Space, the final frontier

I’ve been reading a juvenile fiction novel called Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

which tells the story of a teenage girl living in the aftermath of a devastating asteroid hit to the moon.  The moon is pushed out of orbit and the effects on the earth below are widespread.  The character Miranda tells of the struggle to live in such a world where there is little sunlight, fires, flooding, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and most of all, very little hope.  While the premise might seem almost impossible, people have been fascinated by the idea of the Earth being uninhabitable at some point and what we’d do next.  Of course, we haven’t quite mastered the goal of being able to live on another planet, but people will always be interested in outer space and the idea of space travel for the average person.

When I came across  the Spaceport America website, I wonder really how many people are seriously going to consider space travel once it becomes a commercial endeavor.  Spaceport America is the first and largest company to begin promoting commercial flights to space.  Not surprising, it is located in Roswell,  New Mexico, the famed landing site of a UFO in 1947 and the home of further space exploration from that point on.  New Mexico is considered ideal for a space program of this sort due to the large, open space, dry weather and government support.  Aside from the Roswell incident, White Sands, New Mexico was for many years the home of a landing strip for the NASA space shuttles, and it now regularly hosts the X Prize Cup annual space flight exhibition.

And of course, we’ve all seen Sir Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic team promoting space flight for the average person.  (You can see more of Virgin Galactic here.) You can see all about the flights here and also book your ticket, which will run you a cool $200,000 (but you only need to give a deposit of $20,000 right now!).

Would you pay that much just for a short trip above the earth?

Secret Agents

This week, we started our summer programming for children at the Carleton Place Public Library.  We have had more than 200 children join the TD Summer Reading Program already, with 50 kids who have already read their first three books.  They are busy solving clues and searching the giant I Spy puzzle on our library wall.

Kelsey’s programs this week have already drawn a number of wanna-be spies.  They’ve made their own secret badges and name tags and had “training”, but tomorrow is Secret Agent Boot Camp, so I hope our little spies are ready!

This morning, our storytime little ones were busy trying to bring the sunshine back to Carleton Place after days and days of rain.  Here’s one of our sunshine kids:

If you are interested in coming ot one of the programs, please see our summer calendar on the right hand side of this page.  Send us an email or give us a call and sign up early because the programs are filling up quickly!

Life After People

I’m not sure what the idea is behind all of these doom and gloom shows on TV lately, but I think they are trying to scare us into actually doing something to change the way the world is going.  Is it working?  Probably not, mainly because I have a feeling that most people watching TV at night are not watching the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. Dancing with the Stars and the latest version of Big Brother are not going to change a lot of lives. But the big informational channels keep trying and the latest addition to the History Channel is a program we  just watched called “Life After People”.

Life After People is an ongoing series that aims to show us what the world would be like if people were suddenly gone.  They don’t  tell us how we actually vanish from the Earth, but rather, they focus on the story that would emerge when people are no longer present.  Now, for some reason, animals still seem to be around, so maybe we were just carried away on a spaceship that didn’t have room for animals?  You decide.  But the result is interesting.

Each episode focuses on a different aspect, from what would happen to bodies that remained, to the collapse of bridges and buildings and the deconstruction of automobiles.  Very interesting and really informative about what happens scientifically speaking to things like steel, brick and wood.  You might be surprised to learn that a lot of the things we take for granted in our world each day are actually very well cared for by people, such as bridges, and without people, these things would deteriorate quite quickly.

You can find out more on the History.com website, with videos and breakdowns of each episode, along with quizzes and interesting facts about our planet.  For more information on our planet, stop by the library and find books about the environment, the planet itself and what you can do to keep our world functioning in a better way than it seems to be heading now.

We’re going batty!

Yesterday morning I came to work and as I reached the front door of the library, I was surprised to see this little guy just hanging out, right beside the front doors.

I don’t know how long he’ll be there, but he seems to be having a good old sleep right now anyway.  So, want to know more about bats? (I’m not convinced that I really do, but here goes.)

We have a large number of books on bats at the library such as this little gem about Vampire Bats by Barbara A. Somervill:

Canadian author Kenneth Oppel has written a fabulous series for kids written from a bat’s perspective starting with Silverwing. He also has a fun website based on the series and you can take a look at it here.

If you are interested in more information about bats in general, there are a few websites that you can visit such as Bat Conservation International, Bat Conservation Society of Canada, and Bats for Kids, a website for kids only.

Go batty!

Geek the library

Of course we all know that libraries are cool, but there is a great new campaign on called “Geek the Library” which is trying to promote that libraries are as interesting as the people who use them.  You can leave your own geek-love response to let others know what you use the library for, or just view some of the other fascinating responses.

There are all kinds of fun things to look at on this site, and you can download Geek the library wallpaper for your computer, or buy a cool t-shirt that is customed designed with your own geek phrase (called Geek Gear).  If you Tweet or use Facebook, you can also show your support to this campaign with a direct link to the site. Why not give it a try?

Carleton Place is an exurb

(photo of the Carleton Place Town Hall by Julescamp)

Recently, I came across a new term that I had never heard before in reference in Carleton Place.  Apparently, our town is an “exurb”. Just what is an exurb?  It stands for “extra-urban”  and according to Wikipedia, it describes  “a ring of prosperous communities beyond the actual suburbs that are the commuter towns for an urban area.  Most exurbs serve as commuter towns, but most commuter towns are not exurbs”.  So, does this apply to us?  Yes.  Carleton Place is definitely a bedroom community with many people who live in the town but work right in the city.  We are not considered a suburb because we are too far out from the city, I suppose, a very separate entity.

Where does the term exurb come from?  It was coined back in 1955 in a book called ” The Exurbanites”  by August Comte Spectorsky.  Exurbs often grow to become suburbs of larger cities and very rarely, they can become cities themselves.

I thought this term was fascinating and it goes up there with my list of new words for the year.  Is your town an exurb?