kids these days

I was helping Vivi practice for her science Olympiad with her mousetrap car and overheard some of the junior competitors complaining about the astronomy test. They first complained that the test was essay and not multiple choice; which I wrote off as typical laziness. But then they were complaining about a particular question that they called a "trick question" it appears that the question was along the lines of "if a star appears more blue than it should is it moving towards your or away from you, how do you know, and why is it moving? The one student simply stated that he put down that stars don't move. Well that is just not true, and of course I could not pass up the teaching moment. I turned to them and asked them how fast the earth was moving, of course they didn't know and I explained that it is rotating at roughly 1000 mph (yes I used stupid units to help them) and that is at least 5 times faster than they have ever experienced. A car on the highway moves at most 100 mph, a commercial airliner at 500 mph (yes I am rounding a lot). But that even the rotation of the earth is sadly slow in comparison to the rate that the earth is orbiting the sun at 66,000 mph. Now you might think that is fast, but we do not feel that sense of motion. and it turns out that we are actually moving a lot faster than that. As the sun orbits the milky-way we are moving at the amazing rate of of 486,000 mph. That is just mind boggling! you could travel from Washington DC to Los Angeles in about 20 seconds.

But we're moving even faster than that. The Milky-way is moving away from the center of the universe at a rate of 1,300,000 mph. It would only take 8 seconds to make the cross country trip at that speed.

Anyway their response to my story? "Wow, I wonder if we can go retake the test and take you with us."

sigh