Frogs here, frogs there, frogs were jumping everywhere! (Passover pt. 1)

Get excited! Passover is coming soon!

Ya know, that holiday where Jews eat horrible, dry, bland crackers instead of bread for seven days. It's an experience.

I'm just kidding. There's a lot more details, so I've decided that today I'm going to tell the story of Passover. Nutshelled. So very brief.

Next week (when Passover is actually soon), I'm going to explain some of the good old Midrash-y details and interpretations. But right here is the bare basics.

This is a pretty well known story, so stop me if you've heard it before. Oh, wait, that's right, you can't! Oh, the joys of the internet! Mwahahahahhaa.

Ahem.

So anyways, a really long time, ago, there was this Pharaoh of Egypt. Jews were slaves there for a bit, and this Pharoh was sort of afraid they would rebel. So he decreed that all male Jew babies would be killed.

So then one woman, as it happens, gave birth to a baby boy. His name was Moses. She didn't want him to die, though, funnily enough, so she got his older sister, Miriam, to put him in a basket and drop him in the Nile river to float around for a while. As luck would have it, baby Moses was found by the Pharaoh's daughter, who was taking a bath. She thought he was so cute, she wanted to keep him forever. So she took him back to the palace. Miriam, clever girl she is, appeared and suggested that the Pharaoh's daughter get a Hebrew nurse, and so Moses's mom got to raise baby Moses.

Cut to a few years later. Moses is in his late teens, early twenties, and he sees an egyptian beating up a Sewish slave. In a fit of rage, he kills the slave, then runs away into the mountians in guilt. There, he becomes a nice shepherd and marries a shepherdess, Zephorah.

One day, Moses is wandering around, doing his shepherd thing, when he sees a bush that burns, but is not consumed. Weird. The bush talks to him, making him take off his shoes and then declaring that he is God, the God of Jacob and Isaac and all of those patriarchs. God then tells Moses to go to the Pharaoh and demand that the Jewish people be freed. Moses is confused, mostly because he's a random humble shepherd with a stutter, but God is adamant. So he takes his brother Aaron and goes to the Pharaoh's place.

When Moses says to the Pharaoh, "Let my people go!" Pharaoh almost agrees, but then his heart is hardened (I will discuss this next week). Moses does a fancy trick turnig his staff into a snake, but even that doesn't work, so God brings a plague onto Egypt.

The first plague is turning all the water into blood. This is very, very unpleasant, as you can imagine, so Pharaoh tells Moses his people can go. But then he changes his mind (because he's sooo changeable (That was a Sherlock reference. Deal with it)) and makes them all come back. Then God rolls out the next plague, which is frogs. It looked something like this:

The same deal as before. Pharaoh almost lets the Israelites go, but then his heart is hardened and he changes his mind. This process is repeated several times, with seven more plagues; lice, flies (or wild animals), disease on livestock, boils, hail, lucusts and darkness. Each time, the Pharaoh lets them go, then changes his mind because his heart is hardened. Finally, God brings one last Plague on Egypt--death of the firstborn. When Pharaoh's firstborn baby dies, he finally relents and lets the Israelites go. They flee, not even having enough time to finish leavening their bread, and run for it. They make it all the way to the Red Sea when the Pharaoh changes his mind (again!) and sends him after the Jews.

Moses (and God) have a few more tricks up their sleeves, though, and he parts the Red Sea with his staff. The Jews escape and the army drowns.

That's more or less the story of passover. I'm sorry that that was so brief, but I promise that that is because I will go into way more detail next week. There are so many interesting and different interpretations and explanations and thoughts and feelings about everything, which are so interesting. So be excited.

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the best. He's an Astrophysicist with a wife and two kids and what is probably the best twitter feed on the whole internet, and an out-of this world of knowledge about space and the universe.

Yes, he is a real person who exists, all you naysayers. And he's actually quite famous. And really, really cool.

I've mentioned him before on this blog, because he used to host NOVA Science Now,  but I feel like I should dedicate an entire post to him because he's actually on my list of my favorite people.

