Thursday, March 06, 2003

Empty Spaces Between Stars Desert Places by: Robert Frost   Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last. The woods around it have it--it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares. And lonely as it is that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less-- A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars--on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. My students seemed to enjoy this poem by Robert Frost today, but what they truly seemed to enjoy was my demonstration of what exactly is meant by the "empty spaces between stars."  That "space" is so vast, so unimaginably vast, that I had to find a way to put it into a scale they could grasp.  I drew upon several websites to illustrate how with just a quarter, you could almost imagine that emptiness Frost was talking about.  For instance, if the sun was the size of a quarter, the next closest star (quarter) would be 400 miles away.  One site that had this sort of info was Skygaze.com and their facts about the universe page, specifically the part about spanse.  Absolutely mind-boggling stuff. If I'd planned a little better, or wanted to spend more time on the topic (sometimes I wish I could teach Astronomy), I'd have shown them pictures from Hubble's Deep Field camera.  In those single shots of relatively small areas of the sky you see not hundreds of stars, but hundreds of galaxies, each containing nearly countless stars.  Each also containing huge empty spaces that are difficult to imagine. Maybe those empty spaces didn't scare Mr. Frost, but they certainly put a sense of personal perspective in many of my students today.  Every once in awhile it's useful to known just how utterly insignificant you really are.  And damn it, not that I'm placing myself above a major news organization, but CNN used a quarter today to demonstrate the size of a Chee-to.  I used a quarter to demonstrate the size of the universe we live in.  I think the final score is Alex 1 : CNN 0. 9:20:07 PM     |

Ours Is An Abysmal Culture With our country on the brink of war, with our economy limping along, our education system second best at best, what is a major news item today?  The world's largest Chee-to. Let's face it.  Next to the ancient Greeks, the Romans, or hell, even the '60s, I don't think history will judge us too kindly.  This is pathetic. Even more so, the town mentioned in the story wants to center its tourism campaign around this freakish lump of junk food.  If I lived there now, I'd move.  Or hang myself. Most hilarious line isn't even in the article.  It's in the "FACT BOX":  About 15 million pounds of cheese are used every year in making the snacks. Ha!  That's a good one.  Saying they use 15 pounds total of real cheese would still be a stretch. Oh well, back to giving up hope on humanity. 12:37:08 PM     |

© Copyright 2005 Alex L. Mauldin.