 |
 |
0.0000016% of Britain's population visited my wife and me last night. His name is Dave, an electrician and personal friend. Conversation turned to the pair of brilliant planets sliding between broken clouds high to the south east. I grabbed a camera tripod and x40 bird-spotting telescope and quickly set them up outside the kitchen door, behind my car. While I was struggling with this inadequate equipment, a late straggler behind the Leonid meteor shower streaked spectacularly across a quarter of the sky. Then I showed Dave the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, just as Galileo saw them. It was cold and late and were were out there for less than ten minutes. I have seldom seen anybody so awestruck. It reminds me of the story about a woman walking along a beach. I don't know if she was a journalist or a politician. As sometimes happens, a recent storm had stranded millions of starfish all along the tideline. She passed a small boy throwing starfish, one at a time, out into the waves. "What are you doing?" "Helping the starfish." "I'm afraid you're not making much difference." The boy picked up another starfish and tossed it out. "Well I made a difference to that one." Ian Russell * [log in to unmask] Successful learning environments are more exploratory than explanatory. * http://www.interactives.co.uk * %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%