Category: Technology

Keeping in Touch

10/3/2018

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent
Nature's Animal Ambassador

How often do you check your cell phone or email each day? Use Twitter or Facebook? Can you stand not to “stay in touch” for even one day? We’re used to being able to hear from people anywhere in the world at any time, with just a few taps on a keyboard or telephone pad.

Through most of human history people could only communicate when they were within shouting distance. When alphabets came along, our ancestors could create messages on stone or wood and later on parchment (made from animal skin), or paper, made from wood pulp. Then, of course, the message had to get from one person to another by way of a messenger. When public mail came along, it made that process much easier and more reliable.

That’s where things stood for a long time. Imagine being a soldier in 1804 joining explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their epic trek across the west to the Pacific Coast. This was territory almost totally unknown at the time to European Americans.

You’ve left behind your family and all your friends. Now you have no way of finding out what happened to those dear to you. Did your father or mother die? Did a sister get married? How many babies were born? Your loved ones get to be a bit luckier, since in the spring of 1805, the keel boat that carried the expedition to Indian villages for the winter is sent back down the Missouri River with a small crew, and you get a chance to write notes to your loved ones, reassuring them that you are okay.

A lot can happen during a 2½ year span like the one endured by members of the expedition! Finally, in September of 1806, you and your colleagues return to the St. Louis area and find out that most people assumed you were all dead. Now you must figure out as quickly as possible how to reconnect with family and friends. It won’t be easy, since they don’t know you are alive, and you don’t know where they are after so long. How can you even locate everyone you care about?

Think about it: If you didn’t have email or a phone of any kind, whose messages would you miss the most? And who would you most wish you could tell about these events in your life?

The Lewis and Clark Expedition followed the Missouri River through miles and miles of vast prairie like this one, full of amazing wild animals like these bison.

This postage stamp honors the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And, no, they could not have used a stamp on a letter to send news home. The first US postage stamps weren't issued until 1847.

Dorothy has written about how the horse changed the lives of the Plains Indians and everything that followed.

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom,a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.

MLA 8 Citation
Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw. "Keeping in Touch." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 4 Oct. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/keeping-in-touch.

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Getting Your Head 3-D Printed

9/21/2018

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Roxie Munro
Visual Thinker

So do I stick my head into that glass-enclosed rectangular box? Will it fry my brain? Or will the damage show up in 20 years? Will my head come out looking like those primitive shrunken heads that repelled and fascinated me as a child?

    I’ve volunteered to have my head 3-D printed, and am checking out the equipment at the State University of New York. As it turns out—great relief—I don’t have to stick my head into the box after all; that’s where the “printing” occurs, not the scanning.

    The professor tells me to just sit upright and stay super still on a chair for a little over a minute, while his assistant uses a hand-held scanner—making several passes of the sides and top of my head and neck from about 30 inches away.

    In a couple minutes, the glass box starts to make noise and comes alive. The “printing” begins. For the color of my little sculpted head, I’m given a choice of red or white. Red seems a bit creepy, so I go for white. The plastic substance is long and cord-like, about 1/8 inch in diameter, and wrapped around a big spool at the back of the printer. One thin white layer after the other is laid down. It builds up, and slowly a tiny replica of my head begins to take shape. Half an hour, and it’s done.

    Sure enough, this looks like a miniature Roxie, about 2 inches high, with a flat back where it lay down on the printer, although the machine appeared to have quit just before it reached the tip of my nose, which is kind of cut off.

       So what can be done with this new kind of printing? Well, it is already being used in dentistry for making crowns. Jewelry can be created from metals, even gold. You can actually make plastic guns using this method. Unfortunately (or should I say fortunately), they don’t work very well—the plastic gets distorted rapidly from the heat and action of shooting a bullet.

    But maybe the most fun is making food. Nursing homes in Germany are taking pureed food and making it into appetizing shapes. NASA is researching making 3-D pizza in space. Instead of white plastic maybe I should have asked for chocolate—and turned myself into a delicious dessert.

3-D printer

Print being built up in thin white layers

Roxie getting scanned

Mini-me.

Roxie and her mini-me.

Using works from the National Gallery of Art by Vincent Van Gogh, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, and others, Roxie Munro has created an innovative introduction to art. As an artist contemplates her next painting, she introduces genres and subjects, showcasing reproductions of great works. The sweeping painting she creates cleverly incorporates all 37 pieces she has considered.

Children can have fun finding the masterpieces in her painting and learn more about the artists in the notes in the back matter.
Read a review here.

MLA 8 Citation
Munro, Roxie. "Getting Your Head 3-D Printed." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 20 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/getting-your-head-3-d-printed.

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Keeping in Touch

Getting Your Head 3-D Printed

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