Welcome to the Wilcox Family weB LOG, your source for the latest Wilcox news, anecdotes, and rants; and, as Jack Benny quipped on his first radio show (March 29, 1932), “There will be a slight pause while you say, ‘Who cares?’â€â€
It is somewhere around 1:00 am. All but two of us are asleep.
I am hugging my daughter tightly as she sobs uncontrollably, her heart pounding with disappointment and fear.
There is nothing, really, I can say to comfort her. The best I can attempt is, “I will always fight for you,” as my own tears flow.
We are thrilled that Naomi has been selected as Clara in this year’s performance of “The Nutcracker” by Gate City Ballet.
Three performances will be held:
Tickets are available from the Stockbridge Theatre online.
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“Space,” [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen …
Inspired by this NASA Web page, and Miss Sarah’s work-related interest in space science (too bad she spent all those years not reading science fiction), we decided to lay out our solar system in a manageable scale, complete with to-scale outlines of each planet.
(Naomi plants herself just outside the orbit of Mars.)
Here are the scale sizes and distances, along with the real distances.
| Body | Diameter (mm) | Avg. Distance (yards) |
Distance (in) | Avg. Distance in AUs |
km | miles |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | 17.00 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mercury | 0.06 | 0.8 | 28.8 | 0.4 | 58,000,000 | 35,000,000 |
| Venus | 0.15 | 1.4 | 50.4 | 0.7 | 108,000,000 | 67,000,000 |
| Earth | 0.16 | 2.0 | 72.0 | 1.0 | 150,000,000 | 93,000,000 |
| Mars | 0.08 | 3.0 | 108.0 | 1.5 | 228,000,000 | 142,000,000 |
| (Asteroids) | 0.00 | 4.0 to 8.0 | 144.0 to 288.0 | 2.0 to 4.0 | 450,000,000 | 279,000,000 |
| Jupiter | 1.75 | 10.5 | 378.0 | 5.2 | 778,000,000 | 484,000,000 |
| Saturn | 1.47 | 19.0 | 684.0 | 9.5 | 1,427,000,000 | 887,000,000 |
| Uranus | 0.62 | 38.0 | 1,368.0 | 19.0 | 2,871,000,000 | 1,784,000,000 |
| Neptune | 0.60 | 60.0 | 2,160.0 | 30.0 | 4,498,000,000 | 2,795,000,000 |
| Pluto (avg) | 0.03 | 79.0 | 2,844.0 | 39.5 | 5,906,000,000 | 3,670,000,000 |
| Voyager 1* | See http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/ | 138.4 | 20,707,634,708 | 12,867,127,667 | ||
| Voyager 2* | for current locations of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. | 114.2 | 17,089,103,421 | 10,618,676,567 | ||
*Distances of Voyager 1 and 2 are as of May 2, 2017.
Isaac and Naomi lay out the inner planets.
I’ve made a Google Sheets spreadsheet with this data publicly available, here.
You can also grab and print this Acrobat/PDF file which has the sun and planets to the same scale as the planetary distances: planets_to_scale.pdf. At this scale, the sun is only 17 mm in diameter, Jupiter is tiny, and the inner planets are nearly invisible.
(“It’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere, I’m all alone, more or less …”)
Now, are you ready to have your mind blown?
Our nearest neighboring star is a binary star, Alpha Centauri. It would be, if we could see it from the northern hemisphere. It’s about 4.3 light years (271,930.8 AUs; 25,277,549,200,000 miles; 40,680,272,100,000 km) away.
At the scales we’re dealing with, how far away do you think Alpha Centauri would be?
Think carefully. When you’re sure, follow this link for the answer.
Space … is … big.
I want to brag a little bit about Naomi.
This is the finished result of a multi-week school project. It’s called a “Five Pocket Project,” and has a number of interesting features, but that’s not what this is about.
On Tuesday, after a full day of school and two hours of dance classes, NaNi got out her zipped organizer binder to work on her project, and was distressed to discover that all the work from her project was missing. She looked everywhere, and made phone calls, and thought carefully, but was resigned to the fact that she wouldn’t find the work: The questions she had to answer for the biographical part of the project, and all the research she’d already done were gone. I expected she’d find it the next day in school, but she never did.
That evening she started rebuilding her research, getting the questions-to-be-answered from a classmate by phone, and digging in to the unpleasant task of redoing the significant research she’d already completed.
She continued this Wednesday evening.
Thursday was a long day. She had a full day of school, then an after-school dress rehearsal for the school Variety Show, then 2 1/2 hours of dance. Getting home at 8:30 last night, she dug right into the work, as the project was due this morning.
