February 28, 2014

Holy crap, folks. I have finished the storybooks. I sailed through the last one today and got all of the PDFs copied over to the teacher's folder on the shared drive. I am finally free. It feels good to be done.

When I finished with that I was also able to scan more sixth grade pictures for the slideshow. And I started looking through old pictures that are still on the shared drive. They go back to when the current sixth graders were in kindergarten so I decided to go through them to see if there were any good ones. I think I've found a few. I still need to mess around with actually making a slideshow, though. I don't think it'll be too hard but it's probably best not to leave it until the last minute. I also need to look into the yearbook website. There is still about two months until that is due (a little bit longer for the slideshow) but that time is going to fly by. Especially with two tests that will take up a lot of my time.

Other than storybooks and pictures, I had classes in the lab (including two that weren't on the schedule but had subs so it was an easy alternative I guess), helped with second grade reading groups (where we worked on present tense verbs), kind of helped the gifted teacher with computer and robot stuff, and we had a character assembly (that was short and sweet).

After school I bought Powerball tickets and was shown a form I could fill out which they can scan and give me my tickets. This seems a little easier than having to tell the cashier the numbers I want. The girl today asked me if I wanted to keep the sheet and I said no, but immediately wondered if it was reusable, which would make it even more convenient. So I'll need to look into that next time.

Tonight at work I watched Non-Stop and read the latest issue of National Geographic. Non-Stop did a really good job of making everyone look guilty. It is annoying when it is obvious from the beginning who the bad guys are going to be. But it is also kind of annoying when it could be anyone. It is a very enjoyable movie though. A good psychological thriller, if that is the correct term. It reminded me of my favorite episode of Doctor Who, when they are trapped in a train-like car the whole episode. National Geographic was really good this month. The cover story was about black holes, which are always fascinating, but there were also interesting stories about blue fin tuna, horses, and bats.

And I will end this with several things I read in National Geographic.

"On his laptop the night before, Wilson had programmed the satellite tag on this fish to pop off on June 1 of the next year. Nine months and two weeks from this day, in whatever time zone the bluefin happened to be, the tag would send an electric current through the metal pin attaching it to the leader and dart in the fish. The electrolyzed pin would begin to corrode. Within a few hours it would sever. A bulb on top of the tag is made of foam that's incompressible and therefore buoyant at any depth. The tag would rise through the cathedral rays of the ocean toward the brightness of the vault. On breaking the surface, it would begin uploading the encoded secrets of this bluefin – its travels, its seasons, its dive patterns – to a small constellation of Argos satellites orbiting overhead."

If the Earth got sucked into a black hole, it would collapse to approximately 0.7 inches across, while maintaining its current weight.

"A sugar-cube-size fragment of a neutron star would weigh a billion tons on Earth; a neutron star's gravitational pull is so severe that if you were to drop a marshmallow on it, the impact would generate as much energy as an atom bomb.

"But this is nothing compared with the death throes of a star some 20 times the mass of the sun. Detonate a Hiroshima-like bomb every millisecond for the entire life of the universe, and you would still fall short of the energy released in the final moments of a giant-star collapse. The star's core plunges inward. Temperatures reach 100 billion degrees. The crushing force of gravity is unstoppable. Hunks of iron bigger than Mount Everest are compacted almost instantly into grains of sand..."

The horse originated in North America, migrated to Eurasia over the Bering land bridge, eventually died off in North America, and wasn't reintroduced until European conquistadores and colonists came to North America.