Saturday July 23, 2005
Saturday July 23, 2005 Google and Avogadro En Route to Penguins
I took 4 children to
see the March
of the Penguins today by National Geographic. What a
beautiful film. Although, it's about life with a little bit of
death thrown in for good measure, so the youngest one got a bit
teary-eyed toward the end. The cinematography was a wow and
the logistics must have been imposing. According to the scuba
gypsy blog, the penguins were filmed at "penguin eye-level for six
to seven hours a day in 13 to 22 below zero
Fahrenheit in order to capture character-like qualities of the
creatures." Imagine what kind of quads those cinematographers
must have.On the way there, the 4 children had a little chat about numbers. I stayed out of it. For context, they are 8, 7.5, 6, 5.5 - two are mine, two are someone else's. Why am I sharing this? It was just so darn amusing... To the best of my recollection, they said:
- Why did they have to cut down that beautiful old shade tree at school?
- It was old and was sick. They had to.
- How old?
- Really really old.,
- Yeah, but how old?
- One thousand million years.
- No, a google.
- Google plus!
- Yeah, google plus years.
- Definitely google plus.
- Isn't Avogadro's number bigger?
- Infinity is the biggest. It's because there are always more numbers to count. The numbers never stop counting.
- That's right, there's no stopping point for numbers. Just a starting point - zero.
- No, zero is not the lowest number.
- Yes it is.
- No, it's not.
- Yes it is!
- No it's not! When we drove back from Tahoe last winter it was so cold it was in the negative numbers.
- What's a negative number?
- Negative one, negative two - it was negative twelve degrees that day - all the way down to negative infinity.
- You're right I guess - numbers don't have a starting point either. Of course.
[Pause]
- Are we there yet, Mom???
(2005-07-23 22:48:06.0) Permalink Comments [1]
