Andrew Underwood

Alley Zen

Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence

I stumbled upon this site while looking at jobs in CAPS, at first I thought it was a joke: Edmonton Waste Management Centre of Excellence.

I’ve played alot of guitar the last few days, hours probably. Finally I’m getting around to learning some heavier Metallica type stuff.

Da da DAAA! Up up and away!

I’ve just been busy with schoolwork lately. It’s amazing when you can sit down with a math assignment at 10:30 and work until 3:00 without getting up for anything. I wasn’t having fun, but boy, time was flying. I guess it piqued my interest…

The big news is that Jared and I bought our tickets to Italy tonight. It’s going to be a fun trip!

Cutest thing I saw today

It’s pretty hard to beat a lion cub and a puppy playing together: pictures of the odd couple.

The Moon

How big do you think our moon is? Perhaps the size of France… does that sound right? Actually it turns out that it’s about a quarter of the diameter of Earth. This is actually pretty big for a moon, 3476 km accross to be exact. Compare this with Pluto which is 2274 km accross. That means our moon is bigger than a planet! I for one am glad we have it, because without it the earth would not be so steady. The almost perpetual dance our planet and moon engages in keeps us from who knows what weird things a planet with a moving magma core would get up to. It also gives us our tides. When I say ‘almost’ perpetual, it means that our moon is slowly loosing interest in the dance and is drifting off, currently at a rate of about 4 cm a year. The second question to ask is where did we get our moon? It must have always been there and was just one of the planetesimals that formed with the earth and all the other planets and moons at the beginning of the galaxy. That’s what I would have guessed. Another thing could have been that we locked orbits as the moon floated by from who knows where. Turns out that the current theory says that it was actually part of Earth and was blown out when something the size of Mars hit us. I find it ironic how something that sounds so devistating is one of the items in a long list of why we are here.

Disposition

I was just out running down into the river valley. It’s dark but not really cold so it was nice. On my way back I tripped over an election sign wire that had been left in. They had taken the sign off but left the big shin high hoop firmly planted in the ground. Being night time I didn’t see it, they should really take care to clean up their election pollution better!