Ithaca View

As you wander through the Commons you can be excused from missing it since it’s not near a cafe or pizza place, but once you find it you feel an undeniable urge to discover more. Ithaca has an inventive tribute to the late, great Carl Sagan . It’s not just some boring statue with a bust that could be any guy and engraved with "Carl stopped here in 1988 to buy a hotdog during a festival" at the bottom. Oh no. This one takes effort.

Collectively it is known as the Sagan Planet Walk . Start at the pedestrian crossroads of the Commons and you will find a statue to the sun that’s about 6ft (1.8 meters) tall (by itself showing that locals know for certain that the rest of the world revolves around Ithaca).

The rest of the solar system is laid out proportionally according to actual distance and size (see map ). For example the sun is really 1,392,000 km in diameter so the hole in the statue is 278mm (11 inches). Uranus is 47,000 km in diameter so its hole is (contrary to crude jokes) 9.4mm (.37 inches) and it is located 574 meters (632 yards) away from the sun (near the library) which is proportional to its 2,870,000,000 km actual orbit radius. Bored yet? Well you shouldn’t be. Pluto, the furthest, is 1,180 km away or .6 of a mile and on the side of the Science Center.

Now that I have found Pluto, I will go back with my sledgehammer and adjust the planet walk according to the official 2006 revision of the Definition of a Planet .

BTW, I miss the snow. I thought it was supposed to SNOW in winter.

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A friend of ours and mother to a boy our son plays with is working on her PHD in Political Science at Cornell. She told us a story today that any exhausted parent could relate to. Recently she had to complete a 72 hour exam to continue in her coursework. That’s right, 72 hours. The participants were encouraged to "forgo sleep as much as possible". We did ask why someone in PoliSci has to complete a test of endurance more fitting to medical school and it seems that it is some type of weird hazing.

Anyway, on with the story. Sometime after the 50 hour mark, she was driving back to her house from Cornell very late at night completely exhausted. Her mind started drifting and so did the car. She had that moment shared by all exhausted drivers where they grip the wheel and cry "Oh, Shit!"

She honestly knew she had been weaving badly so when she heard the faint sound of a siren behind her she guiltily began pulling over to the side of the road. Almost stopped, she glanced into her rear view mirror. Nothing was there, not a single car.

She drove on and there it was again. That same siren. She was convinced she was having audio hallucinations from a lack of sleep, pulled over then got out of the car but the road was silent. She walked to the rear of the car and heard the siren again. It was coming from the trunk. Inside she found her son’s fire engine that she had taken away from him for misbehaving days earlier.

She never mentioned which woods she threw it into.

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