Final eval...

For the third and final eval

close out

so this is the "close out" of my blog. I would like to thank my followers for reading this and I am just letting you all know that this is the ending to this blog. Many of you know I started this blog for a class I took on communicating science and now that the semester is ending I will not be continuing to post. This has been a fun topic for me and I hope that yall got something out of it as well. Once again thanks for following and commenting  so that I had feedback on my posts etc...

Decomp.

I say an interesting show the other day that i enjoy called unsolved mysteries. One of the listed offenses was a murderer who had killed his family. the interesting thing was how he was caught. they called in a man by the name of  Dr. William Bass who runs the body farm at the university of Tennessee. He is considered to be the for most expert on the decomp of human bodies. His name has been refereed to in such shows as CSI. Anyway the prosecution brought him in and he predicted that the bodies were deceased for one month but was startled that there was not a specific remain of the flies that begin to hatch from maggots. He stuck to his guns and funny enough, when the defense brought in there pictures to counter his expert testimony, they had several pictures that the prosecution nor Dr. Bass had access to. Long story short, they had the evidence that proved Dr. Bass correct. This is a good case of what documenting studies in science can do. Dr. Bass went in open minded made a conclusion based on his 20+ years of research, that his predictions were proven based off of the good science he had and continues to set forth. Dr. Bass stated that going in without knowing potential times or dates etc... is how he does these studies, he simply looks at what is present based on his research, and then draws a conclusion merely based on what he sees vs. the research. A good aspiration for future scientists and engineers.

aliens

So i came across an interesting point in an article that relates to my blog about how in many movies the "alien" life forms are all human looking in design. I starting thinking about movies that have many aliens in it and for the most part it is true. Many movies show an alternate life form that has several or most human characteristics. Now I know its Hollywood but with all the crazy movie themes and the plots etc you would think that Hollywood would not show these "advanced" life forms as being very human. For the other life forms to exhibit many of the things we do, there planets atmosphere etc.. would have to be almost identical to ours and we all know that the other planets that surround us have very different atmospheres etc... I guess to me it is absurd to think that these so called advanced races would appear to be just like us and know English and all  the rest.

The Book

So this is titled the book because we have read the book dont be such a scientist in class. In chapter 3, there is a comment made that when star wars came out it was a good movie etc... Now I have done posts on star wars and many of you know I agree with the statement. The reading goes on to say that it was criticized for having simple science errors that take a little away from it, specifically that in one scene han solo refers to time in a measurement of a parsec. A parsec is a unit of distance used in astronomy and is equal to 3.26 light years. If you dont know what a light year is it is also equal to 31 trillion kilometers. the book goes on to say that it is little things like this that take away from the movie. I agree but also feel that the movie explored areas that were not very understood or were in early phases when it came out. So I still recommend the movie even with the small errors.

How clean

So I have seen this commercial several times and feel that it is time to question the selling motive. Lysol has a new soap dispenser out that automatically dispenses soap when a hand is placed close to it. Very cool technology wise. This device implores several things such as motion sensor electronics and dispensing motor etc... While very cool, the ad states that you will never have to touch a germy soap dispenser again which is possible I guess. The fact is though atleast to me, is that the point of soap and washing of the hands is to kill the germs and in my mind if you touch a germy soap dispenser to get soap and then wash your hands, you kill the germs anyway so I guess I dont really see the point. I realize this is a commercial and the goal is to sell a product but I feel as though people understand that using soap kills germs, thats why we wash our hands.

How far

So it has come to my attention through someone else that in battlestar glactica, they refer to distances in space by microns. Not so bad except as all of you know space is huge. A micron also known as a micro meter is very finite in its size. A micron is a meter times ten to the negative 6. in comparison, wikipedia has supplied me with some things measured in microns

To help compare different orders of magnitude this page lists some items with lengths between 10⁻⁶ and 10⁻⁵ m (between 1 and 10 micrometres, or µm).

Distances shorter than 1 µm

• ~0.7–300 µm — Wavelength of infrared radiation
• 1 µm — the side of square of area 10⁻¹² m²
• 1 µm — edge of cube of volume 1 fL
• 1–10 µm — diameter of typical bacterium
• 1.55 µm — wavelength of light used in optical fibre
• 3–4 µm — size of a typical yeast cell
• 3–5 µm — size of a human spermatozoon's head (radius by length)^{[citation needed]}
• 6 µm — anthrax spore
• 6–8 µm — diameter of a human red blood cell
• 7 µm — diameter of the nucleus of typical eukaryotic cell
• 3–8 µm — width of strand of spider web silk^[1]
• 8 µm — width of a chloroplast
• 9 µm — thickness of the tape in a 120-minute compact cassette.
• about 10 µm — size of a fog, mist or cloud water droplet

also the size of a human hair is 

The diameter of human hair varies from 17 to 180 µm (0.00067 to 0.0071 in)

So you see that to use a micron in space as it was in battlesatr glactica, is just not very feasible.