The Life Experience ~ Summer '15

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice

• Kinesthetic Astronomy lessons are great for some people, but they only serve to make me dizzy.


• Longhair cats do have more chance of having litterbox mishaps.


• There was a fascinating woman in New Orleans in the early 19th Century named Marie Laveau, who was a spiritual and community leader, and this is the first time I've really been interested in New Orleans history.


• Managing to find the sun on a helioscope is a surprisingly satisfying experience.


• Pluto is reddish, and it also has a surface made mostly of nitrogen ice.


• The dwarf planet Eris was given the informal designation "Xena" before it got its official name. But even when it was renamed, its discoverer, Mike Brown, named its moon "Dysnomia," which is a lesser entity associated with Eris. It also doesn't hurt that "dysnomia" means "lawless," so he still managed to slide a Xena reference in there.


• Kittens are expensive.


• Saturn's moon Phoebe is constantly spraying another moon, Iapetus, with particles, accounting for Iapetus's weird coloration.


• Sourdough bread needs a starter, which you can make with flour, a tiny bit of sugar, water, and either wild or bread yeast.


• Doing the Super Jump 100 times in a row in Super Mario RPG unlocks a badass bit of armor called the Super Suit. Also, I HAVE A SUPER SUIT NOW.


• The Martian totally lives up to the hype.


• When making fireballs for science demos, don't test your spritz bottle on the carpet because you might wind up having to stomp out some green fire.


• Gnomes have a gestational period of 12 months. For some reason I always thought it was 11.


• Training a parrot to wear a flight harness is not easy.


• Navajo really is that difficult a language.


• There is a theory, put forth by a researcher named Kazunori Asada, that Vincent Van Gogh was color blind, and his unusual pallettes were a result of his inability to distinguish certain colors. Comparing paintings with and without a color blind filter reveals a lot about his work, but I also just like this theory because I kind of love Theories About Artists' Perception.*


• There is a reason the fabric store I go to always looks a bit run-down.


• Jupiter's moons of Europa, Io, and Ganymede have a 1:2:4 resonance, so for every one orbit Europa completes around Jupiter, Io goes around twice and Ganymede four times. Neat!


• Being a grownup is busy.

*Partly this is due to a running gag between me and my siblings about pioneering artists who think they're being realistic. Favorite examples include Claude Monet Was Just Painting What He Saw and Philip K. Dick Was Writing A Memoir.

Comments

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

I think this is the first time I have ever read a description of the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans as a "spiritual and community leader." But it works!

You might be interested in reading Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mystery series. It's set in 1830s New Orleans. The first book is A FREE MAN OF COLOR, and I highly recommend them all.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* Sometimes I like using understatement.

That could be cool. I like Barbara Hambly, but my experience of her work is mostly from Star Wars tie-in novels.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

I first started reading Hambly with her Star Trek tie-in, Ishmael, which is a clear case of author-gets-away-with-murder-publishing-fanfic-and-getting-paid-for-it: she took advantage of the fact that Mark Lenard had roles in both Star Trek and Here Come the Brides, a short-lived takeoff on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and did a crossover book which included guest appearances from every Western TV series airing in the 1960s. It is brilliant. At the time, no one at Paramount was paying any attention to media tie-ins, and the folks at Brides were not too happy about it. That led to people being assigned to oversee the novels program. Which was really too bad....