Learning? During the Summer?

I started off this vacation from school with a list of things to do that mostly entailed voraciously working on my reading list and trying to work on some writing. I've definitely still found room for common summer practices like enjoying the outside, coming inside and turning the a/c up, half-price shakes at Sonic after 8pm, and going swimming, though maybe getting caught in torrential downpourings of rain doesn't quite count. But for the last two weeks, I've been reading all the time! I've finished six books so far, working on my seventh, and here I am, practicing some writing with a blog post! And now my hours have (finally) increased at work, so now I'm working five days a week instead of two. This makes me feel a little bit better about lying around all day and reading books.

But I do more than just read these books; I try to learn as much as I can from them. It helps that almost all the books I've read so far were either science-fiction, or actual non-fiction science books. These facts and possible ideas that stem from these books are so interesting to me that I just can't help looking up more information to see what other applications can be found. Wikipedia has always been a great help and I seem to always have at least one tab open to an article from them at all times. I currently have tabs up for String Field Theory, String Theory, Nuclear Propulsion, and Antimatter. It's gotten to the point that Google just opens up Wikipedia articles for me instead of giving me all the other results of the search. I love Google. :)

Anyway, Jesse also helps in my endeavors by playing video games, oddly enough. His latest time sink is a game still in alpha called Kerbal Space Program. It has thousands of dedicated players already, a helpful community, is available on Steam, has third-party mods, and its own subreddit. It's in version 0.20, but it still has many opportunities to have fun and explore new places. It is basically NASA if they had an infinite budget and astronauts that are super cute and don't need to plan for food/water/oxygen/time spent in space. There are also several places out in the solar system to explore such as other planets and moons, but sometimes just leaving Kerbin's atmosphere is quite the challenge. The game operates with mostly realistic physics and requires players to pay attention to actual rocket science components like delta-V, angles of trajectory, and surface weight to thrust ratios. It's fun seeing terms like apoapsis and periapsis in the game because they're not shying away from the real terminology, and it definitely made me want to learn what they were so I could understand the game better. Someday there will be a career mode, but until then, it's a sandbox game that lets the user do whatever they want from making rockets to space planes, and even rocket powered boats, because why not.

His current mission is to land a 150 ton floating base on a mostly water covered moon (Laythe) of a Jupiter-like planet (Jool). It's a three part base that includes the core, a large fuel tanker, and a return craft. My favorite part is the inclusion of two boats that the Kerbals can sit on and boat around the moon. This is a very different mission than some of the others he's done, such as landing on the moon (Mun), making a space station to orbit Kerbin (the Earth-like planet), and landing on a planet similar to our Mars (Duna). It's just so much fun to watch what people can do in this game and it's like real rocket science. So crazy! Youtube has many videos of this game, if you're curious, and it has plenty of tutorials for those wanting to play.

So there's just a little bit of a glimpse into my science-filled summer so far. I'm learning about other non-sciencey things as well, but science is always fun to talk about. Now I challenge you guys to learn something new today/this summer as well! Go go go!