You and I, and a little toy shop

Today was dedicated to equipment training.  We got the chance to play with Garmin, Trimble, XRF, and spectrometer devices.  My favorite was the Trimble because I got to walk all over campus and  interact with satellites at the same time.  Don’t let the distance fool you, those suckers can find you mostly anywhere!

* Interesting fact…there is a total of 999 operating satellites that orbit the Earth and 442 belong to the United States.

Later in the afternoon, Dr. Lipo gave a talk about research that he conducted on Easter Island.  He studied how people moved the maoi statues around the island.  His research was so popular that it will be published in National Geographic tomorrow! No joke.  Dr. Lipo also introduced the term “ecocide,” a term that I believe will become more commonly used in future generations.  As science and technology improves, we are able to study the impact of human presence on an environment in a more precise fashion. Having such information is bringing awareness to people other than scientists.

At the end of the day we got to have a little fun by flying a blimp in the air.  It was big and red and looked like a ginormous tomato hovering above our heads!  Of course, all I could think about was food with a tomato above me, and not surprisingly, the song 99 Red Balloons crept its way into my mind and stayed on repeat for the duration of the activity. But even with these distractions, I had to focus my attention to help guide one of the ropes that flew the blimp.  There were three ropes attached to the blimp and one camera hanging from the middle; we will fly this blimp in Kauai to take aerial photos of specific sites.   Any way, we were flying this thing in the middle of campus with a bunch of trees around.  You can imagine the circus that we made.  People were running around in every directions.  Voices were raised.  Stress was felt.  It was hilarious.  Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me to take a picture; hopefully someone else will put a picture in their blog.