Noah’s Blog

In preparation for an exam later this week, I am studying poetry. This might be called, “The Very Last Possible Moment” approach to studying. I decided to try out the Open School’s Grade 7 Poetry unit.

I found it pretty uninformative, except that I learned the meaning of a really great word, onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia, which is a word you can say all day long without ever getting tired of it, means “the use of a word that sounds like its meaning.” For example, whoosh, wham, blam, squish, crunch, tick tock, and pop.

The Grade 7 poetry unit presented a poem by Emily Dickinson, called Hope. Here are two verses:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

What I noticed about this poem is that hope is a thing with feathers. It’s a bird. Birds fly; hope flies (but hopefuly never away). It’s sweetest in the storm, meaning that you have hope when things are very bad. (If you need hope when things are very good, then that’s kind of strange: what are you hoping for? To win the lottery?)

Completely by chance, I found Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven just after finishing the poetry unit. The Raven is much more fun to read than Hope, because it is creepy. Here is a sample:

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

Poe’s poem is also about a bird. Except that this bird represents hopelessness. It has feathers. It flies. It keeps the narrator company in the the dark night and gale of his sour soul. But it is not sweet. It is the opposite of Dickinson’s feathered thing.

I prefer the raven over Dickinson’s bird because it keeps saying, “Nevermore.” This drives the narrator to madness, but at the same time the narrator is pretty silly to constantly ask questions when he knows that the bird can only answer, “Nevermore.” The bird only has one word. Or possibly, only one word for the poet.

Will he ever learn another word? Nevermore.

“Take thy beak from out my heart,” the narrator screams at the bird. This is not the way that Dickinson treats her bird. Her bird perches on the soul, not like a deranged pecking “thing of evil.”

I think that The Raven is more fun to read (nobody mention this to Dickinson, please). It’s more fun to read because there are a lot of tongue twisters, alliteration, repetition, rhymes, and even ironies in The Raven. Plus, it is very long. Plus, it’s very long. Plus, it’s very long.

-Nevermore!

Today, Prime Minister Harper asked the Governor General, Michelle Jean, to suspend the Parliament, so that the Opposition parties would stop arguing with him and go home. He probably finds debate a little too tiring and prefers dictatorship.

The Governor General could have declined and turned the government over to the coalition. This would have meant that Canada would be led by New Democrats, the Bloc Quebecois, and the Liberals. But she didn’t. She disbanded the Parliament.

If Canada was ruled by the New Democrats, the Liberals and the Bloc Quebecois, it would be very liberating. I would probably be a lot freer and have more human rights. Quebec could separate from Canada. And the sport of political debatemanship and name-callingmanship could continue.

I don’t think that disbanding Parliament is very democratic. (The New Democrats would probably be very upset. (Why are they called the New Democrats? What’s the difference with Old Democrats?))

Disbanding Parliament is kind of like sending everyone to their bedrooms. How are they supposed to come to an agreement when they are sent off in different directions?

Email is the answer! Or a virtual government! A virtual government would be great! People are much more polite in vclasses. If politicians could be polite in political vclasses, then Canada would be much better and we wouldn’t have to spend so much money (and carbon) flying people back and forth to Ottawa just to bicker.

In Andy and Raven’s e=mc2 class, I have been assigned the lifelong intensive study of fairy tales. “Coincentally”, there are no books of fairy tales in my house. Obviously, they have figured out where my learning gaps are and are determined to fix them.

Luckily for me, a sub category of fairy tales is fantasy. , I have a lot of fantasies in my house ansI am a big fan of fantasy books. The reason why fantasy can be considered a sub category of fairy tales is that there was no genre called “fantasy” until recently. Previous books, like The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, were considered to be fairy tales.

Today, I am going to write you about The Princess Bride, which is a fantasy and also one of my favourite  movies. It is based on a book by William Goldman, and is the story of Wetsley, “The Dread Pirate Roberts”, who attempts to rescue his beloved, Buttercup, from the evil Prince Humperdinck. Like other fairy tales, this story has a beautiful princess. But, luckily, it also has swordplay, battles of wits, fishing ship chases, ROUSes (rodents of unusual size),  a great amount of humour, and two morals:

“Never start a land war in Asia.”

“Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.”

Why is this fairy tale good for today’s world? Our world doesn’t contain ROUSes, but we have a gigantic world depression, bird flu, CO2, cigar(ette)s and Noahstein.

We can learn how to handle this brutal planet by studying the character of Westley. This is what we learn:

-There’s no reason to wear a black mask, but they’re very comfortable and everyone in the future should wear one.

-If you’re a very good fencer, you should fence with your left hand, otherwise it would not be fair.

-Make sure you’ve taken rock climbing lessons, because you never know when you will have to climb the Cliffs of Insanity.

And, most important of all:

-Always develop an immunity to Iocane Powder BEFORE you match wits with a Sicilian.

watch?v=TUee1WvtQZU

I have come up with an exciting and useful formula. You can use it to find the square of the next number in a series. For example, if you have 16, and you find out that the square root of 16 is 4, then you can use that square root to find out what the square would be of 5.

As an example:

sqrt(16) = 4.

4 + 1 = 5.

Five squared would be: 4 times 2, plus 4 squared, plus 1, which equals 25. So, starting with 16, we would know that the square of the number that is its square root plus one, is 25.

My law is the following:

To find the next square number ((x + 1)^2) of x, you can use this equation: sqrt(x)*2 + x + 1 = (sqrt(x) + 1)^2.

I can prove my above law.

In my example, y = sqrt(x).

y^2 + 2y + 1 = (y+1)^2

(y+1)^2 = (y+1)*(y+1).

(y+1)*(y+1) = y*y, + y*1, + 1*y, + 1*1

y*y + 1y, + 1y + 1*1 = y^2 + y + y + 1 = y^2 + 2y + 1

There you go. Both sides are equal.

( And how does this make you feel?)

Alright. You’re reading Algebra for Dummies and you come across this question:

A cat is stalking a mouse. They are about 100 inches apart. The cat creeps closer, one tenth of the distance with each step. When it is six inches away from the mouse, it will be close enough to pounce. How many steps (including decimals) will the cat have to take before it is six inches from the mouse?

If you turn this into an equation, this is what you will get:

100 (9/10)^n = 6

The book uses trial and error to find that it takes approximately 27 steps. (Twenty-six steps brings you not quite to six inches.)

This is not extremely helpful. Who wants to spend all day doing trial and error? I will give you a secret tip for geniuses (which is why it wasn’t in the Dummies book)! To find the correct, exact answer, you can use logs.

What is a log? A log is a function that, when you give it two numbers, will return an answer that tells you the exponent that you can put into the first number to give you the second number.

For example, 16 equals four squared. So, log(4,16) equals 2, because four squared is 16.

Back to the cat. And the mouse. To find the answer without using trial and error, we can use algebra to move the 100 from the left side of the equation to the right side. That gives us:

(9/10)^n = 6/100

An interesting property of logs is that log(x,x^n), where both x’s have the same value, will give you n. If you think about this, you can probably see why.

Alright, so, log( (9/10) , (9/10)^2 ) will give you 2, and, log( (9/10) , (9/10)^n ) = n. If we know that the right side of the equation is 6/100, or .06, then the equation can be rewritten log( (9/10) , (9/10)^.06 ) = log(.06)

If you enter this information into your calculator, you find out that the cat has to take .06 steps. But this can’t be right! That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Let’s take a look at the original equation:

100 (9/10)^n = 6

We can use algebra to make this:

(9/10)^n = 6/100

We can log both sides with the same first number.

log((9/10), (9/10)^n) = log((9/10), 6/100)

aha! We forgot to log both sides! We can use our calculators to find the right side:

log((9/10), (9/10)^n) = 26.70270451 (approx)

Using the afformentioned law,

n = 26.70270451

Good! that’s more like it! the cat has to take 26.70270451 steps to get to six inches. To test this, we can do:

100(9/10)^26.70270451

And I got:

6.

6 inches. Therefore, 26.70270451 steps is the correct number. I’m going to go try this on my cat, Snowflake, who is currently fighting with my - very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very fat - other cat, Smokey

Hey guess what my older brother Sam made? A program for creating Mars Rovers. And for creating robots and vehicles that can move around on their own and figure things out for themselves.

