October Sky Movie Review

October Sky is a movie about a boy, Homer Hickman, and his friends, who worked to build a small working rocket. The movie is set in Coalwood, West Virginia in October 1957, when the news of the Soviet Union’s satellite, Sputnik 1, being successfully launched reaches Coalwood. Everyone watches the satellite cross the night sky, and afterwards Homer becomes inspired. Homer plans to build a rocket and enter the science fair. Everyone thinks he’s crazy when he teams up with Quentin Wilson, the school's math geek, who seems to know quite a bit about rockets. With the help of a few of his other friends they try their hand at building rockets and called themselves “The Rocket Boys”. His teacher Miss Riley is very supportive of his ambitions.

They fail several times, and later they are accused of starting a forest fire with one of their stray rockets. His father gets injured in an accident while working at the local coal mine, and Homer stops his school to work at the coal mine to support his family. Later, when his father is recovered, Homer is re-inspired by a Rocket Science book Miss Riley gave him, and he teaches himself the math needed to find a rocket’s trajectory. He then proves to the police that his rocket did not set the fire because the fire was to far away.

He returns to school, and he and his friends return to rocket making. They win the science fair, and Homer takes their rocket to the national science fair in Indianapolis. He wins the national science fair and returns home, a hero.

I liked this movie. It was very interesting, and I liked that it was based on a true story. This movie is well done and captivating. I liked Miss Riley a lot. She was a very happy and supportive character. The Rocket Boys are funny but determined. Homer is a smart, strong willed, and inspiring character.

I liked the movie because it was interesting. I find movies about science interesting, and I also like the story equality to it. I like documentaries, but I like movies that are based on true stories but are told in story form. October Sky is a story. I thought it was cool, and I would recommend it to a lot of people

If a Tree Falls in the Forest - Does it Make a Noise?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear does it make a noise? I believe that is does because the other option is just too (there's no other word for it) weird. Galileo disagrees with me, as does the rest of the scientific world. The reason I mention Galileo is because he was the first to suggest the strange concept that trees don't make noise unless someone is there to hear it.

First off, what is noise; what is sound? Sound is a wave, a vibration of the air. This is usually known as, you guessed it, a sound wave. These waves then vibrate the ear drum, the information is sent to the brain, and the brain interprets the information. This is known as sound.

Galileo said that if there is no one there to interpret these waves, they aren't sound. In other words, when a tree falls it creates a type of wave. Galileo said that eardrums are part of the process of making sound. If ears plus waves equals sound, then waves with no ears are just waves, not sound. So, calling these waves "sound waves" is false.

Now here's my argument. Since waves are needed to make sound, if someone were there when said tree fell, they would hear the thump. Since ears are not needed to make the waves, then the waves are still made. Therefore, there is a possibility of sound being heard. So, in my eyes (or shall is say, ears), that means the falling tree does make what we call sound.

I believe my philosophy to be sensible, if not scientifically correct. I suppose, it really depends on your definition of sound. Is sound what happens when the waves collide with your eardrums, making them vibrate, or is sound the actual waves even before they hit your eardrum? This is an intriguing and puzzling subject, yet it seams so simple. What do you think? What is your definition of sound?



Sources:
Zoom: How Everything Moves: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees By Bob Berman, Page 223, First Edition Hardcover, Published in 2014 by Little, Brown and Company

By Aurora J. A. Pass

The Zen of Python

This poem is can be found on Python by typing into your Python Terminal: import this

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

by Tim Peters

Fossils

Older than books,

than scrolls,

older

than the first

tales told

or the

first words

spoken

are the stories

in forests that

turned to

stone

in ice walls

that trapped the

mammoth

in the long

bones of

dinosaurs--

the fossil

stories that begin

Once upon a time

by Lilian Moore