Earth Day

So it's Earth Day! Of course, every day is Earth Day, just like every day is also Christmas and Easter and Columbus Day and my birthday, just today is more SPECIFICALLY Earth Day because there are advertisements for it on TV and the Internet.

:(

Well, here's my contribution to Earth Day '05.
I’ve always just admired the pretty trails of clouds that airplanes leave behind them, and never wondered whether those clouds might be a cause of bizarre climate change and poor air quality.
But surprise! Cars and factories aren’t the only major contributors of greenhouse gasses and other harmful emissions. Airplanes are in on it as well! This should be no big shock, since jet engines use internal combustion to burn fossil fuels (usually kerosene) just like automobiles do, but I never really stopped to think about it.

According to NASA, four percent of the annual carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels around the world come from planes.
More from NASA:
“In 1993, a study of toxic emissions at Chicago's Midway Airport revealed that arriving and departing planes released more pollutants than the industrial pollution sources in the surrounding 16-square-mile area. A more recent study at London's Heathrow airport showed that aircraft contributed between 16 and 35 percent of ground level NOx concentrations.”
“Because of local concerns about the gases exhausted by airplanes, the expansion plans of several U.S. airports—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Washington—have been stopped.”

Their site is about five years old, so it’s probably a bit outdated, but they do a remarkably good job of explaining some concepts (greenhouse gasses, the ozone layer, fuel efficiency, etc) in a few paragraphs that my Chemistry for Consumers class spent weeks on.

Let's work together for a cleaner tomorrow!

Add it up

All of my college career, and indeed, most of my academic life, has been spent trying to avoid math. I found its rules to be too strict and arbitrary and quite frankly boring. I had to give each number its own personality and turn equations into struggles between good and evil in order to even begin to process a problem. I'm not making this up: when I was in first grade I was uninterested in addition and subtraction unless there were "nice" and "mean" numbers that I could make a story out of.
So instead of the one required math class in college, I enrolled in a ton of film and screenwriting and sociology courses where I could explore storytelling with fewer boundaries and more symbols (twenty-six letters, plus punctuation is greater than ten digits plus plus-signs). Finally, the last semester of my senior year, I was forced kicking and screaming into the pre-calculus class I had avoided for so long.
It’s not so bad. I mean, it’s awful and I hate it, but if you ignore that for a moment, it’s not so bad.
I actually pulled an A on the last test (79 points + 15 extra credit = 94 points = 94%), and during my religion class where I have a tendency to day dream, I sometimes see the concepts of good and evil expressed as math problems. Part of it is that we’re studying the meaning of a lot of symbols and numbers (three, the number of the divine, plus four, the number of creation or the cosmos, equals seven, the number of perfection and three times four equals twelve, the number of completeness and religion), but still . . . since I usually turn numbers into concepts instead of the other way around, it’s a bit backwards for me.
But my biggest appreciation of arithmetic this semester came yesterday when my professor was discussing arcs and degrees (as in 360 degrees in a circle) and I asked him why the system didn’t just operate with a decimal system like most of math does.
Never one to turn up a good math-related story, my professor, who is Mexican and talks like Strong Bad (“Ok, ok, so the point is, basically, that your weekend will be sooooo much cooler with math!”) explained that the first people to do this sort of math were the Babylonians, who operated on a base-six system, which was passed down to us.
Now ancient Babylon is modern-day Baghdad in Iraq, and that got me thinking about how modern mathematics really is an international product that combines many traditions and developments from throughout time and across the globe.
To just graph a circle and compute its area we have to use the Babylonian base-six system transposed into the Arabic base-ten, or decimal system (complete with the handy, Arab-invented zero) and charted onto a French Cartesian plane and partially represented with a Greek symbol (pi), which has been most recently calculated most fully (although not exactly) by a Japanese mathematician.
Not only is math an international language, it is the result of a grand and widespread international collaboration. Could dreaded math actually be a symbol for peace?

sk8!

Today I went on a decent longboarding for the first time in more months than I can count. I'm pleased to report that I can still stay on the board. I had forgotten what it feels like to bend limp and floppy while cruising straight down the sidewalk, how effortlessly sentences compose themselves in my head between kickoffs and the secret thrill of knowing when the ground is tilted just slightly downhill.

I may buy my own board again soon to get back in the habit, which could be bad news for those of you who dislike skating poetry.

From today's adventure

Log-a-rhythm

oh my gosh, I have far, far too much math homework to do. The good news is that I now understand what a logarithm really is. It's basically like this number that's a power that you might raise one number to in order to get anouther number. For example, two! or even six!
so how many of you knew that? I mean really, REALLY knew that? How many of you can explain it as well as I can?

that's what I thought.
...
The good news is that I will probably go on a tree climbing expedition tomorrow.
The other good news is that there is just a lot of other good news to go around.

xxoo