A Ton of Crap (92 page)

Atmosphere
All of the air that surrounds the planet is considered the atmosphere. The majority of the atmosphere is located near the Earth’s surface. The atmosphere begins at less than 1 meter below the surface of the planet and goes up to more than 10,000 kilometers. The air of the atmosphere consists of 21 percent oxygen, 79 percent nitrogen, and a small amount of carbon dioxide and a variety of other gasses. The atmosphere protects the living creatures found in the biosphere from the Sun’s rays, and absorbs and emits the heat from the Sun.

SIGN LANGUAGE

Written Form
The written form of sign language also differs from the oral forms of languages. This is known as SignWriting. SignWriting was created in 1974 by Valerie Sutton, and is actually based on the graphic notation used for writing ballet steps. The system uses visual symbols to express the handshapes, facial expressions, and movements found in sign language. In other words, the alphabet shows how the hands look. SignWriting is currently the written form for twenty-seven Sign Languages.

WORLD WAR II

End of the War
Germany’s control and power began to weaken. As the Soviet Union fought German forces in the Battle of Berlin, Hitler, who had been hiding in a bunker during the battle, committed suicide. On May 1, the German forces surrendered in Italy, and on the next day, the forces fighting in Berlin surrendered to the Soviets. On May 7, the war in Europe was over. On August 6 and 9, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and on August 14, Japan surrendered.

SCIENCE FICTION

Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury, an American author born in 1920, has written more than 500 works. His most famous work is also perhaps one of the most controversial science fiction books ever:
Fahrenheit 451
, a novel set in a dystopian world where hedonism is celebrated and the reading of books is prohibited. Bradbury is also the author of other famous books such as
The Martian Chronicles
,
The Illustrated Man
, and
Something Wicked This Way Comes
.

KNOT THEORY

Tabulating Knots
In knots, a crossing number is a knot invariant that is the least amount of crossings in a knot diagram of a particular knot. Knots are cataloged by their crossing number. Tables include the prime knots and one submission for a knot and its mirror image. Prime knots are the knots that cannot be expressed any simpler after knot sum. Tabulation of knots can become increasingly difficult as the number of nontrivial knots of a particular crossing number increases. John Horton Conway did the first major work verifying the process of tabulating knots.

THE EARTH’S SPHERES

Celestial Sphere
The celestial sphere is actually a fictitious sphere that surrounds the Earth, with the planet being at the center. One can only see half of the sky at any time, because that is what is above the horizon. Much like the way the sun rises and sets, so too do the stars in the sky. The celestial sphere keeps record of the celestial bodies that are in our sky. Important notions of the celestial sphere include the North Celestial Pole and the South Celestial Pole (which are extensions of the North and South Poles), the Celestial Equator (which is like the equator, but it expands into the sphere), the horizon (which changes based on what position you are on), the Zenith (the point that lies directly overhead) and the Meridian (which goes from the North Pole, through the Zenith, to the South Pole).

SIGN LANGUAGE

Sign Language with Primates
Language is not only a form of communication, but a uniquely human experience. Studying whether primates have the ability to develop language could lead to some great discoveries about the earliest humans. Washoe, a chimpanzee, was the first nonhuman to ever learn sign language and communicate with humans. Since the 1960s, chimpanzees and gorillas have been learning to use sign language for communication. Koko, a gorilla, was introduced to sign language in the 1970s. In 2004, Koko was featured in news reports when she signed to her caretakers that she had a toothache and needed to go to a dentist.

