Sunday, March 11, 2007

Getting side-tracked...

I'm now behind by two flight posts -- the checkride (still!) and yesterday's flight with Husband.

But I'm gonna post on a semi-unrelated topic anyway...

Aviation. Aeronautics. NASA. The universe.

Maybe it's not so unrelated after all...

Husband sent me a link to this 6.5-minute video a while back, and it got buried in my inbox, but I finally dug it up tonight and watched. It's pretty neat, especially when you're fascinated by the topic but, as they note, in your day-to-day life you just don't think about it that much. (There's some series available in full online that's pretty good, if you want more -- Husband, what is it? Is it a Nova program?)

I did have to laugh out loud, though... Not on account of the dancing dork (it's only a few seconds, bear with it), but when they said "8 planets in our solar system." It really caught me off-guard! I guess the change to that fundamental piece of knowledge hasn't sunk in yet, because when they said that, I flashed forward 10 years to when our baby is in elementary-school science class learning about the solar system, and how weird it will be to say "Back when I was in school, there were 9 planets." I wonder if they'll learn about Pluto's demotion, or if the textbooks will even mention that it was ever a planet.

3 comments:

  1. I fairly sure that was created by an amateur - it's good but the voice over isn't quite NOVA quality.

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  2. I think the professional NOVA program we watched online (here) was called The Elegant Universe.

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  3. If not Pluto, then something else:

    My mother was a biology professor & she would say, "when I went to school people had 24 pairs of chromosomes, but now we have only 23..."

    Anyway, New Mexico is looking to legislate Pluto back as a planet, so the # of planets may differ from where you're standing.

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