Geography rambling 1/23/08

Just now Luke brought me the Borderline World Geography card game and we are sitting here playing for high stakes - who gets to choose the kind of cookies we make this afternoon. We just finished reading Around the World in a Hundred Years: From Henry the Navigator to Magellan by Jean Fritz - a very interesting book for both of us. Also in our Earth Science class, that I teach Luke and four other kids, we are making maps of the physical geography features of each continent. We downloaded black line maps from the internet and are filling them in.
One of the maps is a projection of the Pacific Ocean like you are looking at a globe from slightly below the level of the equator. It is bordered by Antarctica on the south, Asia on the west, and the Americas on the east, of course. But what interested me is that, from this projection, almost no land is visible. It strikes me as ridiculous to think that humans could be responsible for global climate change, when we're barely even in half of the picture. Actually, over 77% of the earth is covered with water, and of the land, only 4 percent is urban and suburban use, so less than 1% of the total surface of the earth is "peopled." Another 25% of the land is in agriculture, but that may actually reduce CO2 output since people are growing plants where, in many places, not much was growing before, and the plants take in CO2 (I'll have to see what studies have been done on this.)
It seems like if we are looking for a cause for climate change, we should look at really BIG stuff, like the thermo-nuclear reactor in the core of the earth, our enormous sun, the oceans, etc. Not us puny humans.
Quinn just brought me his BYU Physical Science book, wanting to go over the answers to the end-of-chapter questions. One of them was discussing how we know what we think we know, and mentioned Occam's Razor, which essentially states that when confronted with equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, choose the simplest one. Anthropomorphic climate change flunks that test. As William M. Gray, professor of atmospheric science and meteorologist at Colorado State University says: “Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential...."
BTW -- Luke beat me at Borderline. Maybe I shouldn't multi-task so much.

The Quest for Princess Peony

The kids made a movie over Christmas vacation, for which they made up a story line, drew characters and improvised a script. They had lot of fun with it.
Unfortunately, the first scene got cut off, in which the princess was walking through a field of flowers (were they peonies?) and was abducted by a dragon sent by Queen Malevolence....

Snow conquers all!

Around here when it snows everything comes to a screeching halt. It's GREAT! I had things planned all afternoon and evening, but, to quote an email I got, "for the sake of safety" everything is canceled. So I've been working on our blog, trying to make it functional before I announce it. Anyway, here's to SNOW!

What a Fun Thing!

Everyone wants to be listened to. Now we can get all the bees out of our bonnets (and manly hats) and you can love it or leave it! A win-win situation! The plan is that all of us will post our latest happenings, art work, cogitations, photos, projects, videos, and maybe home-made music clips if we can get it all to work right. So our friends and family will have one-stop shopping to know what's up around here.