What would you call this?

In some places, like Chicago or St Louis, people call this pop.  In other places like Philadelphia, people would call it a soda.  We’ve even heard people in Massachusetts call this tonic.

There’s no risk having different ways of naming something like soda pop.  It’s no big deal when you buy something to drink to go with your sandwich while you’re visiting the museum of science.  “Pop? You mean soda?” the lady at the cash register asks.  “OK, that’ll be $1.25.”

See?  Easy.

But talking about using measurements can be tricky.

Your mom goes to the gas station and fills up the car with 10 gallons of gas.  Your father puts a 12 ounce sirloin steak on the grill.  Gallons and ounces are a couple of examples of how we measure stuff in the US.  We use a system that was based on the Imperial system from England but changed slightly.

Here’s how Americans used measurements in the time of Thomas Jefferson:

Two mouthfuls are a jigger; two jiggers are a jack; two jacks are a jill; two jills are a cup; two cups are a pint; two pints are a quart; two quarts are a pottle; two pottles are gallon; two gallons are a pail; two pails are a peck; two pecks are a bushel; two bushels are a strike; two strikes are a coomb; two coombs are a cask; two casks are a barrel; two barrels are a hogshead; two hoghead are a pipe; two pipes are a tun-and there my story is done!

from http://library.thinkquest.org/J002831/missionmetric.htm

We need to be able to have a standard of measure so that if a grocery store buys a bushel of corn from Iowa, and it gets delivered to Washington State, that everyone will know exactly how much corn they’ll be getting, as long as it’s in the US.

The same is true at a hospital.  The doctor tells the nurse to give you 10 ccs of some medicine.  CC means cubic centimeter, which is part of the metric system, or SI, the International System of Units.  It’s a completely different way of measuring than the American standard.  So the doctor has two ways of measuring inside his or her head.  At the gas pump?  American.  At the hospital?  Metric.

If you’re a scientist, you, too, work in the metric system.  It does not matter if you’re a scientist in Brazil, Bangladesh, Spain, Canada, or the US.  Scientists use the same system.  But Americans who have other jobs like carpenter, receptionist, police officer, all use the American system of measurement.  Right now there are only three countries in the world that do not use the metric system for everything.

which countries do not use the metric system?

The countries on this map (courtesy of Kate Sedgwick at Matador Nights) in pink are the United States, Liberia, and Burma.  Everybody else uses the metric system for everything, steaks and gasoline, included.

Will this ever change?

The You Tube(r) video Once Upon a Tide presents a different kind of fairy tale.

Listening to the sound a seashell makes, a real living girl enters into a sad and beautiful cartoon world of the ocean.  The storyteller in the video says, “you might find it hard to believe but I assure you it’s true.”

You see underwater that there is a huge world we do not know much about.  The oceans have populations of different animals, locations, light, its own kind of environment.  It is different than what we human live above ground.  But what we do on land and how we behave directly affects the oceans.  And what goes on in the oceans directly affects the weather.  Which then directly affects us humans on land.  So if the oceans suffer, so will we.

Click here to see –>Once Upon A Tide

Oceans cover more of the earth’s surface than rocks and dirt do.  When you look at a map of the world, notice how much water there is, compared to the land.

Oceans are very deep.  The lower you go into the water, the darker it gets because the sunlight from above can no longer penetrate.

Morning Earth explains:

Life in the ocean that lives below the sunlight penetration lives in a three dimensional blackness. They can move in any dimension, but have few clues about where because there are zero landmarks, or better, signs to tell them where they are. It is hard for gravity-bound beings like us to imagine free floating all the time. No autotrophs (self-feeders) live here–there is no light to photosynthesize.

When we scuba dive to explore this complex world, we are limited by our bodies, even if we have very good oxygen tanks to breath.  We experience limits that we don’t have when we’re out of the water.  The lower we swim down and down into the ocean, the more our bodies feel pressure on our organs.  And at some point our bodies simply cannot dive lower because the pressure is too much.

So, scientists employ other methods to go further down to explore, using robots and submarines with cameras, and are able to find the smallest of organisms that you cannot see without the help of a microscope.  You might take a look at drops of water taken from these depths and not be able to see anything with just your eyes.  Look at the water using  a microscope, and you will truly see life where you could not see it before.

I bet you have never thought of a fairy tale as a microscope before, right?

Germs, sometimes known as Bacteria, are alive, but you can’t see them.  Bacteria are groups of tiny organisms that have only one cell.  They are on the ground, in the air, on your shoelaces, the handle to the refrigerator, the tip of your nose.  They are all around us.

Some bacteria can cause diseases but not all of them.  Humans actually need some kinds of bacteria to live!

To learn more about Germs go to this website:

http://kidshealth.org/kid/talk/qa/germs.html

To hear the latest Bacteria dance song, sweeping across…my computer…click on the You Tuber video below.  I like to think of the song as what Germs would sound like if they could sing.

Update: Check out these details on bacteria