As part of the International Year of Astronomy, one of the projects was to create an inexpensive telescope that could be purchased in quantities by schools and individuals.  Well, I received an email today that let me know they are ready to be ordered.

We are now taking orders for delivery beginning in late April.

The Galileoscope is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed as a Cornerstone Project of the International Year of Astronomy 2009.  For just US$15 plus shipping by postal/parcel service, you get a 50-mm f/10 refractor that snaps together in less than 5 minutes and gives great views of the celestial wonders that Galileo first glimpsed 400 years ago and that still delight stargazers today….The Galileoscope comes with a 25x eyepiece and 2x Barlow lens and incorporates features such as achromatic optics, stray-light rejection, and a 1.25-inch focuser normally found only on telescopes costing at least 10 times more.

Galileoscopes are in production and will begin shipping to customers in late April 2009!

You can go to their website and order one for yourself.  And if you like, you can order additional scopes to be given away to schools.  It’s a great inexpensive way to get into the hobby of astronomy and it’s especially great for kids.

…go with overwhelming numbers.  That’s the jist of this article about a group of evangelical christians calling themselves the Quiverfull movement who shun birth control in order to have large numbers of children to spread their faith.  If this isn’t the scariest thing you’ve read all day, it must still be early where you are.  Here’s a sampling.

"The womb is such a powerful weapon; it’s a weapon against the enemy," Campbell says.

"They speak about, ‘If everyone starts having eight children or 12 children, imagine in three generations what we’ll be able to do,’ " Joyce says. " ‘We’ll be able to take over both halls of Congress, we’ll be able to reclaim sinful cities like San Francisco for the faithful, and we’ll be able to wage very effective massive boycotts against companies that are going against God’s will.’ "

Heaven forbid.

As I’ve posted earlier, the Texas State Board of Education is set to vote on the science curriculum standards later this week and I had suggested those so inclined to send an email to the Chairman, Don McLeroy and remind him of something he said.  Well, I thought I would go ahead and post what my email contained in case anyone else wanted to use it as a guide.

Mr. McLeroy,

    I simply want to remind you of something you said during your interview on Texas Montly Talks that aired on KLRU in May of 2008.

 

    "I certainly don’t want to force my views on anybody else." – Don McLeroy

 

    You said this in reference to the debate regarding sex education in Texas.  But shouldn’t this apply to everything you consider while in the position of Chariman of the Texas State Board of Education?  In fact, this statement should be read to all the committee members at the beginning of every meeting and before every vote to remind them of what their purpose really is, to serve the citizens of Texas, not their personal political or religious agendas.

     Your statement should apply to the upcoming vote regarding the Science curriculum standards.  If you truly meant what you said, you would listen to the educators and experts in the field to determine how Texas schools should treat and teach the concepts of science and not try to insert language that is intended to tear down well established principles.  Your personal beliefs should not get in the way of trying to provide Texas children with the best science education possible.

    That’s all.  Please follow your own words and do the right thing for Texas and it’s school children.

I don’t normally seek out vampire movies, but as with most films, if there’s a good human story driving it, I’m in.  Let the Right One In has the foundation for this, but falters a bit in the execution.  What drove me to want to see this film was the concept.  A 12 year old boy meets and befriends what he thinks is a 12 year old girl, kind of a first crush thing, only to find out that she’s been 12 for a really long time and is in fact a vampire.

This film compelled me to finally create a half-star rating.  I couldn’t justify a 4 star rating, but it was certainly better than 3, so there you go, a 3.5 star rating.

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We’re about a week away from the final vote that will determine the Texas Science curriculum standards for the next 10 years.  This vote will also heavily influence what gets put into the Science textbooks students will use.  The Texas State Board of Education meeting is scheduled for next week, March 26-27th.  There have been some improvements in the standards, such as the removal of the "strengths and weaknesses" language.  But our creationist members of the board have proposed amendments to insert "sufficiency or insufficiency" language in its place.  The creationist members are trying to insert language that would allow teachers the flexibility to introduce non-scientific ideas into their classrooms.  Specifically, the idea of creationism and intelligent design.

There are some very good write-ups about this already, so I won’t go into detail but instead just refer you to the links below.

• Texas Science Standards: Game on! 
• Texas Freedom Network on Don McLeroy
• Austin American Statesman article on Don McLeroy
• Quote mining by Don McLeroy to defend his postion

What I do want to encourage is people to send emails to Don McLeroy, who is the Chairman of the Texas SBOE, reminding him of a quote he made during an interview with Texas Monthly Talks in May of 2008.  He said:

"I certainly don’t want to force my views on anybody else." – Don McLeroy

If only he would follow what he said and instead of trying to impose his personal religious views on the rest of Texas he should listen to the throngs of educators and science experts who support good science education.

All the board members use the same email address, so please enter his name in the subject line:  sboesupport@tea.state.tx.us

This can make a difference.  The overwhelming public outcry has helped so far, but until the final vote we need to keep our voices heard.

I know confusion is probably a normal state for me, but in this case I just don’t understand.  Compare these two headlines.

Stem Cell Research Opponents want Personhood for Embryos

2,000,000 Children Die From Diarrhea Each Year

So the first is discussing how pro-life advocates are fighting to give legal rights to fertilized embryos so they can’t be destroyed or used in research.  While the second article talks about how a large number of living and breathing children are dying every year from a very treatable disease.

So here’s my confusion.  Why aren’t the pro-life people up in arms about the issue of children dying?  Why aren’t they pushing through laws to support efforts to treat these children around the world.  It seems to me if they are really pro-life, start with protecting the lives of people that are already on this planet and trying to survive.  Then, once you have all those issues worked out, attack the issues of the unborn.  Until you’ve wiped out disease, hunger and poverty, don’t talk to me about protecting embryos.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to educate myself on a topic that interests me…Dark Matter.  This is Part 1 of what will (hopefully) be a multi-part series.  In this post, I’ll try to give a high level explanation of what Dark Matter is and why astronomers think it exists.  I’m not an astronomer, I’m an Engineer, so I’m coming at this from a layman’s perspective and as such I’ll be writing at a level that matches that perspective.  I’ve gathered some resources (which I’ll post at the end) that I’m using to educate myself and most of the information in this series is a synopsis from those resources.

For 400 years, since Galileo pointed his spyglass to the sky, astronomers have been studying the light they could gather from distant objects.  The amount of information contained within light is more than most people realize.  From spectrum information to understand what elements these distant objects are made of, to determining velocity, temperature and mass of objects, to understanding the effects of gravity and the curvature and expansion of space.  All this can be derived from analyzing the light that left those distant objects so many years ago to be captured by us tiny creatures here on Earth.

Stars, galaxies, globular clusters, nebula and such comprise what we can see when we look into the night sky.  These objects are luminous.  That is, they give off light that we can see.  But beyond that, are there objects out there that we can’t see?  Dark objects? Or, on a more fundamental scale, Dark Matter?  It turns out yes, Dark Matter exists.  In fact, the luminous matter makes up only about 4% of the total mass of the Universe (how do we know that?  Well, that’s for another post).  So for the last 400 years, astronomers have been studying a very small portion of what’s out there in the Universe.  But they have still been able to piece together an incredible amount of information about the Universe in which we reside.

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I ran across these two videos the other day and thought I would share.

and the follow-up

It looks like it comes down to convenience, just like everything else in our society.