And work she did. There weren’t enough hours to make up everything she’d lost in a reasonable manner, but that didn’t stop her. She took small breaks to eat, but stayed at the task, finishing the research questions and biographical data first, and then moving on to the already-mostly-complete artistic portion of the project.
She did all this without a single complaint or whine, or even the loss of a smile.
When I gave up and went to bed at 12:30 am, she was still at it. I think she finished around 1:00. She set her alarm for a little later than usual, but still early enough to get up, make some last minute adjustments to the poster, get dressed, and get out to the bus on time.
I am very proud of her.
Each Friday evening I take a class in Mandarin at the Chelmsford Chinese Language School. After that class, I go to chess club, while Naomi studies Chinese Folk Dance. I wrote this at the end of last year.
Carissa is quietly contemplative. She keeps her body movements still, with a level of concentration that seems incongruous with her age. She looks disarming. Yet she plays chess with such aggression that I find myself doing nothing more than react to her constant attacks the entire game, with no chance to implement a winning strategy of my own.
Jeffrey is “all boy.” Every time he makes a good move, his whole body shakes with elation. He laughs with glee every time he puts forth another reveal, or forces me to choose which of two pieces I am going to have eaten by his.
I am 42. They are both just seven years old. In addition to their age, they have one other thing in common: They absolutely destroy me at chess.
But the children weren’t the only ones who learn and improve. I go back every week, and I get better.
When I got home yesterday, I discovered that NaNi had put her snow day time to very good use.
Naomi had been very, very sick for almost 10 days—double ear and ear canal infections, that we finally got under control. Even though she stayed home from school, she hadn’t had a fever all day, and I let her go to ballet. (Isaac took care of her while I was at work—my first day back in the office in a while. I am very grateful that Transparent Language has such excellent work-from-home infrastructure.) So I went home, got her ready for ballet (tights need help), and off we went. Gate City Ballet is pretty much on the same street as my job, so I normally drop her off, go back to work, and pick her up at the end.
On the way to ballet, we stopped at the school department offices, where one of her pieces of artwork is being displayed. Naomi was thrilled to see it.
We got to ballet (on time, even—everything in Nashua is close and convenient), and she exclaimed, “My ballet bag!”
I said, “No problem, you can see if they will let you start in your stockings,” and I went home to get the bag. I picked it up, and realized there were no tap shoes in it. So, I hunted around her room to find tap shoes, and put them in the bag, and delivered them to ballet.
“Dad, these are my old tap shoes. They hurt my feet if I wear them.”
I laughed. “Okay, I’ll be back in a bit.” Back to the house … play the “find the real tap shoes” game—not as easy as finding the wrong pair. Back to the ballet studio. Along with a sweater she forgot to pack.
I hold up the correct shoes and the sweaters. Naomi beams and blows me a kiss.
I am in Heaven.
There’s something fascinating about zombies, and a current cultural meme seems to have made them even more popular than the silly idea that the world will end in 2012. (One of the most popular video games around now is the second installment of Left 4 Dead
Zombies seem to be everywhere. There’s even a Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me parody centering on a zombie apocalypse.
LARPing—live action role playing—is detailed in Little Brother
Somewhere between reading Little Brother
Overall, this went very well. Next time, I’ll include a couple of minor improvements:
There were a couple of really great moments. One was when my sweet daughter Naomi came up to me and gave me the “Indian sunburn.” This was perfectly reflective of the psychological difficulty of fighting zombies who were formerly loved ones. I should have shot her on sight!
(Sadly, you probably won’t see this anytime soon, but you never know. I remember when Lego wouldn’t manufacture Lego weapons for their minifigs.)
Naomi has become quite the artist; much like Isaac, she loves to draw.
NaNi:
While I was getting ready to go to work this morning, Naomi stood in front of the refrigerator, and said, “Dad, watch what I have learned.” She opened the refrigerator, and demonstrated how she could press the switch in the front to turn the refrigerator light off. She proudly announced, “I figured out how this works. See,” she closed the refrigerator door slowly, “when you close the door, it presses this switch, and the light goes off.”
“Good investigation, Naomi,” I praised. “My little engineer.”
“Just like her daddy,” she responded, with her usual smile.
David:
David was watching an online episode of “Bleach” anime at the computer. “So, watching some ShÅjo manga?” I asked, sneakily.
Unusually, I fooled him. “Yes,” he replied, “Wait! NOOOOOO!”
(Laughter)