So here we are.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson was born in Manhattan, the second of three children. He graduated from Harvard and earned a doctorate from Columbia, then went to work at the Hayden Planetarium. He eventually became the director, renovating and greatly improving the planetarium. He hosted NOVA Scince Now for five years, served as a presidential adviser, and also makes frequent appearances in the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report. He's written a lot of books, like Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandarie and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was the one to declare Pluto a dwarf planet instead of a regular planet (perhaps his only fault), but what he's most famous for is his ability to explain complicated science concepts in a way that's easy to understand.

He also has a lot of opinions about religion, spirituality, and God. He  was an eyewitness to the 9-11 attack. He has the awesomest ties that have space and planets on them.

The thing I admire the most about him is how passionate he is about Astrophysics, and how much he knows about it. I mean, he actually knows everything about space. If I don't become a Rabbi or Shakespearean actress or author or journalist or archaeologist or teacher, I definitely want to be him when I grow up.


Here's him, talking, being awesome, like he always is.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is my favorite.

EVERYTHING.

Today I want to talk about God.

Yep. G-d. Adonai. Allah. The big guy. You know.

The reason this came into my head was because I was helping out in my mom's class at my Sunday school, and one of them asked something, like, "How do we even know that the Torah is real?" and the my mom and the other adult helping her didn't really know how to explain it, and then I realized that most people in my tiny little Synagogue community don't actually believe in God so much, and then I started thinking about that, and it all sort of spiraled into this existential crisis of questions and religion and AUUUUGGHHHGHGHHG and EVERYTHING.

So I thought that I'd share it with you all.

First of all, let me be clear; I don't actually care whether or not you believe in God. I think it's absolutely fantastic that people are willing to question the status quot and make their own decisions about whether or not they believe in God and that it's completely accepted.

I do care when people who believe vehemently in their religion try to make other people believe vehemently in their religion. No one should tell anyone else what to think or how to think it, and I feel like that especially applies to religion.

But, as my dad said (because I talk to my parents, okay??), if your religion says that everyone must think something or else they'll be punished for all eternity, wouldn't you be doing other people a favor by trying to convert them to your religion?

So if you're a kindly old person who goes door-to-door to distribute pamphlets, that's probably okay. If you're the Westboro Baptist Church and you're picketing dead soldiers funerals, that's technically okay as well. With free speech and all that. (Hi, Ms. Cullen!)

So where does one draw the line? How much freedom can people when practicing their religions?

It's like all of Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, (Hi, Mr. Freeman!) in that you have the freedom to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't infringe on other people's rights to do what they want. That seems pretty reasonable, I guess.

But should there be universal rights and wrongs? Like, being nice to someone should always be good, and kiling someone should always be bad. But then if you think about it, there could even be qualifiers for that. 

Also, believing in God or a particular religion or something gives you a set of beliefs to fall back upon. And that's really important, at least for me. I think that everyone has, or at least should have, something that they believe in that trumps everything else. This value system can keep them going when they feel particularly hopeless or cause hthem to stand up for something they believe in.

I think, too, that the reason why people disagree is not really because one person is right and one is wrong, but because they have different core values. It would be impossible for them to agree, so I think the sooner we understand this, accept this, and move past it, the sooner the world might be a better place.

Having decided that, and also having realized that there is no real answer to any of these questions, I had some tea and watched Doc Martin for the rest of the day.


These are just some thoughts. You don't really need to agree or disagree with me. I'm just talking.

End rant.

If you're somewhat interested, you can also watch this vlog brothers viseo. Because they're awesome, and it applies. So yeah.

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

one might say. Although, one would be wrong.

Haha, get it? The sky is falling? Chicken Little? The asteroid landing in Russia? Eh? Eh?

I'm sick. It's not my best, I'll admit. 

Anyways, I though I'd discuss the event that occurred in Russia last Friday. Because it's space, and current, and all sorts of fun things.

So.

In brief, here's what happened:

On last Friday morning, a relatively "small" meteor crashed on the earth (55 feet in diameter, weighing about 10,000 tons), near Chelyabinsk, Russia. The crash released the energy of more than 30 atomic bombs. The shock waves caused by it shattered glass windows and injured over 1,000 people.

