#up goer five

[zweedsanimatiepoppetje1]

“If [the engine compartment] starts pointing toward space, you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today.“

- XKCD, Up Goer Five

Image credit to Jack Beyer and NASASpaceflight.com

[moral-autism]

“Ever Given” in up-goer-five talk

The day before today, a very important man-made-river was blocked in both directions by the really large big-boxes ship “Ever Given”. Today the ship is still stuck. The ship was boating in the man-made-river when it turned the wrong way and hit the edge, blocking the man-made-river. The ship may have done this because it lost power, and there were strong winds. The ship was number five in a group going north, with ten-and-five ships behind it when it hit the edge. Ships going in both directions were blocked, leading to over a hundred ships stuck waiting close together. The company “Ever-green” owns “Ever Given”.

If you look at “Ever Given” on a map of where ships are, there are some boats right next to it. You might think that the boats right next to it are also stuck. However, people say those boats are the kind used for pulling other boats. The ship needs help moving, so those little boats may be there to pull it. The ships that are waiting for “Ever Given” to stop being stuck are mostly waiting to the north or the south of the man-made-river, because if they cannot go through the man-made-river they do not want to go in it.

[drethelin]

[geekhyena]

Up-Goer Five challenge for Nature Dom: Describe the life cycle of a plant! Want to guess which one? ;p

[limerickmachine]

There once was an old stupid car That just wouldn't go very far Or turn left or right Try with all your might Held still with the force of a star

[isostatic-uplift]

The larger project that my senior thesis is part of, using only the thousand most common words:

The ground moves along places where it is broken.  Those places are called faults.  Sometimes faults get stuck and then move very fast, and that makes the ground shake. When faults move, they move other things (like long land forms where water goes) into different places than they were before.  When we know how far land forms have moved and how old the land forms are, we can figure out how fast the fault has been moving.  Some faults look like they are moving faster right now than they usually do and some look like they are moving more slowly.  Maybe faults sometimes do move more slowly for a while because other faults near them are moving faster instead. There are a few ways to figure out if this happens.  Some people look in the ground to see how often the ground moves.  We look at how long land forms are or where they are now instead of where they used to be and then see how old they are.  Knowing how long it took for the land forms to go that far along the fault tells us how fast, on the whole, the fault has been going since the land form first appeared.  Then we can see if that is different than how fast it goes at other times, and know if there is a problem in our understanding of how and why faults move.

[sweetteascience]

EXPLAIN A HARD IDEA USING ONLY THE TEN HUNDRED MOST USED WORDS

Today, in my scientific communication class, we tried to explain our research using only the 1,000 most commonly used words.  Check out my attempt, linked above.  I’d love to see other people give it a try!  Post yours up and tag us, so I can wander over and read them.  

Here was my go at it: “I study the land that is covered by water, but only sometimes. In these sometimes water covered places, strange things from far away can arrive and cause problems. I want to know how these strange things, especially the green growing things, change what sorts of tiny animals live under them. If these animals change, what does that mean for other animals who eat them? Would cutting down the strange green things change it back to the animals that were there before? We probably won’t stop having strange green things arrive by chance, so we better start understanding them.”

[limerickmachine]

There was an old man in a tree Who didn't know quite what to be He tried being small But was far too tall So climbed down to watch some TV