Last Week in Review.

Hello Troops,
We had a good overnight camp on Friday. The Cherry Hill kids were well behaved and did well in the ships. The staff performed brilliantly as usual.

I was under the weather battling the onset of another cold, and with that another sore throat to take the place of strep throat from two weeks before and the Cold of all Colds I caught just after Christmas. There must be generations of germs lurking at the Space Center. You scrub everything with Lysol wipes only to find you’re getting sick again. I’m thinking more drastic action is required. Perhaps gasoline and a match might do the job :)

I want to thank the staff and volunteers for overlooking my abruptness during the camp. I can be sharp with I’m not feeling well. It’s not easy being hyped and all smiles when all you want to do is crawl into bed. I also should apologize to our programmers. I had a meeting with them Saturday afternoon. They attempted to show me their latest programming creations written in Cocoa for the Galileo. They spoke while I tried to listen. I did my best to look enthusiastic but couldn’t keep my eyes open the whole time. It’s kind of discouraging when you’re proudly showing off your the results of your hard work and your boss keeps drifting away into a stupor.

The Fire Alarm

Saturday morning around 9:15 A.M. Bracken kicked me out of the Briefing Room so he could lead his Odyssey crew on an away mission into the Voyager. I went next door into the school’s library where I had two pillows on the ready for a quick lay down (that’s where I go for the 5 to 15 minutes it takes for either the Odyssey or Phoenix to do their “Landing Parties”).

I layed down near the Library’s door, closed my eyes to recapture a few minutes of shut eye lost during the overnight camp. I usually only get 4-5 hours of sleep, add a full 12 hours on Saturday and I need a few minutes from time to time. Just as I bridged the gap between the real world and unconsciousness I was pulled back to complete alertness by the sound of the school’s fire alarm.
“Bracken!” I shouted, knowing what had happened. Bracken went overboard on smoke from the Voyager’s smoke machine. The smoke from a smoke machine can set off the school’s alarms if you don’t have the smoke detectors covered correctly.

I jumped up and ran into the school’s office. I punched in the code on the alarm box to silence the alarm and that was just the first step. As all the campers filled out of the school in their Space Center uniforms I picked up the phone and dialed Pleasant Grove’s fire department to tell them to ignore the alarm. If I didn’t catch them in time we’d have the entire fire dept, police dept, and most likely the community orchestra on our doorstep making for a very embarrassing explanation.

The next step in canceling an alarm was to call the alarm company and give them the school’s password. After that I was back in the office punching in the code to rearm the sensors throughout the school. After that, I unlocked the central fire panel and complete the three steps to reset the alarm in the building. The reset stopped the flashing fire strobes throughout the building.

I was not a happy Space Center Director. I gave Bracken a few of those special looks a boss has in his inventory of “I’m not happy about this situation” looks.

Bracken, in his defense, apologized and explained that he didn’t use any more smoke than I use during the day missions. Jon appeared with the cracked cover used to cover the detector in the Voyager. It appears the damaged cover let enough smoke through to trigger the alarm.

As much as I hated to do it, I had no choice but to let Bracken off the hook.

OTHER NEWS.

• The old Galileo is gone as stated in an earlier post this week. The cafeteria has room enough to hold the field trip classes for lunch. No more feeding them in the Discovery!
• I heard back from the Nigeria Space School. They are interested in sending some of their teachers to the Center to learn about our simulators.
• We had our largest classes in this week from Westfield Elementary. We needed to use the Galileo two days in a row for field trips.
• We did a few repairs on the front of the Odyssey. The new Galileo is having its torpedo launchers installed. Just another cool feature of this new awesome ship.

Well, We start a new week at the Space Center.

Are we ready?

Mr. Williamson

Home Shopping at the Space Center's Imagainarium! The Food Lift. Buy Yours Now.

Hello Troops,
Something new from the Space Center's Imaginarium and Center for Wonder Studies. Buy your Food Lift now at the Space Center's extensive Gift Shop. I have one and can't imagine returning to the old way of eating with a knife, fork and spoon. Come on, our traditional eating utensils were used for hundreds of years. It's time to modernize. We preach the 23rd Century. Well its time to take eating to the technological age.

Imgaination running amok at the Imgainarium. Mine sure does.

Mr. Williamson

The Galileo is Gone. RIP

Hello Troops,
Just a quick note that I'll write more about later. The Old Galileo is gone. Last night the purchasers arrived during our 2:00 - 6:00 P.M. field trip. They dismantled the Galileo and removed it piece by piece from the cafeteria (causing damage to the door and door frame I might add).

It is the end of an era. Kind of sad in a way. We wish the old ship well in its future escapades throughout the galaxy and we are happy we have the new Galileo to take its place.

On a brighter note, with the new Galileo gone we can start feeding our field trip students in the lunchroom again. There's room to put down two more tables. No More Using Discovery as a Lunchroom! No more muck on the carpet! No more spilled milk!

I'm smiling about this.

Mr. Williamson

Openings For Friday's Overnight Camp

Hello Troops,
We have openings for this Friday's Overnight Camp that just came up. The Camps starts at 7:00 P.M. and ends Saturday at 10:00 A.M. Normal cost is $43 per person. Cost for our Blog Readers is $38.00 per person. The Camp is open to anyone between the ages of 10 and 14 years old.
If you'd like to attend please send the following information:

Camper's Name:
Phone Number:
Age:
Email Address:

It is very short notice. I'll need your response no later than Friday morning, 9:00 A.M.

