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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Waaay off the Richter
Monday. 11.13.06 10:29 pm
I'm learning about how we figure things out about the surface of Venus, considering that the whole damn planet is covered in clouds and they absorb, scatter and reflect every photon of light that tries to come through without transmitting a bit. (well, as little as possible.) This has of course created a runaway greenhouse effect on the planet, which has finally resulted in a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead, and a surface pressure more than 90 times the surface pressure here on Earth. There is lightning on Venus, which is pretty cool, and some rain... but the rain is made of sulfuric acid. Talk about acid rain. The landers that the Soviets put down on the surface lasted only hours before the intense atmosphere fried them completely. So how can we learn about the surface then, if it is impossible to see? Pure. Ingenuity. Of Smart People. Who are not Me.

First of all we use radar. Radar is a type of light which has a really long wavelength, kind of like radio waves. So while a photon of light with a high energy and a short wavelength zig-zags really fast and runs into all kinds of particles on its way to the surface (thus getting scattered away uselessly) radar takes a much more direct path through all the particles and therefore a lot more of the radar beam gets through. If you can bounce radar off the surface and recollect it you can figure out all of the topography on the surface, and to some extent, how rough the surface is (a smooth surface returns a strong signal because it's like a mirror, a rough surface doesn't return as much signal because it's like a broken mirror in that it returns light in every direction, not just the one where the light came from). We use other things, like the reflective and electric properties of minerals, to learn all kinds of things using just radar.

BUT GET THIS: We want to know something about the seismic activities going on in the crust of Venus (the "venusquakes"). But if we put a seismometer on the surface, it's going to be crushed and fried in hours. What to do? These random guys figured out that if you have an atmosphere that is as thick as Venus', the seismic shaking from a quake, that is, the wave of energy passing through the crust, actually continues propagating through the air above the crust after it hits that interface in a measurable way (because the atmosphere is so thick!!). The crustal wave can actually transfer some of its energy to the air, kind of like shaking out a rug underwater and imparting the waves of the rug to the water around it. So by looking for these waves, we can tell what is going on beneath the surface of Venus without even having to look through its atmosphere.

These people are so crafty!

btw- have you ever looked into the sky and seen a flat sheet of cloud that looks like a bunch of parallel bands? These clouds are located at a place in the sky where two air masses of different densities are moving past each other. The interaction of the two densities along a plane causes waves to form. These are the same kind of waves that happen between sea and sky, only not as extreme because the densities of the air are not as different from each other as both are from the density of water. You can also get waves like these from different densities of water, so they are essentially submarine waves. During WWII, submarines wanted to get into the Mediterranean, but they couldn't turn on their engines or they would be detected by sonar. So they devised a plan where they would go down to the depth where two different densities of water causes submarine waves to go through the Straight of Gibraltar. So essentially they surfed into the Mediterranean, on waves 100s of feet below the surface!!

That's why waves are soooo coool.
2 Comments.


:P Waves are cool because they are like totally wavy though. So other than that.
» ryan444123 on 2006-11-13 11:57:01

:)
I learned most of this in Astronomy and I still can't stop looking skwards at night.
» Helena on 2006-11-15 07:53:46

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