Book Review

I just finished reading "The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp."

While the title is a bit windy, the book itself was very good. The premise, is that a misfit teenage boy, Alfred Kropp, gets thrown in the midst of a age-old war that he unwittingly started. Along the way, he meets knights descended from Bedivere, who, as you may know, was one of King Arther's

Knights of the Round Table. Although the plot might sound like a rehash, the story is very entertaining, and is very well written. I recommend this book to anyone who like sci-fi/fantasy books. It was a easy read, and a must for King Arther fans.

More on Spies

I am partway through a unit study on spies. I have studied spies who date from the time of Sun Tzu, in 500 BC, to the latest modern spy planes that can fly at many times the speed of sound. The use of technology has greatly changed, too. Ancient spies used nothing but their eyes and memory on a mission; now, a night vision camera with a 16x zoom is considered outdated. My opinion is that while the skills required to be a spy have greatly changed, they are no less numerous. For example, while skill with a sword is no longer needed in the profession, an extensive knowledge of programming languages and how to install phone bugs are mandatory in the 21st century.

Despite the new technology available, some jobs just cannot be performed by a human being. More and more jobs are being handed over to robots and drones, who are expendable, unlike human lives. Spy planes and surveillance cameras are being put into extensive use throughout the world. Great Britain alone, for example, has over 4,000,000 cameras. With a population of 51,092,000, that is one camera for every 12 citizens. Spy planes are used for spying and surveillance, as well. They are capable of flying so high that they are impossible to target with missiles, and can take hi-rez pictures of the earth below them. Whatever the age or method, spying has changed the world, for better or for worse, and has shaped much of our culture and society.

Spies

I am starting a unit study on spies.

I will be learning about the gadgets that they use, famous spies in history, and the wars that they were used in. I just read a book that talked about two spies durning world war II. They operated in the Manhatten Project, (the code name for the US atomic research project) posing as US scientists. Actually, they were soviet spies. When they were found out, they were executed for their trouble. A set of twin of electric chairs was built just for them.

I will post again when i know more.

Johannes Kepler

I finished reading my book on Johannes Kepler, who was a scientist called "The Father of Modern Astronomy". Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt, a city located in the German principality of Wurttemberg, on December 27, 1571. His family life was far from perfect. Kepler called his grandfather "Remarkably arrogant, short-tempered and obstinate. His mother was "small tin swarthy, gossiping, quarrelsome, and of a bad disposition. Wis father, who was "vicious, inflexible, quarrelsome, and doomed to a bad end," left the family to become a mercenary in Italy. 

Despite all of his family problems, he was one of the most renowned astronomers ever. He was credited to a great number of achievement, some of which are listed below. He was, not surprisingly, the man who made "Kepler's Three Laws of Planetary Motion". He wrote a good number of books, too. Some examples of these are Cosmological Mystery, New Astronomy,  a letter under the title of Conversation with the Starry Messenger, Observer's Report on Jupiter's Four Wandering Satelites, Dioptrice, Art of Measurement, World Harmony, and, The Rudolphine Tables.  He totally dismantled Aristotle's ideas, which had been is use for 2000 years. He proved that the planet's had elliptical orbits, not circular as it was thought at the time.

Astronomy was not his only his only strong suit, though. He was also interested in his field of optics.He wrote "Dioptrice", which was a book explaining the properties of light, and how a telescope worked. Telescopes were a rather controversial invention at that time. Or, more accurately, the people who made them made suspicious claims to being the sole inventor. Galileo Galilei, another prominent astronomer, is not the one who actually invented the telescope, despite popular belief. Leonardo DaVinci invented a weakly magnifying telescope about 100 years before. Kepler, when he was able to briefly borrow a telescope, could confirm Galileo's discovery's, and was able to collect incredibly accurate data.

Today, I built a telescope of my own, out of cardboard and some basic lenses. Here are some pictures of it. The telescope works by using a lens to focus available light. The lens is curved, so this bends the object, making it look bigger. This make the object larger and brighter. The one downside to early telescopes that the image is upside-down. This rarely matters ion astronomy, as planets are round, and look mostly the same either way. 

A picture of the telescope extended.

A picture I tried to take through the lens.

Book Review.

Another Book Review.
I just finished reading "Rhiannon", by Vicki Grove.
It takes place in England/France, (Francia, at that time), and is a fun read.
The main character is, somewhat obviously, Rhiannon, a girl who lives as a nurse in a village hospice care facility of sorts, with her mother and grandmother. They are the founders and sole caretakers of the place. The plot involves Rhia and her friends, as they try to discover the murderer of a mysterious stranger.  Their movite is that the scapegoat that the crime is eing pinned on is one of Rhia's friends and former patients. I really enjoyed this book, as it was much more cheerful than "the House of the Scorpions", which I have reviewed in this blog as well.
Overall, "Rhiannon" is a fun read, with a good plot and action.

Update

This is an update of what I am doing in school.

As I have said in earlier posts, I am doing an ancient scientist study.

I am reading "Johannes Kepler, Discovering the Laws of Celestial Motion", by William J. Boerst. 

I will be putting a summery of it up soon.

Largest Camera Obscura ever

The worlds largest pinhole camera, or camera obscura, was contructed with a abandoned F-18 hanger. Artists used 1.5 MILES of black gorrilla tape and 40 gallons of black spray paint to make tha hanger light-tight. the goal was to make a black and white picture of the Marine Corps air station with the San Juaquin hills in the background.  A huge piece of muslin cloth was made light sensitive by coating it with 80 litres of gelatin silver hilade. The resulting finished print was nearly 108 ft (33 m) wide and 85 ft  high and was exhibited for the first time at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, on September 6, 2007. Quite a bit bigger than mine.

Book Review

I was just reading The House of Scorpions, by Nancy Farmer.

The scoop: NO GOOD!

The plot is very odd, involving a a main character who is a clone of a man who will live forever because of brain implants. This doesn't even include eejits, who are people with brain implants to dull their intelligence and free will. Did I mention that the entire story evolves around opium drug fields? This book is seemingly creepy for creepy's sake, and gets weirder by the chapter.

If this sounds entertaining to you, then have fun, but I don't recommend this book to anyone.

Camera Obscura

I did another science experiment today, making a Camera Obscura. It turned out really well, as you can see from the pictures below. I made it with cardboard, a lens, and tracing paper. It was really easy to make, and was lots of fun. It projects a upside-down image of what you point it at onto sheet of tracing paper attached to the back. This is more important than it sounds, as it actually proved a very important theory in the field of optics. Most classical scholars believed that the eye emitted "vision rays" that struck the object being observed. However, the camera obscura proved that light actually reflected off of a object, as the camera focused light through it's lens and shone it on a piece of paper. This theory was origionally concieved by the scientist Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham, who was the scientist who I have talked about in earlier posts.