Every spring the Colorado School of Mines takes a weekend to do nerdy things in celebration of E-Days, which is of course short for "Engineering Days." They have a mining competition, pull and ore cart down main street to downtown Golden, build cardboard boats and soapbox cars and trebuchets, and cancel classes for a day and a half to do it. Most of the really neat stuff-- in fact, all of the things I just mentioned-- are tomorrow, but today they had a tesla coil demonstration, and it was awesome.
Tesla coils, for those who do not know, are entirely useless but very cool things which create electrical arcs through the air. That's it. You turn it on and there's lightning arcing up into the air. Or, if there are two of them, across the gap. Useless but very cool. Well, not entirely useless-- some people have managed to turn them into musical instruments, which is awesome. Go to youtube and look up Arc Attack, you'll see what I mean. Anyway, this guy brings in one he built at home, and tells us about Nikola Tesla (look HIM up on "Badass of the Week" for an entertaining read) between turning the thing on and showing us neat stuff it can do-- like putting a little spindle on top with a wire balanced on it, and having the heat from the electricity now arcing off the ends of the wire cause it to spin. Then he let us come up and see the guts and ask questions, and that was awesome, too. Tesla coils are neat, and I want to build one.
Following that I managed to meet up with several of the people I am hoping to organize the SSA group with. The saga continues: we heard from the elusive Matt again, and this time we have a LOCATION for the Tuesday meeting! Hopefully I will yet manage to collapse the wave-function that is Matt, and find out whether we can get all our cats to herd together in a single group. Even so, I met with Nate, one of the people I found while fishing with my button, and two others that are not students but are still quite interested and helpful. We decided that we would like to be sure we are all on the same page before Tuesday, so it's more like two herds of cats coming together, rather than each cat having its own ideas. (At some point I will get tired of calling them cats. That has not yet happened, obviously. I do not anticipate it being soon.) The good news is: the people I met with today are very much on the same page as me, and are people I know I can work with. I hope my observation of the elusive Matt collapses him into a favorable quantum state as well.
We talked about a lot of things-- speakers we would like to get, and a few we might be able to afford sometime soon, ideas for service projects, what our group's official structure should be, good things to include in a mission statement, fun events we could plan on campus, and more. Here is our proposed mission statement at the moment:
"The Secular Student Alliance at the Colorado School of Mines strives to create an welcoming environment for students who embrace a non-religious or skeptical worldview. Our group works to utilize debates, discussion, speaking events, service projects, and cooperation with faith groups on campus to generate a dialogue about supernatural claims, science, ethics, skepticism, and reason."
Hopefully, when we arrive on Tuesday, this will all gel with what Matt and his herd have been thinking, and we can get things moving forward.
Tesla coils, for those who do not know, are entirely useless but very cool things which create electrical arcs through the air. That's it. You turn it on and there's lightning arcing up into the air. Or, if there are two of them, across the gap. Useless but very cool. Well, not entirely useless-- some people have managed to turn them into musical instruments, which is awesome. Go to youtube and look up Arc Attack, you'll see what I mean. Anyway, this guy brings in one he built at home, and tells us about Nikola Tesla (look HIM up on "Badass of the Week" for an entertaining read) between turning the thing on and showing us neat stuff it can do-- like putting a little spindle on top with a wire balanced on it, and having the heat from the electricity now arcing off the ends of the wire cause it to spin. Then he let us come up and see the guts and ask questions, and that was awesome, too. Tesla coils are neat, and I want to build one.
Following that I managed to meet up with several of the people I am hoping to organize the SSA group with. The saga continues: we heard from the elusive Matt again, and this time we have a LOCATION for the Tuesday meeting! Hopefully I will yet manage to collapse the wave-function that is Matt, and find out whether we can get all our cats to herd together in a single group. Even so, I met with Nate, one of the people I found while fishing with my button, and two others that are not students but are still quite interested and helpful. We decided that we would like to be sure we are all on the same page before Tuesday, so it's more like two herds of cats coming together, rather than each cat having its own ideas. (At some point I will get tired of calling them cats. That has not yet happened, obviously. I do not anticipate it being soon.) The good news is: the people I met with today are very much on the same page as me, and are people I know I can work with. I hope my observation of the elusive Matt collapses him into a favorable quantum state as well.
We talked about a lot of things-- speakers we would like to get, and a few we might be able to afford sometime soon, ideas for service projects, what our group's official structure should be, good things to include in a mission statement, fun events we could plan on campus, and more. Here is our proposed mission statement at the moment:
"The Secular Student Alliance at the Colorado School of Mines strives to create an welcoming environment for students who embrace a non-religious or skeptical worldview. Our group works to utilize debates, discussion, speaking events, service projects, and cooperation with faith groups on campus to generate a dialogue about supernatural claims, science, ethics, skepticism, and reason."
Hopefully, when we arrive on Tuesday, this will all gel with what Matt and his herd have been thinking, and we can get things moving forward.
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