellar dust, would you?

Just doin’ my part

You may have noticed I have a bit of an issue with creationism and intelligent design (ID). Not with ID in particular, but with the idea that ID is being taught as science in schools, and to the exclusion of teaching evolution.

My favourite scientist, the Bad Astronomer, has passed on word of a Google Bomb to redirect those searching for information on ID to the Web site of the National Center for Science Education. This post is my way of gleefully participating in this exercise.

(A Google Bomb tampers with the search results returned by Google for specified key words. By linking the words “intelligent design” to the NCSE Web site, it influences Google’s ranking algorhythms and increases the rank of the NCSE for that keyword. See Wikipedia for a better definition if you’re curious.)

Bombs away!

Why we should explore space

This is for Nancy, because she asked.

I, too, watched the space shuttle explosion in 1986, and the more recent Columbia disaster in 2003 (or was it 2002?) and I remember crying my heart out watching the coverage. But I still believe that the space program needs more, not less, funding.

For a really great list of spin-off benefits from the US space program, visit The Space Place:

One of the many spinoffs from the Hubble telescope is the use of its Charge Coupled Device (CCD) chips for digital imaging breast biopsies. The resulting device images breast tissue more clearly and efficiently than other existing technologies. The CCD chips are so advanced that they can detect the minute differences between a malignant or benign tumor without the need for a surgical biopsy. This saves the patient weeks of recovery time and the cost for this procedure is hundreds of dollars vs. thousands for a surgical biopsy. With over 500,000 women needing biopsies a year the economic benefit, per year, is tremendous and it greatly reduces the pain, scarring, radiation exposure, time, and money associated with surgical biopsies.

Other technological spin offs from the space program cover everything from golf ball aerodynamics to doppler radar (weather) imaging to improvements to school bus design and even better baby food.

Of course, this only covers some of the practical things we have learned in the pursuit of space. To me, it’s not even half of the best argument. For a more poetic description of why we should continue to explore space, please do take a moment to read the Bad Astronomer on this subject. He’s a terrific writer! Make sure you read the comments, too. No really, go! It’s important.

And on a completely unrelated but perhaps not so unrelated after all topic, have you guys seen Google Earth yet? So way wicked cool you have to see it to believe it! Google sightseeing has now gone international as well.

So, now you know how I feel about it – what do you think? Is it worth it to explore space?

A little something for everyone

Every morning, I read the newspaper on the bus ride into town, making mental notes of stuff that might be interesting to blog about. This morning, there is so much going on that I have no idea where to start!

First and coolest, NASA will be launching the space shuttle Discovery at a little after 3 pm today. I love shuttle launches – they give me the same breathless feeling of wonderment that the boys do, but originating in a different place in my heart. Some day, I’d love to go to Cape Canaveral and see one in person. I’m hoping the launch goes off on time so I can watch the Web cast at the end of my work day.

Also in countdown mode, only three more days until my Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince arrives via Canada Post special delivery on Saturday morning. Ahem, not exactly my copy – I pre-ordered it for Beloved as a Christmas gift, so I know I’m supposed to let him read it first, but he reads with glacial slowness, savouring each word and idea, whereas I read voraciously, as if the words cannot be gobbled up quickly enough. Sharing is all well and good for the preschool set in the house, but I may well have to buy my own copy or die of impatience.

At the risk of coming of as completely against religion (which is not entirely true) after probably alienating half of my loyal readership with my comments on creationism in the schools, I must now turn my mocking attentions directly to no less personage than the Pope for castigating the HP books as being a “subtle, barely perceptible seduction” that can “corrupt the Christian faith in souls even before it is able to properly grow.” (From the Ottawa Citizen)

This continues to make me crazy. Teachers around the world are falling all over themselves complimenting JK Rowling on getting children, especially harder-to-reach boys, into reading. Yet people who have likely not even read the damn books are castigating them as corrupting the faith. I’ll never forget the first time I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the feeling of wonder it gave me. I couldn’t get over how many ways it appealed to me: to my barely-repressed inner 12 year old geek; to the parent who can’t wait for her boys to be old enough to have these stories read out loud to them; and, to the wanna-be writer in me who would give her left arm to be able to spin a tale with such imagination and appeal.

Without any kind of segue at all, the third thing on my list of things to draw to your attention is the campaign by Brit blogger Nosemonkey. In a very British (and lovely) response to the terrorist attacks, he and an American friend discussed that what is needed in London is not so much the Red Cross disaster relief kind of aid as a morale boost for those still working in the aftermath of the bombings. So he’s raising funds to buy a few pints for emergency workers – and has rasied enough so far for “a hefty piss-up for at least one London police station” – in the neighbourhood of 200 pints. To me, this perfectly encapsulates what I so admire about the British response to the bombings – a stoic determination to carry on regardless, and up yours while we’re at it.

And finally, just a little post-script to confirm that yes, we both survived yesterday’s dental interventions. Tristan was an angel, so much so that I am wondering where I can get my own supply of behaviour-enhancing antihistamine/laughing gas cocktails. For therapeutic use only, of course.