Asymptomatic

It's got to be the stupidest name I've heard for a thing, but I've finally broken down and installed one.

Basically, a Wiki is a piece of software that allows you to create and edit web pages in a most free-form manner. In fact, the design was intended such that anyone could come along and make changes to any page that they wanted and add any page that they thought was needed.

At first this idea might sound crazy, but it turns out that it's very good for creating collaborative documentation online. For example, one of the best resources on the net right now is the Wikipedia, which is a fantastic complete user-written encyclopedia. Amazing....

I know I've been prattling on about writing a book forever, but I think I might have finally found a topic that makes sense.

I was looking at my Astronomy notes and noticed that there is a lot of cool stuff there that people ought to know. In a typical astronomy book you get a lot of pictures of things in space (that you'll never see in your backyard telescope, by the way) and charts of the constellations. That's all great, but there is more to Astronomy than star-gazing. Astronomy is a science.

In my Astronomy class, we've been learning a lot about the science of Astronomy. We have not learned, for instance, how far away the Earth is from any particular star. This is something you can pull from any astronomy text. But what we have learned is how to determine the our distance from one, whether that star is moving closer or farther away, and what direction it is spinning, all based on what we know of the pinprick of light that bleeds through our atmosphere....

I totally forgot about the transit this morning. I had heard of it a few months ago when I was looking for some neat stuff to look at through my telescope. I was planning on having a solar filter around so that I could see this, but that didn't materialize, and I didn't even try out the pinhole method that we discussed in class last night.

Oh, well. I guess I'll just have to wait for the next transit in 2012, when it'll be easier to remember because it's happening at sunset. Abby will be 11 then, and possibly interested in seeing it, too.

I wish I could find my MP3 player because I would like to record a little of my astronomy teacher's ramblings for you to amuse yourself with. Maybe I'll just call Audioblog and leave my phone on speaker. It's supposed to record for an hour.

Yesterday, we constructed maps of the sky. There was a lot of taping and cutting involved. It's a kind of neat thing. I think that there are probably better star charts out there than what we'll make in class, but since we're basically adding things to it by hand, we'll get to know a lot better where things are in the sky. This place has night sky maps you can download with event data for certain dates.

This MTW class thing is going to drive me crazy quickly. I feel like I've fallen into a deep rut where I wake up, go to work, go to school, go to sleep. I'll be happier when tomorrow rolls around and I can spend some time with Berta and Abby. Actually, I'll be even happier when work is over on Friday, since I have off until June 7th.

I attended my first Astronomy class at WCU last night. It was pretty strange. The teacher is some kind of religious zealot, except not in the traditional sense. No, he's very anti-religion.

How do I even describe this? I don't even know that it's necessarily that he doesn't believe in God (although I think that's probably the case), but that he must always be at odds with the really religious folks. He says that people are always telling him that the Earth can only be a few thousand years old because the bible says so, even though scientific proof exists that the Earth is much older. Well, nobody in our class said anything about religion. I wonder how he got so jaded.

He reminds me a little of older people (and he is retiring after next year) who are very stubborn in their ways and profess certain beliefs rather publicly, when nobody asked to know what they thought....