Everything and Space Theme

The idea behind our book choices this round was that each round we need a theme, and this round's theme is that we are reading books that end with the word "everything"??? And they're both about science, science fiction, and space. Not really a normal read for any of us, I think, but it should be fun -- we can all pretend to be A/V geeks for a month. It is the "Geaky" book club after all. Read and post away!!

24.9.08

A glip from Alien Class


I'm not sure if you've all heard about the silliness of Utah State, but one of the few integrated science generals is called 'Intelligent Life in the Universe.' I am currently enrolled in an alien class. Anyway, the first weeks of the class were spent discussing all the early models, theories, and discoveries of the universe. I was intrigued in class by something my Professer discussed, but I'm not sure is actually factual... One Johannes Kepler, (working under Tycho Brahe -- awesome name, I know) was playing around with Brahe's measurements and data, and A- discovered that orbits are elliptical, along with other important shiz, but B- hinted at something really cool that I'm not sure was ever proved (or understood). So I'm likely very wrong about most of this, but you geniusses are here here to correct me. There is/was an important order of shapes, don't know why, but it went Sphere, Pyramid, Cube, and then on to some other cooler words. When you start with a pyramid, enclose it by a sphere(1), enclose that by a cube, enclose that by another sphere(2), then on to other multiple sided objects, each followed by a sphere (3, 4, 5) you then have many spheres all increasing in dimentions. What Kepler discovered, is that the radius of each sphere is porportionally related to the distance between each of the planets in our solar system! He didn't know why, but he was pretty accurate in his measurements of the orbits, and found they matched these spheres he'd been playing with. If true, I really am baffled. Random thang for y'all to research for me.

23.9.08

Related Science Link

I know this is more of the same, but here is a funny project called "Street Corner Science" where they put a Nobel Prize winner on a street corner and encourage people to go ask him whatever questions they want about science. He talks about some of the things in the first chapters of Bryson's book. I thought you might get a kick out of it.

http://www.sciencentral.com/video/2008/08/21/street-corner-science-with-leon-lederman/

22.9.08

How should this work? (Erika)

So how do you suggest our discussions go....there are 34 chapters in Douglas Adams book, do we read read 17 chapters in the next two weeks and not comment on anything past that, or do we wait till the end of the month and comment on the whole book? I don't want to read comments on parts that I haven't read yet, so should we just title our posts as to what chapters they cover?
I have both books now, and Dean gone all day, so guess what I'm doing!!!!

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Caitlyn

I really like how he writes, but so far all the information was in my first Alien test, so I'm waiting for new info...