Run, Don't Walk

I don't generally exhort people to go out and buy things, but this will just have to be the exception. You might have heard a certain band interviewed on Science Friday last week. If you care about science at all, if you're remotely interested, have kids that you want to interest, or are just a bit of a fan, then you need to get the new disc from They Might Be Giants, Here Comes Science. Even if you're not a fan of TMBG - and to be honest, while I like them, they're not my favourite musical combo - the lyrical content is fantastic. Good solid science, presented for children and adults alike.

Favourite songs so far? "I Am a Paleontologist", "Why Does the Sun Shine?", "Photosynthesis", and, of course, "Here Comes Science". I laughed out loud at these songs: they're that brilliant. Frankly, lyrics like these that don't mince any words or pander to the nonsense of the superstitious are a necessity right now.

So, as I say, if you're a friend of Science (I think the capital "s" appropriate here), an FCD (Friend of Charles Darwin), a teacher, friend of reason, or anything like that, give these tracks a listen. The two-disc set includes a DVD with some quirkily animated versions of the songs, which I can't imagine kids not going for. I'll test it on ours this week-end and report the results (I could probably construct a doubly-blinded study, if I really wanted to put the effort into it...)

Of course, these things sound all the nicer on a nice 160GB iPod, which thanks to GHR I now have, and can fit my entire music and audio and podcast library onto, with all of ten gigabytes to spare. Best gift for no discernible reason ever - now how to reciprocate?

NASA Swag

Science Club at our humble little science store is a meeting held on Saturdays where school children from kindergarten through the eighth grade can come monthly to hear discussions of various science topics. This year, being not only the International Year of Science but also the International Year of Astronomy, the four hundredth anniversary of Galileo's observations with a telescope, the bi-centennary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (free etext from Project Gutenberg here), we've had a number of great topics to discuss. October's will be no exception. This month, the local NASA educational outreach officer is due to come in to discuss space flight and space exploration.

Unfortunately, she can't make two of the four planned meetings. Fortunately, the Amateur Astronomer is a keen student of space missions, so he's taking one presentation, and I am taking the other, my sole credential being with my life-long fascination with space travel (I was the kid with the scrapbook of Voyager mission newspaper cuttings, after all). Yesterday, we met with the NASA educator, and she presented us with some of the materials that we could use and distribute to the kids, including images, stickers, and experimental materials. The image cards are very cool, we have a poster of mission patches to show the kids, stickers to give out, and different ways to model the size of the solar system. Should be a good time.

We have some really great ideas about what to do for this presentation, so much so that it's going to be hard to cram it all into an hour. And no, I don't intend to answer the question about how one uses the toilet in space. Some mysteries are better left... well, mysterious, and I'd prefer not to stray into the scatological if at all possible. But that's just me.

Of course, we don't get to eat the space food that we will have to show. I understand that. It's expensive to put Smarties in a vacuum-sealed bag. But the idea of making ziploc instant pudding bags to simulate how you would eat when weightless sounds too good to pass up, so I think that we're doing that.

If you want to learn some more about NASA's educational outreach, check out the website (the local one for Missouri is here). And if you're a member of the Beagle's Science Club, be prepared for some fun in October!