Small fragments of the meteor have been found scattered around the site, ranging from very, very small, to just sort-of-small. This particular meteor came from the asteroid belt, and not from the moon or Mars, like many do. For those of you who don't know, the asteroid belt is pretty much a ring of floating space rocks in between Mars and Jupiter. They can be dislodged by comets, gravity, any number of things.

When these asteroids do approach Earth, they fly into our atmosphere. Most of them, if they're small enough, burn up there, and don't really cause a big splash, so to speak. You may have seen this during a meteor shower; however, sometimes they don't burn up entirely, and then bits land on the Earth. That's what happened on Friday.

Fun fact: according to the Wall Street Journal, "A meteor is what is seen burning up flying through the atmosphere. A meteorite is what survives the plunge and lands on the earth's surface."

 The event was filmed completely by accident by several drivers from little cameras mounted on their dashboards. Apparently, that's a thing in Russia, so that if someone assaults their car, they have proof for corrupt police or people trying to make faulty insurance claims. There's a segment on the Daily Show. You should watch it.

The terrifying thing, for me, at least, is not that this asteroid crashed as it did, but that NASA had no idea. Apparently, they're stepping up asteroid detection, but why haven't they yet? In my humble (cough not really cough) opinion, I feel like defending the Earth should be one of their top priorities.(Although, when you think of the Earth, you should remember that IT. IS. DEFENDED. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry (I'm not.)). Besides, you know, discovering new things out there, in space...

I think that everything in the universe is important. Not just because I watch too much doctor who, but mostly because I knowing what's out there, be it helpful aliens or mortally destructive space rocks, is so, so interesting and important. There could be, and I think there is, an entire universe full of wonderfully diverse life and planets and everything. The universe is infinity.

Your whole life is a lie.

Well. Most of it. Well, some of it. Well, a very, very, small, somewhat unimportant part of it. But nevermind that.

Let's talk about Apatosaureses. Apatosauri? Apatosaurs? Whatever the plural form may be, today I'm going to tell you about the species of dinosaur known as Apatosaurus. Okay.

Apatosaurus was discovered in 1877 by paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh.  In a nutshell, Apatosaurs are a type of plant-eating sauropod, those dinosaurs with the really long necks, from 154 million to 150 million years ago, or during the the Jurassic period. They lived hereish, in the woodlands of North America. They're really, really big, some of the biggest dinosaurs, about 75-85 feet long and 18 tons. It had to keep its head parallel to the ground most of the time because it's neck is too long and heavy and it would be hard to maintain its blood pressure.

I've always felt bad for apatosaurs. They're the saddest dinosaur, in my opinion. Not because they're wimpy or they died out quickly or anything like that, but because there's been so much confusion as to their identity.

Their name, Apatosaur, comes from greek words (like most dinosaur names) "apate/apatelos," which means "deceptive," and "sauro," meaning "lizard." Even from the beginning, apatosaurs (I guess that's what I'm calling them now. Bear with me) were mistaken for a different type of dinosaur-- Mosasaurus, which is an aquatic reptile.

Shortly after Marsh discovered an incomplete set of fossil remains and named them Apatosaurus, he discovered another set of remains, this one more complete, and named it Brontosaurus. Have you heard of them? Good. Now erase them from your mind. You've been lied too. We've all been lied to.

As it turns out, Marsh did not, in fact, discover a new dinosaur. What he discovered were a mostly complete set of apatosaurus bones and one camarasaurus skull. It took until the 1970s to figure this out, which is uncomfortably close to a whole century before the apatosaur was recognized for what it was. They are sad. See?

The reason that this mistake was made is because of something called the Bone Wars (also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush). Much like when everyone was rushing to discover new elements for the periodic table during the mid-late twentieth century (Hi, Ms. O'Donovan!), two of the world's greatest fossil finders, Marsh and another paleontologist named Edward Drinker Cope, were rushing to discover more dinosaurs, first. And also like the periodic table of the elements discovery war, the competitive nature of the scientist often led to rushed decisions, mistaking already found dinosaurs (and/or elements) for new dinosaurs (and/or elements), and, in one case, putting the skull of one dinosaur on the tail instead of on the neck. Yup. That happened to Cope, which sort of makes Marsh's little accident a bit ironic.

