Well. I think I should take a minute and catch everyone up on what’s been going on around here.
We had out big science fair. And guess what!!! Jaci got 3rd in her category. We figure that that is good considering the girl who got first has been working on the same project for the last 5 years and has taken it to international competition the year before last.
Jaci is going to regionals and everyone at the school thinks she has a good chance at state or beyond.
Megan got a second in her category but didn’t meet the minimum score to qualify for the regionals.
Kam also got 2nd in her category and will go to regionals. I’m busting with pride because of all the hard work that they put into these projects (not to mention all the hard work that I put into them as well) I know they say its not weather you win or loose, But sometimes its nice to get noticed for putting forth extra effort)
Being a small school there was some of the small town politics involved. Most of the category winners were either children of teachers, school board members, or star basketball players. In spite of that all 3 of them did extremely well. We will find out how my 2 elementary kids did tomorrow.
AJ. And I did something with batteries and an electro magnet exploring some different simple circuits. His project was a good 1 but he insisted on putting his board together himself and it looks like it.
Woody did an experiment to see if those hand cleaners like germ-x work. They don’t. Jaci helped him with his board and it looks AWSOME
I guess I should take a minute and tell what Jaci, Megan, and Kam did on there’s.
Jaci, repeated her experiment from last year. I read about a professor somewhere that created a set of Barbie dolls. He altered them to make some fat, some skinny, some big hipped, some flat chests ect… Then he asked people which 1 they liked the best. We did basically the same thing. We would up with 9 dolls. Ranging in body style, from super skinny with no hips or breasts, to a very large obese doll. She then created a questionnaire with questions like “Which doll looks like it would be an athlete, which doll looks like a mommy. Ect…
The results are somewhat like you would expect. But the whole project was innovative for a high school student and we received a lot of comments from the people who saw it.
Megan’s project was to see if cats preferred the taste of expensive canned cat food to the cheep stuff. They do.
Kam wanted to do something along the lines of is it feasible for terrorists to destroy our drinking water. We used small amounts of yeast (a simple bacteria) to test the ability of the chlorine in tap water to kill bacteria. Do to a transcription error on my part I accidentally told her to start her test at .05 grams. I meant to have her start at .05 milligrams. It was still a very creative project. But by the time the math had been done we figured it would take 19 semi-truck loads to contaminate the local reservoir. Were going to try again next year with the correct amounts.

Other news. Jaci went to spend 3 days at the E.A.S.T. convention in Little Rock. She got to stay at some fancy 4 star hotel in downtown. EAST stands for something, I cant remember what but basically its and advanced self paced course for technology related fields such as computer programming, computer graphic design, computer, computer, computer.
The class project this year was to GPS our little town of Alpena, They built a 3d model of the town showing every stop sign fire hydrant building emergency evacuation plans ect. It was really cool. But the east conference is a multi-state thing and they didn’t even place. She had a great time though.

Regular basketball season is over, both the boys and girls made it into regional playoffs so there are still a few games to be played but none here in Alpena. Go Lady Leopards. Go Leopards!!!!!
More later.
Al…

Have you ever read somthing that made you think "Damn. I wish i had thought of that." Well this did. It appeared in our state paper "The Arkansas Democrat Gazette" in there "OP-ED" section.

To the moon and beyond
Charles Krauthammer
First we will mourn the brave and beautiful who fell out of the sky Then, however, we will proceed to the usual post-catastrophe ritual: investigation and recrimination. We will search for the culprits. Some human agent will be hauled out to bear the blame. And we will search for the cause: flying foam, wing damage, insulating tiles, whatever—we will find it but we will miss the point
The point is that the first 150 or so miles of space travel—braving the gravitational well of Earth and shooting through the atmosphere—is the most difficult and dangerous; the next million miles are comparatively easy. Yet going up and down that first 150 miles is the least glorious, least inspiring of all space adventures; it is the stuff beyond low-Earth orbit that speaks to our yearning as a restless, seeking species. Everyone notes how Columbia’s flight was almost totally ignored until disaster struck but it is hard to excite people about a space truck tacking off every couple of months on service missions.
Here then is the heart of the problem The shuttle does nothing but this most dangerous, yet most mundane, short-haul trip, over and over and over again—until the odds catch up with it. The risk of catastrophe for a commercial jet is one in 2,000,000. For a fighter jet, one in 20,000. NASA's best estimate for the shuttle was one in 240. Our experience now tells us that it is about one in 50.
That is a fantastic risk. It can be justified—but only for fantastic journeys. The ultimate problem with the shuttle is not 0-rings or loose tiles, but a mission that makes no sense. The launches are magnificent and inspiring. But the mission is to endlessly traverse the most dangerous part of space—the thin envelope of the atmosphere—to get in and out of orbit without going anywhere beyond. Yet it is that very beyond—the moon, the asteroids, Mars—that is the whole point of leaving Earth in the first place.
We slip the bonds of Earth not to spend 20 years in orbit studying zero-G nausea, but to set foot on new worlds, learn their mysteries, establish our presence.
Why was Columbia up there in the first place? It was conducting scientific experiments. But almost all such experiments can be conducted by robot. Sending human beings through takeoff and re-entry to study spider behavior in weightlessness is crazy. it is almost as crazy to risk lives to act as trucking agent for the space station, which was the mission of nearly every other shuttle flight for the past three years. it is hard to justify the space station in the first place. it is not a platform for further space travel It produces very little science. it is basically a laboratory for the biology of weightlessness. That’s about it. Yet the shuttle has become its slave, hauling up huge pieces of equipment and bringing up astronauts to do the construction work.
What an end. What a dead end. After millennia of dreaming of flight, the human race went from a standing start at Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years. And yet in the next 34 years, we’ve gone nowhere. We’ve gone backward. We’ve retreated from the moon and spent our time spinning around endlessly in low-Earth orbit
The way to consecrate the memory of those noble souls on Columbia is not to mindlessly repeat the last 20 years but to rethink the whole enterprise. For now, we need to keep the shuttle going because we have no other way to get into space. And we’ll need to support the space station for a few years, because we have no other program in place.
But that is not our destiny or our purpose. If we’re going to risk that first 150 miles of terrible stress on body and machine to get into space, then let’s do it to get to the next million miles—to cruise the beauty and vacuum of interplanetary space to new worlds. Back to the moon. Establish a lunar base, And then onto Mars.
The Columbia tragedy will give voice to the troglodytes who want to give up manned space travel altogether. But the problem is not manned flight. The problem is this kind of manned flight, shuttling up and down at great risk and to little end.
Icarus fell because he flew too close to the sun. Columbia—and the whole American manned space program today—fell because it files too close to the Earth, repeatedly, gratuitously braving the terrors of takeoff and re-entry it Is time to once again raise our eyes and our horizons, and return to our original path, so inexplicably abandoned: to the moon and beyond.


Charles Krauthammer, who formerly practiced psychiatry and has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, writes for the Washington Post.