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

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

I got the chance to see some Van Gogh paintings in person a couple of years ago, and nothing odd struck me about the palette, but what did strike me is that they looked nearsighted. If you were literally painting up close what you saw at a distance, and everything at a distance was a little smudged because you were nearsighted... *shrug* They just made a whole lot more coherent sense to me when I took off my glasses.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Marie Laveau was totally awesome.

Managing to keep a Xena reference in the official astronomical naming is also awesome :)

Lapetus: "DAAAAAAD! Phoebe keeps spraying me with particles, even tho I asked her to stop!"

I bounce around between three different opinions on Phillip K. Dick. Sometimes I think he was just a SF writer, sometimes I think he was genuinely writing from his own personal experience, and sometimes I think he was just trolling the hell out of everyone.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Those of us with long haired cats refer to those incidents as "Klingons". They have no idea they are leaving with something stuck to their fur, only to have it fall off later.

Phoebe sounds like kind of an asshole.

Now you've got to tell me how to make fireballs, because FIREBALLS

[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.

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

Yeah I had hoped I wouldn't need to shave Guaraha's butt, but he gets hitchhikers back there just often enough that I decided I'd rather shave him than clean my apartment after one of his poop-on-butt freakouts.

Unfortunately for me (and everyone else at work), having his butt shaved is The Thing He Hates Most. I mean, he's bad for just about everything, but butt-shaves are a whole 'nother level of hate.

My mom and I were going to see The Martian, but then she had to go get a basically full-time substitute teaching job for the foreseeable future, and we refuse to go to theaters on the weekends, so I guess we'll just have to wait until it comes out on dvd.

I read that article about Van Gogh, and it's pretty darn reasonable to me. One more interesting thing about the dude, if it's indeed true.

[diegocrusius.livejournal.com]

liked this 'semi random facts' form of post.