At Last, I Have the Means to Launch Washington Dollars into Quasi-Keplerian Orbits

[beamjockey]

I won a prize.



Three cheers for the Fermilab Friends for Science Education!

I expect to be insufferably smug for at least another week.

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Congratulations, History Quizmaster!

So what's the story behind the bison?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

There's a link to a lot of old newsletter stories about critters at the lab.

Bob Wilson was a Wyoming cowboy in his youth, before he became an accelerator builder. He loved the vanishing bison. When the government put him in charge of building a lab on 6800 acres of prairie with barns and silos on it, he decided to get some bison.

In 1970, the Laboratory purchased the first six animals from a source in Colorado. To obtain better cross-breeding, another group of twelve was added in 1971 from a herd owned by the State of Illinois. The two groups were kept in separate pastures until 1972 when they were combined.

[musicmutt.livejournal.com]

I always wanted to get something like that for busking.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! You have hours of fun in store for you.

And what about those Canada geese?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There's one at Burlington Mall taking donations for some charitable cause or other. It gets my pocket change every time.

[jebra.livejournal.com]

Way cool! I've wanted one of those things for years.

More accurately, I one one of the meter-wide ones, but The Spouse says "no way."

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could take up playing the sousaphone, and roll coins into it when you're not practicing?

[jebra.livejournal.com]

Hmmm ... given how she vetoed the large vortex thing, I can only imagine her reaction when I get one that has 32 feet of brass behind it. B-)

On Purpose?

[tandw.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry...someone deliberately brought Canada geese (eh?) to Fermilab? Maybe things were different back then, but these days we've got a whole lot of them staying at Argonne year-round, and they're not the most sanitary of critters. (Compared to bison, though....)

Re: On Purpose?

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, things were quite different in 1971. Canada geese were seen flying over on migration, never stayed for either the summer or winter, and if you told people that they would be a major pest in 3 decades they would have called the guys with the big butterfly nets to put you in a rubber room before you harmed yourself.

Re: On Purpose?

[tandw.livejournal.com]

It's not a screwup on the order of Bunnies Down Under, at least. It does remind me of how early European settlers apparently weren't sure about local edible plants, so they brought along seeds for something they were certain they could eat: dandelions. Oops.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

You gonna bring that to the NASFiC? You could have Phil draw the Herterodyne Boys herding bison on it in various Sharpie colors, including the ever-fashionable black. :-^)

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

Suspend a little light bulb so it hangs just above the central hole and you can say the coins are in trajectories with "Poynting-Robertson drag"...