Happy Pi Day!

  Today is March 14th.  To most people, it is just an ordinary day...but to the geeky among us (like me), it's PI DAY (3/14)!  (Coincidentally, it's also Albert Einstein's birthday!)  Yes, this annual celebration was established twenty-two years ago at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco in honor of the never-ending number pi.  Pi got its name from the Greek word for perimeter.  Pi is an irrational number, meaning its value cannot be expressed as a fraction, and its decimal form is a never ending number that never repeats.  Most of us know it is used in geometry, mathematics, science and engineering, and only know it to a few numbers:  3.14159265.  The first person ever to find the 3.14 number for pi was Archimedes in 250 B.C.  The farthest that pi has ever been expanded has been out to the five trillionth digit!  In honor of Pi Day, we made a pizza pie with a pi symbol made out of pepperoni.  Yum!  Tasty pi! 

   Check out these cool pi videos!

Sound Sketches

  Starting this week, I'm beginning to learn about sound for my science class.  Sounds are made by vibrations.  The amount of time between vibrations determines how high or how low the sound's pitch is and what the sound "sounds" like.  Sounds also differ between pleasant and unpleasant noises.  Jackhammers make an unpleasant noise and classical music makes a pleasant noise. On Tuesday, my mom and I went around to a few locations here in Richmond to see how their sound environments differed.   To grade the four locations we visited on how loud or quiet they were, we used a scale from zero to five.  Zero was absolute silence and five was harmful to hearing.

   First we went to the Richmond International Airport.  It was full of noises like buzzers, telephones, and people talking.  I gave it a four to five on our sound scale.  It could have been louder if it had been a holiday when lots of people travel or if it was summertime and everyone was taking a vacation.

A quiet day at the Richmond Int'l Airport

   Our next destination was Belle Isle where the rapids in the James River were loud and the current was strong.  It had rained the day before so there was a lot more water in the river.  We gave this destination a three to four rating because the river was so loud.

Looking out over the James River

 

Chillin' and enjoying the quiet at Chimborazo

Then we went to Chimborazo Park in Church Hill where there was some traffic noise but there was a lot of quiet natural noise.  It was so quiet that I was able to locate a woodpecker.  Chimborazo was our quietest site and I gave it a one to two rating.














   My final site was my own backyard which had some car noise from the street and the sound of people talking as they walked by the house.  I gave it a two rating even though it would be much louder in the summer when more people and more animals would be out and about.  Here's a video clip of how my yard sounds in the fall:

Looking at my patio and the brick wall next door

   In doing this sound project, I learned that there are lots of different sounds that occur during different times of day and throughout the year.  Earlier in the school year, I conducted a biodiversity project and discovered that the more biodiversity there is in an environment, the more natural sounds there are (like birds chirping or squirrels chattering).  In that project we visited nature parks, urban gardens, and corporate parks in the city. I learned how important it is to incorporate green spaces in metropolitan areas in order to beautify the city, provide living places for animals, and to give people quiet space to relax, have fun, and connect with nature.  The sounds in an environment affect how people feel about that environment.  If there is a lot of man-made noise, people and animals will like the environment less.  If there is a lot of natural sound, people and animals are more likely to want to go there.  Animals are more likely to live in biodiverse areas that are relatively quiet, and this has a positive affect on the people who enjoy the quiet of these natural habitats.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer

"There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable." (Mark Twain)

 

   The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a book by Mark Twain written in 1875 about a boy who loves to do what he is told not to do.   That naturally makes him a trouble maker who is always getting punished.  Once he was told to paint a big fence and, using trickery, got his friends to do it for him.  Tom's best friend is an outcast who has no parents and doesn't follow any rules.  He is named Huckleberry Finn.  All the kids' parents forbid their children to play with him. This made Tom want to play with him every chance he got.  Tom's life was all about having fun until one of his adventures gave him an unexpected surprise.  

   One night Tom and Huck went to the graveyard to test a superstition that if you throw a dead cat into the graveyard at midnight, the devil will take it and the cat will take away your warts.  When they entered the graveyard, they saw three men digging up a grave -- a doctor, Injun Joe, and Muff Potter.  Injun Joe demanded more pay than he was getting for digging the grave.  The doctor refused and started to fight Injun Joe in protest.  The doctor accidentally knocked out Muff Potter in the struggle.  Injun Joe then took Potter's knife and stabbed the doctor, killing him while Potter was unconscious.

   From this point onward, Tom begins to make a number of grown-up decisions.  When Muff Potter is tried for the doctor's murder, Tom speaks up and says that Injun Joe stabbed the doctor.  Tom and Huck had sworn not to tell anyone what they had seen, but Tom broke that oath to keep innocent Muff Potter out of jail.  Right after Tom spoke out in court, Injun Joe fled from town.

   Tom soon returned to being his crazy boy self, even though he he feared Injun Joe would kill him for testifying in court.  Tom decided to go looking for treasure one day in a haunted house near his town.  He and Huck went to the house and left their tools by the door while they went upstairs to explore.   They had just reached the second floor when Injun Joe entered the house with a bag of money.  As he started to bury it, there was a ping, and Joe picked up a chest of gold he had uncovered.  Joe decided to take the money and the gold to a new location because he felt like someone was watching him. 

   Tom eventually found the location of the hidden treasure during a horrible accident in which he and his friend Becky Thatcher got lost in a cave.  Even though Tom was experiencing this terrible situation, he was determined to find a way out of the cave.  As he looked for exits, he was surprised to see Injun Joe hiding out in one of the tunnels.  Thankfully Joe didn't recognize him and Tom slowly backed away.  After he and Becky escaped, Tom came back to the cave with Huck.  Together they went to where Tom saw Injun Joe.  There they found the treasure stashed in a secret tunnel.

   When Tom and Huck get rich at the end of the book, people's opinions about the boys change.  They began to admire and revere the boys.  Almost everything Tom and Huck did seemed important.  Eventually everybody in their town and in neighboring towns knew who the boys were.  Huck was expected to act like other people now.  He went to live with the Widow Douglas and had to live under her roof.   He didn't like being rich because now he couldn't smoke, cuss, skip school, or get dirty.  He felt like his freedom was being taken away.

   What I enjoyed about the book Tom Sawyer is that even though it was written 136 years ago, it had me laughing like crazy!  The book sounded like it actually could have happened.  I found it interesting how Tom developed his moral conscience throughout the book.  Moral conscience is your inner voice that tells you right from wrong.  The right choice is not always easy, like testifying in court or finding your way out of a cave.  Boys will be boys, but eventually we all have to make good decisions that show who we really are.  I can't wait to read our next Mark Twain book:  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn!