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The Delight of Corner Reflectors

erik

Corner reflectors are amazing.

They help cars see you (sometimes) on your bike at night.

There’s one on the moon that reflects back laser light.

They’re in the channel to help boats see

Obliging across the spectrum, corner reflectors be.

Here’s a great video about corner reflectors on the moon, which also talks about how corner reflectors work, and offers entertaining digressions like how astronauts deal with their poop.

Lesson Plan: A good lesson for students (perhaps Fifth or Sixth Grade, or even Seventh Grade, Eighth Grade, or older) would be to watch this video and make corner reflectors of their own using this science “snack” from the Exploratorium. The Exploratorium website is a wonderful resource for science teachers.

What is a Science Snack, anyway?
An Exploratorium Snack is a hands-on science activity. Science Snacks are tabletop exhibits or explorations of natural phenomena that teachers or students can make using common, inexpensive, readily available materials.

Science Snacks are divided into easy-to-follow sections that include instructions, advice, and helpful hints. Each one begins with a photo and/or video, a short introduction, and a list of materials. Other sections include assembly instructions, how to use the activity, and explain what’s going on, science-wise. Most Science Snacks can be built by one person; we indicate if a partner or adult help is needed, this is indicated. A section called “Going Further” offers interesting bits of additional scientific and historic information.

Why are they called Snacks rather than activities?
The Exploratorium is a science museum with hundreds of hands-on exhibits. Early in our history, other museums would ask for “recipes” to build and duplicate these exhibits, so we published a series of books called the Exploratorium Cookbooks. Teachers wanted to build classroom-sized, less expensive versions of these same exhibits, so we created Science Snacks as a way to bring our exhibits into the classroom. We published these in a book called The Exploratorium Science Snackbook.
Many of the original Snacks we built were based on museum exhibits. We’ve since branched out to cover content that spans science curriculum for grades 6-12.

Source: http://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/about

If you’re interested in learning about the channel markers like the can buoy pictured up top, you can click here. The buoy is green, and has the #5, an odd number, so you know that it’s a buoy that marks the right side of the channel when leaving the harbor.

If you’re a squash player, you might already exploit the corners of the court to send a ball right back where it came from.

“Gifts that Keep on Giving” by Marge Piercy

Gifts that keep on giving
by Marge Piercy (b.1936)

You know when you unwrap them:
fruitcake is notorious. There were only
51 of them baked in 1917 by the
personal chef of Rasputin. The mad monk
ate one. That was what finally killed him

But there are many more bouncers:
bowls green and purple spotted like lepers.
Vases of inept majolica in the shape
of wheezing frogs or overweight lilies.
Sweaters sized for Notre Dame’s hunchback.

Hourglasses of no use humans
can devise. Gloves to fit three-toed sloths.
Mufflers of screaming plaid acrylic.
Necklaces and pins that transform
any outfit to a thrift shop reject.

Boxes of candy so stale and sticky
the bonbons pull teeth faster than
your dentist. Weird sauces bought
at warehouse sales no one will ever
taste unless suicidal or blind.

Immortal as vampires, these gifts
circulate from birthdays to Christmas,
from weddings to anniversaries.
Even if you send them to the dump,
they resurface, bobbing up on the third

day like the corpses they call floaters.
After all living have turned to dust
and ashes, in the ruins of cities
alien archeologists will judge our
civilization by these monstrous relics.

(HT to H.H. for introducing me to this poem and K.K. for recommending Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.)

Book Recommendation for 2015

The best book I’ve read this year is Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, written as a letter to his son for when he’s older.

Coates recognizes the dignity of each person, each “one-of-one.”

Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress-making and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved… Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains — whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

Also, despite our nation’s wealth being built out of slavery and systematic abuses of power to safeguard the American Dream, Coates sees the beauty in the world. He sees the stark reality of how easily bodies can be broken by human and natural causes, and how to be insulated from that reality is to not only be ignorant, but also to be farther from grasping the meaning of life itself: life’s transience, our mortality, the richness of our differences, and the way we depend on one another.

I am sorry that I cannot save you — but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real — when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities — they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

There is so much I would like to talk about with this book, and I realize I’ve just slapped down some large quotes with very little discussion. But first, without delay, I recommend it to you so that I have you to talk about it with.

After that, I’d like to discuss how Coates talks about how racism perpetuates itself, how it’s not about race but about a people. How Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. And so much more. But first, read the book.