Entry tags:
Heiligenschein
So, as you might've guessed if you saw my last entry (offers still open, btw! We might actually end up getting a half-dozen or so internet people together on Saturday, or something) Mom and I were going to fly up to Boston for a week starting today in order to go to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stellar_dust's graduation and things. It was going to be my first plane ride in about twenty-five years!
I say "were", because the flight was cancelled so we're home again already. I should have expected this. The thing you have to understand, see, is that my mother has magic powers. We've known this since I was pretty small: our family likes camping and hiking and such things, and every time Mom goes camping, it rains. It started to be a running joke once we got into Girl Scout camping, and if Mom went, it rained; if we couldn't go, it didn't. I didn't really think it was much more than an observer bias sort of thing until I got old enough to go on a few camping trips with no parents along, and I scoffed at the boys who brought sleeping bags with no tents assuming they could sleep under the stars, and then it didn't rain.
My whole life I'd just assumed that part of planning a camping trip was assuming that, regardless of forecast or length of trip, you would spend at least one day and/or night dripping and miserable (not counting that time it snowed. In April.) I've had to readjust my entire packing strategy now to the idea that if I am going camping without Mom, there is actually a possibility that it won't rain, that if I plan ahead the weekend might actually turn out clear, that if the forecast a day before says dry it actually will be.
Well, we are slowly discovering that Mom's magic weather talent extends to plane trips, too. As in: if Mom is flying, her flight will be delayed substantially, and even odds you'll have to switch flights at some point. While we were sitting in the terminal tonight waiting to see if they'd ever let us board I asked her if she'd ever been on a flight where something didn't go wrong, and she couldn't come up with any.
On the plus side, we got to spend four hours sitting in the air-conditioned terminal rather than sweating it out in 97° at home.
Also, it gave me a chance to pull out my diffraction grating to take on our rescheduled flight tomorrow morning!
I decided that since this is my first flight since I've been old enough to really enjoy it, I was going to, and screw acting my age. So I pulled out my copy of Science from your Airplane Window by Elizabeth A Wood, and had enough time while waiting through delays that I read the whole thing this evening. Now I just wish the flight was going to be longer! (Also unfortunately having to switch flights means a later boarding and small chance of a window seat, but I can hope.)
The edition I have is an old Dover reprint - I love those Dover reprint pop-science books. Modern science writing tends to assume that either a) you already understand all the physics and math, or b) you aren't interested in the physics and math and they don't need to go into it. These books tend to be from a period when it was perfectly reasonable to write a book where the author will explain what a tangent is, and then go on to explain how to use it to calculate, say, distance to horizon based on altitude, or the diameter of a rainbow, without ever talking down to the reader.
Science From Your Airplane Window is basically a field guide to what is seen from a plane, with bonus physics & optics experiments using nothing but the book and the armrest of your seat (and some string, if you want instructions on how to turn it into a "bookback goniometer/accelerometer/clinometer/sextant". More books need to include instructions on how to convert them into scientific instruments.) It covers everything from Heiligenschein to crop marks in just enough detail - most of it was things I'd already covered in college geology/geography classes, but it is great to have the book to refresh my memory and check against, and there's no way I would have remembered the math formulae for calculating angles and distances and accelerations.
I hope I get to see a glory. I've wanted to see a glory for ages.
(Also if I do get a window seat, and somebody decides I'm a terrorist because I'm playing with a diffraction grating or a sextant, I will *facepalm* so very much. I'm half-convinced they made me go through the irradiating machine at security today just because I was wearing that might if you squinted have resmebled modest dress, that is, a peasant skirt and kerchief keeping my hair off my neck, as usual in +90 weather.)
stellar_dust's graduation and things. It was going to be my first plane ride in about twenty-five years!I say "were", because the flight was cancelled so we're home again already. I should have expected this. The thing you have to understand, see, is that my mother has magic powers. We've known this since I was pretty small: our family likes camping and hiking and such things, and every time Mom goes camping, it rains. It started to be a running joke once we got into Girl Scout camping, and if Mom went, it rained; if we couldn't go, it didn't. I didn't really think it was much more than an observer bias sort of thing until I got old enough to go on a few camping trips with no parents along, and I scoffed at the boys who brought sleeping bags with no tents assuming they could sleep under the stars, and then it didn't rain.
My whole life I'd just assumed that part of planning a camping trip was assuming that, regardless of forecast or length of trip, you would spend at least one day and/or night dripping and miserable (not counting that time it snowed. In April.) I've had to readjust my entire packing strategy now to the idea that if I am going camping without Mom, there is actually a possibility that it won't rain, that if I plan ahead the weekend might actually turn out clear, that if the forecast a day before says dry it actually will be.
Well, we are slowly discovering that Mom's magic weather talent extends to plane trips, too. As in: if Mom is flying, her flight will be delayed substantially, and even odds you'll have to switch flights at some point. While we were sitting in the terminal tonight waiting to see if they'd ever let us board I asked her if she'd ever been on a flight where something didn't go wrong, and she couldn't come up with any.
On the plus side, we got to spend four hours sitting in the air-conditioned terminal rather than sweating it out in 97° at home.
Also, it gave me a chance to pull out my diffraction grating to take on our rescheduled flight tomorrow morning!
I decided that since this is my first flight since I've been old enough to really enjoy it, I was going to, and screw acting my age. So I pulled out my copy of Science from your Airplane Window by Elizabeth A Wood, and had enough time while waiting through delays that I read the whole thing this evening. Now I just wish the flight was going to be longer! (Also unfortunately having to switch flights means a later boarding and small chance of a window seat, but I can hope.)
The edition I have is an old Dover reprint - I love those Dover reprint pop-science books. Modern science writing tends to assume that either a) you already understand all the physics and math, or b) you aren't interested in the physics and math and they don't need to go into it. These books tend to be from a period when it was perfectly reasonable to write a book where the author will explain what a tangent is, and then go on to explain how to use it to calculate, say, distance to horizon based on altitude, or the diameter of a rainbow, without ever talking down to the reader.
Science From Your Airplane Window is basically a field guide to what is seen from a plane, with bonus physics & optics experiments using nothing but the book and the armrest of your seat (and some string, if you want instructions on how to turn it into a "bookback goniometer/accelerometer/clinometer/sextant". More books need to include instructions on how to convert them into scientific instruments.) It covers everything from Heiligenschein to crop marks in just enough detail - most of it was things I'd already covered in college geology/geography classes, but it is great to have the book to refresh my memory and check against, and there's no way I would have remembered the math formulae for calculating angles and distances and accelerations.
I hope I get to see a glory. I've wanted to see a glory for ages.
(Also if I do get a window seat, and somebody decides I'm a terrorist because I'm playing with a diffraction grating or a sextant, I will *facepalm* so very much. I'm half-convinced they made me go through the irradiating machine at security today just because I was wearing that might if you squinted have resmebled modest dress, that is, a peasant skirt and kerchief keeping my hair off my neck, as usual in +90 weather.)