Category: Astounding

This Land is Your Land: When Rachel Pretends to be Woody Guthrie

Las Cruces to Carlsbad – Desert Rainstorm.
Photo by Rachel
Las Cruces to Carlsbad – Guadaupe Mnts.
Photo by Rachel

Day Four
Albuquerque to Zion NP
Total Miles Hiked: 0 (14.6 overall)

Albuquerque to Zion – Entering Navajo Nation
Photo by Rachel
ABQ to Zion – Crooked View of Wahweap Bay, UT
Photo by Rachel

During the winter of 2010 (20Dime for those in the know), I finally got around to reading a book my father had lent to me about a year previous.  It was a daunting, historical tome, my dad’s favorite type of book, but I had never successfully gotten into the genera.  Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose was not only entertaining and informative, but really provoked my imagination.  I loved picturing all those brave men and their one female companion, Sacagawea, paddling up river with all their supplies until they reached the continental divide and the rivers changed directions.  I thought about how much I would have loved to be on that expedition.  I was even more excited the story also involved one of my favorite historical figures, Thomas Jefferson (T.J. for short, we’re that tight).  His major reservation about acquiring the Louisiana Purchase, which was a steal of a deal by the way, was that it would make America too large.  How could one government possibly oversee such a big area? Thus, Lewis and Clark’s mission was exploratory and scientific.  What did we just buy, and how can we connect it all?  One thing they really noticed was how many different plants, animals, rock forms, and ecosystems they passed through in their journey.  Lewis studied with renowned scientists of the day just to prepare for the trip.  He knew how to technically describe, identify, and preserve specimens.  Cool guy, right?  My favorite thing about the book was the experts from Lewis and Clark’s diaries (which they were both required to keep and hoped to publish).  They both described the changing landscape around them with such vivid 19th century pizazz. 

ABQ to Zion – Train through AZ

 

“The day cold and fair with a high easterly wind: we were visited by two Indians who gave us an account of the country and people near the Rocky Mountains where they had been.” ~Meriwether Lewis

ABQ to Zion – The Big Sky of the Hopi Reservation
Photo by Rachel

That’s what has been running through my head as Meridith drives and I snap pictures out the window of the car.  How cool and huge is our country?  How many amazing and diverse ecosystems will we be passing through?  We’ve already seen the low and high desert, the myriad ecosystems occurring at different elevations along the Navajo Sandstone within Zion, and soon we will be heading north, then to the Pacific Northwest where (spoiler) the USA houses it’s very own rainforest.  While we make our journey, I will be documenting the amazing things we see along our drive.  I know not everyone has the time to go on an epic road trip, but when you are driving from destination to destination in your daily lives, take the time to look out the window.  And remember what Woody Guthrie said.  This land was made for you and me.

Question of the Day:
What are your favorite roadside attractions and distractions?

Borrowed from PhD Comics: The Higgs Boson Explained

Yet another example of how I am constantly amazed by people’s ability to distill down difficult topics and concepts and present them in an understandable and entertaining manner. Jorge Cham of Piled Higher and Deeper  intersperses comics inspired by life as a grad stud with interviews at various universities and research institutions. This week he traveled to CERN to interview Particle Physicist Daniel Whiteson about the Higgs Boson and how the LHC is attempting to find it.

The combination of visual and audio information presented in such a unique and entertaining way gets me excited to learn about a new topic. I recommend watching the video in full screen to get the entire experience.

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Don’t forget to vote in this weeks poll. What sort of posts do you want to see on this blog? More like this one? Your opinion is important to me!

Scale Matters: What is Big?

If you haven’t checked out yesterday’s blog post, it’d be best to start there! This week we’re having a series of posts discussing scale and size. I’m hoping you all have your imagination hats handy. I never leave home without mine.

Earthrise – by William Anders

After discussing the tiny, microscopic aspects of our world yesterday it’s easy to see ourselves as these giants towering over these minuscule particles. In fact, when consider our role and impact on this planet, it’s hard not to feel big, brave, and onto of the world. We’ve explored the deepest trenches of the oceans, climbed to the top of the greatest mountains, and blasted to the moon and looked back at our planet.

And then, once more, we realized once more how small we are.

“The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” – Jim Lovell

Cloudy skies lend to the view. Looked like a painting.

My most recent ‘OMG – I’m tiny’ moment was the moment I walked up to the edge of the Grand Canyon and looked out at the natural wonder that stretched before me. I thought I had seen some pretty awe-inspiring, gigantic things in my life. Whales off of the South African coast. Giant Sequoias in California. But they all paled in comparison to  the giant painted canvas that is the grandest of all canyons. It’s important to note that the Grand Canyon is not the largest, longest, or deepest canyon, but is still rightly so the grandest.


We can move on to even more expressive depths. By stroke of luck, this week the man behind XKCD penned an impressive array of the depths of lakes and oceans. I was shocked to see that the Deepwater Horizon oil well went even deeper than James Cameron’s epic journey to the deepest trench in the ocean. Even a blue whale, the largest animal to have ever lived (that’s right, larger than all of the dinosaurs) is a mere blip on this scale. 

Click to enlarge.

What I’ve found is that there is always something bigger that serves to make me feel like a dust speck on a pretty blue marble. Even as far as our own solar system goes, we’re on the petite side. Jupiter dwarfs us and is promptly dwarfed in return by the Sun.

Our solar system to scale.

Well, at least we can rest assured that the star in our solar system is quite a whopper, right? I mean, the Sun, she’s pretty big. Look at her! No? Really, are you sure?

So there are suns that make our Sun appear to be a tiny dot. And THOSE ginormous suns are themselves dots among a giant expanse of galaxies. And those galaxies are specks in the great, vast, really, really, REALLY large expanse that is the universe.

And to think, that at one point at the very beginning of time, all of this (all the planets, stars, galaxies, etc) began at one unimaginably dense, infinitesimal point from which everything expanded.

It boggles the mind to try and comprehend these vast scales, but I suggest that you try. Go outside tonight and look at the stars, if you can, and think about the sizes and distances involved.

Remember from the video in this post, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, talks about how when most people think about the size of the universe that it makes them feel small. But when he thinks about the universe he feels big, huge even, as he is (as we all are) made of and are part of everything.

This website touches on some of the biggest objects in the universe. Can you try and guess what these structures are?

Questions of The Day:
Did you guess the biggest objects correctly? What were your guess and what surprised you about the answers?
Are you enjoying this weeks series on scale?
What is the biggest thing you’ve seen on our lovely planet?

If you still haven’t had enough of this topic, then I highly recommend the following video. It’s 45 minutes long but it can help you visualize and provide additional information and astounding facts.