But the great thing about it is that you can turn them on and see how well they do. Their motors work and all the laws of physics apply.

Last night, my other brother, Jacob, used Sam’s program (Golems) to test an engineering homework problem. He built a tachometer, which is an instrument that can measure how fast something rotates. He and David also made a meganaught, which is a big cannon on wheels.

I have made a roller coaster, a Rube Goldberg device, and a car.

You can build anything you want to build. Just download Golems Universal Constructor here. It works for Macs and PCs. Don’t worry about downloading it. It has been tested on lots of computers and is perfectly safe.

I have read five chapters of David Bodanis’ book, e=mc2, and this is what I have learned about life in Science:

-Science is all about backstabbing and frontstabbing people.

-Old guys get all the credit.

-Young guys do all the work.

-If you don’t have the same top notch education as other scientists, they won’t listen to you.

-If you have a new idea, nobody will believe you, even if you prove it, so you should expect to be laughed at.

-You can expect to get credited for your work only after you are dead, especially if your discovery is really important.

-You can expect to get famous for your work only after you are dead, especially if your discovery is really important.

-The more brilliant you are, the more likely you are to start your life as menial clerk, be beheaded on the guillotine, or end up as the director of the port of Copenhagen.

-Never say that somebody else’s idea is dumb, particularly if you are famous, because you might end up in a book someday.

-Science is all about backstabbing and front stabbing people.

Today, I went to the “Join Hands for Justice” rally on Davie Street. Hundreds of people showed up and held hands and walked up Davie Street from the beach to Hornby. Many carried rainbow coloured flags.

Why? To get rid of prejudice.

About two weeks ago, a pilot named Jordan Smith got beat up on Davie Street for holding hands with his boyfriend. He ended up with a broken jaw.

Everybody turned out for the rally to show that the community is safe and violence is not tolerated. There were speeches at the end, too. But I missed some of them because I had to go to fencing.

PS. If you look closely, you will see that I am wearing my EBUS Academy sweatshirt!

“Beam me up, Scotty!”

“Er… Which way is up?”

This conversation never happens in Star Trek. Why? Because Scotty always knows which way is down. His feet are always planted on the floor.

This is puzzling. Having watched several NASA missions, I know that astronauts tend to float around. So, either there is gravity where no man has gone before (Deep Space 9), or the Enterprise makes its own gravity.

How is it that the Enterprise has gravity? Clearly there must be a “Gravity Generator”. But, how exactly, does it work? It must make subjective gravity (subjective gravity: gravity points down for each individual person), or the Enterprise’s thrusters wouldn’t be all that useful. Why? Well, I’ll show you!

There are two problems with the objective gravity generator (objective gravity: gravity points towards the gravity generator). The weightiest problem is mass. To have a generator focus gravity on itself, this would effectively increase the mass of the generator so much that the Enterprise may as well have a neutronium ball implanted in the bottom of the hull. The thrusters would have to be 10^800 times better, to get any decent propulsion, and the hull would need to be 10^34 times stronger! (I made up these figures, but they’re approximately right.)

The objective generator would create gravity, but the gravity would be skewed, which is the second problem. People near the generator would stand sideways.

The advantage of the subjective generator is that people could stand upright. The generator would have to be able to create gravity for every person and object, even people who had just arrived on the ship, and even replacement toothbrushes. This sounds like a significant engineering hurdle, and this wouldn’t work in a power outtage.

Of course, Scotty could probably focus some Tachyon pulses into the Enterprise’s gravity generator and it would be just fine, despite the small side effect of destroying the space-time continnum and ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe.

In which case, Scotty might get a visit from the Doctor.

Today, I blew the shofar. A shofar is a ram’s horn, cut off on both ends so that there’s no ram attached. The small end acts a mouthpiece.

The shofar is a smelly instrument that you blow on every Rosh Hashanah after the Torah reading; everyone should have a chance to hear it. It’s very hard to play, a little like a trumpet but without the carefully crafted mouthpiece.

Here’s a picture of me blowing the shofar. If you click on the sound link above the picture, you will be able to hear me blow!

Noah, blowing a Shofar