Looking for Aliens

So I feel like I've kind of digressed from the original purpose of this blog recently, but I intend to get back to it today.  Earlier this week, I saw this interesting article regarding one of the Vatican's astronomers and his feelings towards extraterrestrial life (often abbreviated ETI for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence).  Considering I took a class called "Life Beyond the Earth" last semester and wrote my final paper on the potential religious implications of finding ETI, this really caught my eye.  

However, the religion aspect is not really my focus today.  What I am going to talk about is the statement made by Guy Consolmagno, the astronomer in the article, when asked about finding ETI-- "The odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it – when you add them up it's probably not a practical question".

Fractals

So talking to my little brother the other day led me to relearning some math and even a bit of chaos theory. Thanks, Dave!

The two of us were admiring our favorite shirts at Shirt.Woot (a fantastic site- if you've never been there, go) and we happened upon the "Fractal Tree" design. Now I was confused, because I didn't think this was a fractal. David disagreed, although I have a sneaking suspicion this was just for the sake of disagreement, not because he actually knew. However, it turns out he was right either way-- the tree is a fractal, because each of the branches is a smaller iteration of the tree as a whole. A fractal, by definition, is an infinitely detailed geometric shape with small sections similar to large ones.

What I was thinking of was a specific type of fractal, known as a Koch curve or a Koch snowflake. I was going to just copy and paste the description of one from Wikipedia, but it seemed a little more complicated than I'm going for, so I'll give it a go on my own. A Koch snowflake starts as an equilateral triangle. Then, imagine adding another triangle, 1/3 the size of the original, to each of the triangle's sides. This would give you a six-pointed star. Now add smaller triangles to each of the sides of this new shape. Repeat infinitely. I'll illustrate this description with the gif image Wikipedia had, since that makes it a little more clear.

Chem Is Try

Well I certainly found a gem among my files-- all of the papers, notes and lab reports from my honors chemistry class in high school.  Not only is this a find because it's over seven years old now and I can't believe I still have it, but also because my life has had a severe lack of science in it since I graduated high school.  This definitely falls into the category of "things I might no longer know", although not because I didn't learn it well.

My honors chemistry teacher was fantastic.  I doubt she'll ever read this, but Alice Frazer, you remain one of the best teachers I've ever had.  For those of you who didn't know her, I'll give this evidence-- among her AP Chemistry students, seventy-five percent received a five on the exam, the highest score possible.  The remaining twenty-five percent received threes or fours, which were also passing grades.  No one failed.  That takes some serious teaching skill.  On top of that, she had an impressive history working in the chem field before becoming a teacher, so she had practical knowledge and really interesting stories.