Career aspirations
The younger son has announced that he wants to be scientist.
Be still my beating heart.
He's been talking about doing experiments. In fact, he regularly "does experiments" by mixing random things together in a sink, sometimes asking for common things to add in and make his reaction go. ("I need soap and water and flour and sugar. Then I'll get a reaction!")
In light of this, it was only sensible to take everyone to the science museum. It was quite interesting to me that my children were far more interested in the physics displays than anything else. Second favorite seemed to be geology related things...although it was stuff like rocks and not stuff like dinosaurs. (Dude, younger son loves dinosaurs! How could he not want to see them?!)
This was my personal favorite:
What you're seeing is a spherical movie screen. There are four cameras projecting, each 90° from each other. They are synchronized such that they can make things like planets that appear to be rotating on an axis. It was pretty fantastic.
In this particular view, you can see plate boundaries with earthquakes distributed. You'll notice the subduction zone in the Caribbean and the west coast of South American have relatively wide bands of earthquakes while in the middle of the seafloor, the earthquakes aren't as numerous or widely distributed. The wide bands are characteristic of subduction zones (an area where one plate is pushing underneath another) because they're following the plate as it's subducting. There is a lot of compression, which tends to lead to stronger and more numerous quakes.
On the other hand, divergent spreading zones follow narrow bands and have less numerous quakes. This is because tensional forces are at work here: rocks can't store as much tensional energy before popping, so it doesn't take much to pull them apart. Thus, tensional quakes are smaller.
After coming home exhausted, the younger one wanted to continue his science studies, so we made silly putty. It's pretty easy to do. You just need some glue, water, and borax. (The younger one couldn't remember what borax was called, so he called it "morax" and "thorax" and "florax" before finally reading the word on the box.) What you're supposed to do is mix a couple tablespoons of borax into some warm water. Pour the glue into a ziploc bag, and add the borax solution a couple tablespoons at a time. Kneed the bag until you have it thoroughly mixed and continue adding borax until you get the right consistency.
One problem is that I forgot that you're not supposed to get washable glue. Wood glue is actually a much better choice. Glue is a polymer, but adding the borax turns it into an elastopolymer...that is, it becomes stretchy.
When you use washable glue, you get more of a bouncy gel that isn't terribly stretchy. If you pull on it, it breaks apart with very little effort or stretching.
Hmmm...that's actually a good analog to lithospheric behavior: pull it apart, and it breaks pretty easily, just like a divergent or spreading zone. However, this analogy is seriously flawed: I doubt the lithosphere bounces very well if you throw it on the table.
Be still my beating heart.
He's been talking about doing experiments. In fact, he regularly "does experiments" by mixing random things together in a sink, sometimes asking for common things to add in and make his reaction go. ("I need soap and water and flour and sugar. Then I'll get a reaction!")
In light of this, it was only sensible to take everyone to the science museum. It was quite interesting to me that my children were far more interested in the physics displays than anything else. Second favorite seemed to be geology related things...although it was stuff like rocks and not stuff like dinosaurs. (Dude, younger son loves dinosaurs! How could he not want to see them?!)
This was my personal favorite:
What you're seeing is a spherical movie screen. There are four cameras projecting, each 90° from each other. They are synchronized such that they can make things like planets that appear to be rotating on an axis. It was pretty fantastic.
In this particular view, you can see plate boundaries with earthquakes distributed. You'll notice the subduction zone in the Caribbean and the west coast of South American have relatively wide bands of earthquakes while in the middle of the seafloor, the earthquakes aren't as numerous or widely distributed. The wide bands are characteristic of subduction zones (an area where one plate is pushing underneath another) because they're following the plate as it's subducting. There is a lot of compression, which tends to lead to stronger and more numerous quakes.
On the other hand, divergent spreading zones follow narrow bands and have less numerous quakes. This is because tensional forces are at work here: rocks can't store as much tensional energy before popping, so it doesn't take much to pull them apart. Thus, tensional quakes are smaller.
After coming home exhausted, the younger one wanted to continue his science studies, so we made silly putty. It's pretty easy to do. You just need some glue, water, and borax. (The younger one couldn't remember what borax was called, so he called it "morax" and "thorax" and "florax" before finally reading the word on the box.) What you're supposed to do is mix a couple tablespoons of borax into some warm water. Pour the glue into a ziploc bag, and add the borax solution a couple tablespoons at a time. Kneed the bag until you have it thoroughly mixed and continue adding borax until you get the right consistency.
One problem is that I forgot that you're not supposed to get washable glue. Wood glue is actually a much better choice. Glue is a polymer, but adding the borax turns it into an elastopolymer...that is, it becomes stretchy.
When you use washable glue, you get more of a bouncy gel that isn't terribly stretchy. If you pull on it, it breaks apart with very little effort or stretching.
Hmmm...that's actually a good analog to lithospheric behavior: pull it apart, and it breaks pretty easily, just like a divergent or spreading zone. However, this analogy is seriously flawed: I doubt the lithosphere bounces very well if you throw it on the table.