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Cybernaut - Live and Learn

While waiting at a cold Whistler bus stop, enjoying the crystal clear night sky that has plagued us all winter, I noticed two phenomena that were slightly out of the ordinary: an extremely bright dot in the southwest and a large satellite skimming th

While waiting at a cold Whistler bus stop, enjoying the crystal clear night sky that has plagued us all winter, I noticed two phenomena that were slightly out of the ordinary: an extremely bright dot in the southwest and a large satellite skimming the sky a little further to the south.

I knew the first sighting had to be a planet, but which one? And while satellites are a dime a dozen these days, this particular satellite was moving a little faster and shone a little brighter than your typical satellite. I wondered if maybe I had just caught a glimpse of Space Shuttle Atlantis or even the International Space Station.

I knew I’d find the answers to both of these questions online.

www.astronomy.com

My first stop was Astronomy.com, the homepage of Astronomy Magazine and a comprehensive guide and digest for all kinds of star gazers. The first thing you want to do at this site is to get yourself a membership – it’s free and they don’t try to sell you anything or ask a lot of product-related questions.

I went directly to the Sky Online, which is a kind of road map to the stars. Using a navigation system that allows me to set the time, time zone, date and direction I saw the bright dot, I determined that the planet I thought I saw was probably just Sirius, or the "Dog Star", of the Canis Major constellation, which was looking exceptionally luminous that night.

That established, I browsed for a while, reading a few astronomy articles and looking at pictures taken by Hubble and land-based telescopes. Scientists have all but proven that the last great extinction was caused by an asteroid crashing into the earth 250 million years ago, the Russians are sending up a crew to film the destruction of the MIR space station as it crashes to earth to raise money for future space endeavours, and a group of elementary school students discovered a cluster of mysterious boulders on the surface of mars. Since most boulders on earth are the byproducts of glaciers or volcanism this discovery could provide more evidence to support the theory that there is a substantial amount of water on Mars.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/

While my planet turned out to be a star, the bright satellite I saw was in fact the International Space Station, visible from Whistler two or three days a week. NASA confirmed this for me at SkyWatch, an online education centre that tracks the station for the public. Using the closest urban centre as a reference, in my case Vancouver, NASA can tell you when and where to look for the space station.

While I was on the NASA site I read up on the crew and a recent spacewalk project where the crew had to move one of the station’s pods, the Soyuz capsule, to the other side of the station to make room for a future link-up with an unmanned Russian re-supply vessel. You’d think they would have thought of that BEFORE they put the space station together.

Words to Live By

For probably the five hundredth time, I forgot to put the first "r" in February when filling out a cheque. I know better but for some reason I find myself making the same mistake again and again. When I’m speaking, however, I don’t say "last February", I say "last Feb-YOU-ary", and in my experience most people are guilty of the same thing.

I started to wonder where the word "February" came from. All of the other months are derived from Latin numerals and the names of Roman Gods and Emperors, but I had no idea what the history was behind the shortest month of the year.

The Vancouver Sun (

www.vancouversun.com ) provides a list of "Useful Web sites", including links to governments, other newspapers, traffic reports, transportation services, TV listings, phone and Web site directories, and loan and mortgage calculators.

It also includes a list of online dictionaries and thesauri.

The best of these is a site called YourDictionary.com (

www.yourdictionary.com) . After a few uses, this site becomes an indispensable tool and an addictive hobby.

It turns out that the word February has its roots in Middle English, and probably dates back to the 12 th century. The root word in question is Februarius, the plural of the Latin term Februa, which means feast of purification.

YourDictionary includes a thesaurus, over 230 different language dictionaries with translation abilities, lessons on grammar, word history and identifiers, and full dictionaries of homonyms, antonyms, synonyms, acronyms, meronyms, holonyms, and hyponyms. There are dictionaries of specialized words particular to an aspect of society, such as sports, medicine, and business; rhyming dictionaries for poets and songwriters; dictionaries of phrases; and the always interesting Word of the Day.

There are also articles on word origins and interesting essays on language. One essay compares and ranks the language in George dubya’s inaugural address to the inaugural addresses of his predecessors. Another traces the origin of the word zero. Another lists the top 10 words of 2000, including: chad (presidential election), millennium and Y2K (capitalizing on the year 2000), and pelletizing (a rubber bonding process at the root of the Bridgestone/Firestone tire recall).

While I was logged on, there was one other word I had been meaning to look up for a while now.

According to their dictionary/thesaurus, "Pique" has three meanings and a couple of obvious homonyms.

One meaning of pique – "a transient feeling of wounded vanity, resentment" – dates back to 1592.

Another, from the French word piquer means literally "to prick" – "to arouse anger or resentment in: irritate" or "to excite or arouse by a provocation, challenge, or rebuff: provoke." This word definition, which is probably the most accurate where our paper is concerned, can be traced back to 1669.

The third meaning, which dates back to 1852, means "a durable ribbed clothing fabric of cotton, rayon, or silk" or "decoration of a tortoiseshell or ivory object with inlaid fragments of gold or silver."

Pique homonyms include "peak" and "peek", which have obvious meanings.

Word up.