1. Which of the following was responsible for America’s entry in the war?
   

   1. The Battle of Normandy
      
   2. The Invasion of Poland
      
   3. The Invasion of Russia
      
   4. The attack on Pearl Harbor
      

2. Which of the following was won by the Allied forces?
   

   1. The Invasion of Poland
      
   2. The Invasion of Russia
      
   3. The Battle of Normandy
      
   4. The attack on Pearl Harbor
      

3. Who is considered the “father of science fiction”?
   

   1. H. G. Wells
      
   2. Ray Bradbury
      
   3. Isaac Asimov
      
   4. Jules Verne
      

4. Who wrote
   The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
   ?
   

   1. Isaac Asimov
      
   2. Robert Heinlein
      
   3. Arthur C. Clarke
      
   4. Ray Bradbury
      

5. When more knots are added to a zero knot, the shape of the knot:
   

   1. Tangles
      
   2. Divides into two separate knots
      
   3. Decreases
      
   4. Remains the same
      

6. Which of the following is not one of the Reidemeister moves?
   

   1. A strand could twist and untwist.
      
   2. A strand can be cut in half and then those two strands are placed on top of one another.
      
   3. One strand could be placed over the other strand.
      
   4. A strand could be moved over or under a crossing.
      

7. The cryosphere is sometimes considered a part of the:
   

   1. Biosphere
      
   2. Hydrosphere
      
   3. Lithosphere
      
   4. Atmosphere
      

8. The biosphere consists of:
   

   1. All of the air that surrounds the planet
      
   2. All of the water that is found on the planet
      
   3. All of the life that is found on the planet
      
   4. All of the crust that surrounds the planet
      

9. Which of the following is true?
   

   1. In general, sign languages are completely separate from oral languages and have different paths of development.
      
   2. In general, sign languages are based entirely on oral languages and follow the same path of development.
      
   3. All sign language is based on ASL.
      
   4. All sign language is based on IS.
      

10. SignWriting is based on:
    

    1. The graphic notation that was used to write ballet steps
       
    2. Visual symbols that express handshapes
       
    3. Symbols that represent letters from the Latin alphabet
       
    4. A and B
       

ANSWER KEY: d,c, d, b, d, b, b, c, a, d

HISTORY:
The Holocaust
Hitler’s Propaganda, Concentration Camps, Ghettos, Pogroms, The “Final Solution,” Liberation

LANGUAGE ARTS:
Fairytales
Aesop’s Fables, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, The Brothers Grimm, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve,
Carlo Collodi

MATH:
Chaos Theory
What Is Chaos Theory?, The Butterfly Effect, Fractals, Strange Attractors, Misconceptions of Chaos Theory, Applications of Chaos Theory

SCIENCE:
Geologic Periods
Cambrian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Quaternary

FOREIGN LANGUAGE:
Hindi
The Origins, Sanskritization, Hindi Vocabulary, Dialects, Hindi Today, Useful Hindi Phrases

THE HOLOCAUST

Hitler’s Propaganda
One way Adolf Hitler made the mass extermination of Jews possible was by eliciting strong feelings of ill will toward the Jewish community. He did so through propaganda by newspapers, film, art, music, books, radio, and the press. The weekly Nazi newspaper,
Der Stürmer
, meaning “The Attacker,” featured caricatures of Jewish people as apelike. Films showed the Germans as superior, with an emphasis on German pride, and depicted the Jewish people as inferior, even subhuman. When Hitler came to power, he ruled with a combination of propaganda and a police state to silence any critics.

FAIRYTALES

Aesop’s Fables
Even though Aesop’s fables (of which there are currently over 600) are some of the most popular fairytales ever written (e.g., “The Tortoise and the Hare”), very little is known about the actual man, Aesop. It is known that Aesop was Greek and born in Thrace in the sixth century b.c. It is believed that he spent most of his life living as a slave on the island of Samos and that, though he was a slave, he was allowed many freedoms and used his fables to argue in court. It is unknown how many of the fables were actually told by Aesop and how many were just attributed to him as they were collected later on.

CHAOS THEORY

What Is Chaos Theory?
Chaos theory is the mathematical study of extremely complex systems, and more than that, it is a study of the unpredictable and uncontrollable. For example, the stock market, the weather, ocean currents, even migration patterns of birds are all extremely sensitive to any sort of change, and therefore cannot be predicted like other principles in mathematics and science (like gravity or chemical reactions). Chaos theory emerged in the early twentieth century when Henri Poincaré determined that any measurement of something, for example, an orbiting planet, could never be infinitely precise, even if it can be accurately predicted.

GEOLOGIC PERIODS

Cambrian
The Paleozoic era, the time period when life forms first began to explode in diversity, started with the Cambrian period. The Cambrian period occurred 570 to 510 million years ago. Many significant events occurred during the Cambrian period. The supercontinent Gondwana broke apart and global temperatures began rising. Oceans were considerably higher, and though life on land was sparse, it is during this time that the first invertebrates began to appear in the oceans. While Precambrian life had soft bodies, the life found in the Cambrian period featured hard shells.

HINDI

The Origins
Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language that, along with Urdu, which is the official language of Pakistan, is a descendent of a colloquial speech used in North India (the Khari Boli dialect spoken in Delhi) in the ninth and tenth centuries called Hindustani. Much of the vocabulary and grammar of Hindi and Urdu are the same, with the exception that Urdu is written in Persian script and Hindi is written in the Devanagari system. Hindi was also greatly influenced by Sanskrit, one of the oldest Indo-Aryan languages, which was also written in Devanagari.

THE HOLOCAUST