Panama Canal

An article in the NYT science section about the Panama Canal talks about the interrelationship between Panama's forests and the successful management of the canal. We are all used to talk of interrelationships, but this one was surprising. In short, since the canal dumps water out into the ocean with every traversal, a huge amount of water is needed at its highest point, to keep the system running.

Since it rains in Panama frequently and copiously, but not continuously the challenge is being able to store the water for the dry season.

Now, writing about things in the NYT is problematic since they seem to want to make money. I will take a look around for other relevant links about the Panama Canal to supplement the original.

Panama Canal Authority official site

Library of Congress Panoramic Photographs of the canal

The internet for Civil Engineers Panama Canal Page
Next time - Intelligent Design

Our world

On the radio earlier ths month, there was talk of a mapping system for showing short-term earthquake risk in California. Needless to say, it is accurate ( almost always right ), but not too useful (it is only wrong when there is an earthquake).

We are getting to the point where there is a huge amount of 'real-world' data available on the web. Examples include:

air quality monitoring
ocean currents
world-wide siesmic events
satellite & aerial photography
power outages

Various efforts to merge all this together include
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/index.html
http://www.keyhole.com/
http://maps.google.com/

internal worlds

I came across an announcement for a program called Jurtle (java turtle) designed for teaching middle schoolers java programming. It is billed as more user friendly than generic IDE's. I will try it out and see. This begs the question - is there any reason to teach java to middle school children?

I should point before going further, I am biased. I write software for a living - at least I try to, so in general I think programming is a useful / interesting way to spend time.

so ... programming is good.

There have been a variety of approaches to teaching about programming languages and development environments designed for learning. These include BASIC, PASCAL, Logo, Squeak, and others, representing a range of pedagogical styles. With the exception of Basic, these are not languages commonly used for application programming.

logo

squeak

pascal

basic


In the real world, we see languages like Java, COBOL, C/C++, Perl - you can make your own list. In fact, a decade ago, the list would have been different.

so... programming languages are bad.

In other words, the things that should be taught are concepts, algorithms, and approaches to problem solving. The rest come and go. Teaching computer science is probably better than teaching a programming language.

The big picture

In order to have any appreciation of all the pretty pictures, some background may be in order. My introduction to cosmology was in an atlas of all things. In order to give some context, our 60's vintage Rand McNally atlas had:

* The origin of life
* plate tectonics
* the origin of the solar system
* and (i think) the big bang.

Pretty good for a dozen pages.

Starting at the beginning, lets look at cosmology:

The Universe - courtesy Nasa


Then, just so we understand how we fit in:

Powers of 10 website

what is out there?

I came across an article in JDJ about a new venture in commercial astronomy. It is a subscription supported telescope with live feeds available through your browser. A neat idea, and probably a great deal of fun to put together and run. But is started me thinking - what else is out there for astronomy buffs. So I will try to put together a list of public domain astronomy archives.

Starting with http://hubblesite.org/ from our friends at nasa.

Somewhat less flashy - nasa picture of the day

From the world of newsgroups - astronomy archive

Oh - by the way, the name of the commercial venture is SLOOH.