In the absence of anything coherent to write, I shall draw on some random bits of journalings to compose this random post.
In September for Biodiversity and Society class we went to the RIT Bird Observatory to see some bird banding. They have three sets of mist nets to catch birds in, and then they bring them back, measure them, and band them. I took a few pictures. Afterwards I looked up their web site. They have some pictures of how to distinguish older and younger birds of different species. In one of them I noticed that the fingernail of the person holding the bird had a lot of parallel ridges, more (or more pronounced) than I have on my own. Immediately the word “striated” popped into my head. I couldn’t place the meaning, so I looked it up. It turns out that that’s exactly the word for that type of formation. Somehow I unconsciously knew the proper word without knowing I knew it!
October 4th was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1 , so the Imaging Science department had a Sputnik party. Unfortunately, it was at 3, right in the middle of class, but we got done about ten after so I could go over there. I missed the majority of it, but I did catch some of Roger Easton talking about his personal memories of Vanguard , the US response to Sputnik. It seems his father , in addition to being the inventor of GPS , was directly involved in the Vanguard project. On December 6, 1957, they tried to launch the TV3 satellite into orbit. The first stage guidance system failed 2 seconds after liftoff, and it crashed to the ground and exploded . However, the satellite itself fell clear of the explosion and continued functioning, though too badly damaged to be reused. Roger said that the next morning he woke up and his dad said, “Go look in the kitchen.” There in a cardboard box was the TV3 satellite itself. It now resides in the Smithsonian.
I think I multitask too well. I drove from RIT to the library yesterday, and on the way back I decided to avoid some of the traffic on Jefferson by taking some residential roads leading from 15A to Hylan. Just as I turned in there, Bible Story by Scott Krippayne came on the radio, so I started singing along. Shortly thereafter I got engrossed in checking the map to make sure I knew where I was going. Several minutes later when I was back on bigger roads I put down the map and discovered that I was still singing. Apparently I was too busy driving and checking the map to pay any attention to what my mouth was doing, so it kept right on going since I knew the song so well. I’ve done that plenty of times before; I just noticed it rather vividly today. The trouble is, I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think I do that in church sometimes too; letting my mind wander while still singing along. If I’m not paying attention, is it still worship? I don’t want to sing for the wrong reason…