So it's sort of understandable why Marsh made the mistake that he did, but not that excusable. Can you imagine if, millions of years in the future, scientist shoved the skull of shark on a human skeleton and called it a completely new sort of being that lived on the earth, terrorixing the humans and keeping them as slaves?

Actually, that would be really cool. But the point still stands.

I feel like we sort of owe apatosaurs an apology, even if they are a species of lizard that has been extinct for millions of years. So, on behalf of the human race, apatosaurs, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.

The reason that I know any of this (besides extensive Wikipedia research) is because of a band/group of storytellers called DinoRock. We had an actual tape thing of a bunch of songs about dinosaurs, one of them being about Alan Apatosaurus and his woeful history. I was going to find a video of this and share it with you, since it is vital to understanding this whole debacle (it's not, really), but unfortunately it can be found nowhere. I did find another one about a particular dinosaur named Harry, a parasaurolophus, though, so all is not lost. Here it is, and remember that this is my childhood.

I hope you enjoyed this small rant about dinosaurs. In the words of dinorock, "dinosaurs, dinosaurs forevermore!"

Some sources I looked at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus

http://www.livescience.com/25093-apatosaurus.html

http://www.wisegeek.com/was-the-brontosaurus-a-real-dinosaur.htm

http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurdiscovery/a/bonewars.htm

Oh, the excitement!

In media this week, we had to make a 90-second video about life in Takoma Park or Silver Spring. I don't really do any interesting activities or go any intersting places, so I just decided to have a quick montage of all the great Takoma Park-y things, like rooster and the Co-op. Then, I decided it was too boring, so I added some music that I think perfectly captures the mood. I hope you enjoy it.

 

I filmed it on my sister's digital camera, my own digital camera, and my dad's flip camera.

They're gonna be the last ones standing

If you had to guess one thing that could outlive any other being in pretty much any environmental condition ever, what would you say?

Not cockroaches. Not those cool, super poisonous cone snails, either. Not humans, certaintly.

Then what? Well, I'm glad you asked. If you didn't ask, I'm very sorry, but I quite frankly couldn't care less. Sorry.

The answer to your question, whether you asked it or not, is a tardigrade! You know, large blue box, bigger-on-the-inside, can travel through all of time and space....

I'm just kidding, of course. A tardigrade is actually a very, very small water animal, only 1.5 millimeters long at the most, that has eight legs, a plump, segmented body, and tiny little claw-type things. They're more amoebic than actually animal-like because they're so small and misshappen. They look like this:

 

They have a very slow, lumbering walk, like a polar bear, which is why they're sometimes called water bears. They eat plant and animal material. They're found throughout the world, mostly in moist places, and were first discovered in 1773. But the thing that makes them the most absolutely fantastic is that they can survive in all sorts of extremely treacherous conditions. 

Tardigrades are able to survive temperatures of around 300 degrees Fahrenheit to about one degree above absolute zero. They can live in very, very low pressure, like in a vaccum, or in very, very high pressures, 1200 times the atmospheric pressure. They can live for up to ten years, usually, in dry moss without water. Tardigrades can also withstand huge amounts of radiation that would be fatal to humans. 

They do this by going into a sort of hibernating state in which they slow and almost stop their metabolism and appear almost dead--sort of like when Juliet takes that sleeping draught in Romeo and Juliet. When they're in this state, they can survive almost anything. 

As you can probably imagine, scientists are fascinated by tardigrades. If they can survive end-of-the-world catastrophic conditions, then perhaps we can figure out a away to adapt their power into something we can use. 

For this reason, scientists launched some tardigrades into space in what is called the TARDIS, or TARDigrades In Space project. If the tardigrades can survive in space, that could tell scientists so much about survival and DNA and reproduction and cool science stuff. It's so exciting! Are you excited? I'm excited! 

Tardigrades are one of those little, awesome things about the world that sort of makes you want to know more about it. I mean, if virtually indestructible, teeny tiny little things can exist here, on Earth, in the world where we are every single day, what totally awesome cool things exist in other places, on other planets, even? It gives one furiously to think, does it not?

If you want to learn more about tardigrades, you can look at this video, which says some of the things I just said, but also some more things. I hope you're as interested in these little things as I am.