Thanks!
Mr. Williamson

From the Inagainarium's Amazing Science Dept. How the Chilean Quake Moved an Entire Planet

By Richard Harris
NPR.org

March 3, 2010

The magnitude 8.8 quake in Chile this weekend apparently changed the length of the day — and shifted the way the Earth wobbles, according to scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Not that anyone noticed. Here's why scientists figure that the Earth changed the way it rotates: It turns out our planet doesn't spin like a perfect top; it actually wobbles a bit.

"The consequence of that is that the rotation pole actually moves, and it moves over the area about the size of a tennis court," says Richard O'Connell at Harvard University. This is called the Chandler wobble. And back in the mid 1970s, O'Connell wrote a paper that showed how big earthquakes keep kicking the Earth and by so doing keep the Earth wobbling.

The Earth's Wandering, Wobbly Axis

Now we know that earthquakes aren't alone in keeping that wobble going. It's also propelled by sloshing ocean waters and by huge air masses like typhoons. All this shifting around can also change the speed at which the Earth spins. And that of course affects the length of a day.

So how much difference can an enormous quake make? Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory figure that the shift caused by Saturday's quake in Chile should have shortened each day on Earth by about a millionth of a second. They also figure that the Earth's wobbly axis should have shifted by about 3 inches within that tennis-court-size area where it tends to wander.

But did it? It's Brian Luzum's job at the U.S. Naval Observatory to keep tabs on the Earth's rotation and orientation. And he says even the best instruments in the world can't measure a change in day length as small as a millionth of a second.

The Wobble Doesn't Show Up In Data

It is possible to measure the Earth's wobble pretty precisely. But considering how many things affect that wobble, it's hard to see the effect of the quake as well.

"So on a day-to-day basis, we actually will see changes on the order of 2 to 3 inches happening every day, and to try to pick out this signal in and among all the other signals, is just not really feasible," Luzum says.

The one hope was that the quake changed the wobble so abruptly that it would show up on the data.

"That's what you'd like to see to give you that eureka moment, but when we do look at the data, no such jump exists," Luzum says.

Theory says it happened, but the observations thus far aren't good enough to back that up.

Melting Ice Also Moved The Earth

But if these planetary effects are trivial on a day-to-day basis, they can really add up over geological time. Adam Maloof at Princeton University notes that ice has been melting over the past 12,000 years, as we come out of the last ice age. That's changing the Earth's orientation by about an inch, each and every year.

"You can imagine that as the ice melts you are redistributing the mass on the surface of the Earth," Maloof says. "So all this water that's caught up in the ice in poles is melting and moving into the oceans at lower latitudes."

And if you go way back in time — like to a period 800 million years ago — this kind of movement was dramatic. Over the course of a few million years, the land mass at the North Pole shifted monumentally: It slid south by 50 degrees.

"That's basically like taking Paris to the equator," Maloof says.

Nobody knows why this happened, though Maloof says one idea is that a huge volcanic plume, like the one that created the Hawaiian Islands, developed near one of the poles and that lopsided mass forced the Earth to rotate.

"It would have had major ramifications for sea level, climate, landscape, equilibrium, all sorts of effects like this," he says.

As for the effect of one quick catastrophic event: It's fair to say the Chilean quake touched hearts around the world more tangibly than it changed the spin of our planet.

A Taste of What's To Come in Utah.

Hello Troops,
Once again we battle ignorance in a never ending quest to move our civilization into the last frontier of space. Today's battle may be our most difficult yet. Arriving at 9:30 A.M. comes the dragon of we feared most of all. A creature we knew existed but dared not speak its name. It is the beast called Massivo - the beast with over 32 heads! Today we see our largest classes yet at the Space Center. Westfield Elementary School in Alpine will be coming with two sixth grade classes of 36 and 37. Tomorrow we have the same.

Classes this big are difficult to control in the classroom and even worse when they're crowded into the Starlab. Their missions take longer to tell because of the extra time it takes to load them into the ships. We open the Galileo for all classes larger than 32. Running the Galileo during the school day is a beast unto itself. The Galileo competes for the crew's attention with the explosion of noise coming from Central School's cafeteria at lunchtime.

With educational budget cuts, and a legislature terrified of raising taxes, our class sizes will grow next year. Classes larger than 32 will become the norm making the teacher's job of individualized education impossible. Education suffers thus shortchanging our kids future. Its called stack 'em deep and teach 'em cheap.

We will make do at the Space Center as we continue to provide the best field trip in the State of Utah (at least according to the majority of teachers and students that attend).

I want to thank you volunteers and staff for your continued support of the program. I want to thank your parents for their support by letting you work and the miles driven each month transporting you back and forth. We couldn't do what we do without you and all the donated hours given to the Center and our visiting guests.

I want to thank the staff for always going the extra mile even on very little pay.

Now, its to work

Mr. Williamson

Oh, I almost forgot to include this from the Space Center's Institute of Wonder. Another picture from the Imaginarium.

I call this, The Statue that Got Away.

From the Imaginarium's "You've Got to be Kidding Department"

I thought at some point in my life I could honestly say that "I've seen it all." Well Perhaps today is that day........Ridiculous.

Of course wouldn't we all want a potty that flushed automatically and gave you a good cheer at the end? You know, a good self esteem boost issued periodically throughout the day?

Mr. W.

P.S. this was one of those Facebook ads found on my page. Is Facebook zeroing in on my age or did they pull this from my years at BYU.....hmmmmm?

From the Imgainarium's Dept. of Useless Signs