2007

Fri, Oct 12

<23:35 EEST> This week's synchronicity is called Stardust. Weather on Monday was unstable from the early morning, but things cleared up in the evening for a physics teaching field trip to Nyrölä Observatory. Most striking to me was a globular cluster on an orbit around Milky Way, as you could distinguish the individual stars, rather than the blur of a bigger galaxy.

Real stardust was also up there to see, in preparation for Tuesday's movie. The main attraction was the script based on a Neil Gaiman novel, and it totally worked for me as a Sandman fan. It was by no means a perfect movie, there were some odd production choices and acting/directing/cutting was sloppy at times. But in fact those little 'mistakes' were a refreshing thing to see on big screen, which is usually reserved for well-rounded, polished Hollywood shite. The classically fairytale-like story, almost innocent with its slight clichés, was another constant source of fascination in this day and age. While the first half turned out a little too predictable, there was an unexpected move introducing the king of sidekicks, Robert De Niro, after which the ball got rolling with electrifying twists (pun intended for those in the know).

Wednesday at school we had special guest nanostars, Lynn Bryan and David Sederberg from NCLT, talking about the allotropes of carbon and how to teach about them. The fullerene revolution of 1985 was presented as an intriguing example of recent scientific history, somewhat like the hubris of mechanistic physics at the late 19th Century. Rather than the familiar example of soot, it turned out the first hint at C₆₀ was found in stardust. Playing around with paper and glue to build buckyballs and nanotubes was a nice change from the usual lecture/discussion pattern. Of course, the P.E. guys later mistook my paper bucky for something else.