Favorite RCL Posts:
Debate Analysis Part II- Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium
This post explored an interesting event that occurred last fall. During the Presidential Debates, Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly got together and had a real, honest debate about politics. While I don’t particularly love politics, I do love Jon Stewart and have a mild seizure every time I see O’Reilly. This analysis discussed how honest debates like this are an important example of a civic activity- everyone gets together and has a real discussion about how our country should run. It’s one of the most important topics one can ask. I realized that Bill O’Reilly wasn’t really truly evil or uneducated (though recent comments have made me rethink that…) and Jon Stewart can be wrong upon occasion. This blog post really made me think hard about my political beliefs and what civic opportunities are.
In “Priorities,” I discuss politics and the news. While I like keeping up to date with news stories, sometimes it’s painful. Being informed is one of the most basic civic responsibilities that we as Americans possess, but very few people truly are informed about current events. Sometimes I can see why. Watching the media pounce on one news story, kill it, eat it, and puke it back up for weeks at a time gets really old. It seems like you can’t really get an idea of what’s going on in the world by looking at the news- all they talk about is the latest scandal or who said what about their political foes, etc.
Favorite Passion Posts:
In “Twinkle, Twinkle” I explained why it is that stars seem to twinkle (“scintillate” in astronomese) in the night sky. It’s basically similar to looking across a hot parking lot and seeing heat waves going up, but on a larger scale with a smaller temperature differential. This is what I like doing in my Passion Posts- taking simple astronomical things that we all take for granted and explaining them to my friends. It’s this kind of explanation that gets people interested in science. For example, when most people look at the stars twinkling, they don’t think about why they do. They just do. Really, we’re basically like goldfish looking up and out of our little bowl at the rest of the room.
In this blog post, I discuss eclipses and what they are caused by. Not only does it include one of my favorite videos ever, but eclipses are one of the things I’ve never seen before that I’d dearly love to. The conditions necessary for a complete solar eclipse are so tenuous that I find it just incredible that they even occur. They’re also kind of depressing, though- within a few million years, the Moon will have been pulled too far away from Earth by tidal forces (I’ll explain in a blog post this spring, most likely) for them to even occur.
