The Little Free Library at Cypress Elementary is dedicated to the the mission of building community, sparking creativity and inspiring readers.
08/18/2021
https://news.leanderisd.org/maskupdate210817/
Superintendent: Mask Requirement for all Schools, Effective Aug. 18 | Leander ISD News Thank you for your patience and support as we opened our 2021-22 school year last week. We know our families and staff share mixed emotions about the school year, especially considering the spread of COVID-19 in our community. I am announcing an update to our health protocols, as we implement a di...
09/02/2020
The 2020 Census count will end in 30 days but hundreds of thousands of residents remain uncounted. This matters because each person counted is worth $15,000 in federal funding over the next decade for schools, roads, health care, pandemics, etc. And it matters when it comes to how our Congressional districts will be drawn and how we will be represented. Please encourage everyone you know to go to my2020census.gov and take 10 minutes for the next 10 years. EVERY PERSON COUNTS!
08/19/2020
Where to Stargaze in Texas About 45 minutes north of Houston, the Brazos Bend State Park still experiences light pollution from one of the country's largest cities. To offset that, the George Observatory located inside the park has one of the largest telescopes in the U.S. that is regularly available for public use. The 36-i...
07/18/2020
Ibram X. Kendi on "How to Be an Antiracist" National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi discusses "How to Be an Antiracist."
05/31/2020
https://www.bookpeople.com/anti-racist-reading-list
An Anti-Racist Reading List | BookPeople Hello BookPerson! Thank you for your support of Independent Bookstores! Though BookPeople is temporarily closed to the public, we are still taking web orders through bookpeople.com to ship directly to you and now offering curbside pickup. For tips to help you understand what the AVAILABILITY of e...
05/23/2020
Her Right Foot: A picture book about the Statue of Liberty by Dave Eggers Her Right Foot is a new picture book about the Statue of Liberty and all that she stands for, written by Dave Eggers and illustrated by Shawn Harris. Coming ...
03/30/2020
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01/03/2020
https://www.facebook.com/5281959998/posts/10152137730179999/
100 Notable Books of 2019 The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
09/07/2019
I am very pleased to report that the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's long-awaited successor, has finally, been, fully assembled after more than 20 years of dedicated effort. Engineers recently connected the two halves together (spacecraft + telescope) mechanically through the use of a crane. Set to launch in March 2021 and to orbit at 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope will peer back in space and time to give us a look into the young exploding stars that ignited in the early universe. The promising instrument will also look for planet-forming disks of dust in our galaxy and search for potential life abodes beyond the solar system. As it revolutionizes our understanding of the universe, this next generation observatory is set to become the next giant leap in observational astronomy.
The James Webb Telescope will have a 6.4 metre-wide mirror, about 7 times larger than Hubble’s, and thus an ability to gather light 70 times more than Hubble. The mirror structure will be formed by 18 beryllium segments, 20 kilograms each. The telescope will also possess a sunshield of astronomical size — almost the size of a tennis court. A parasol sunshield, it will be a five layered-structure, with a vacuum separating each layer. That is because the sunshield will serve to separate the telescope into a warm side and a cold side, as the telescope is pointed to the sun. The cold side is needed in order to seclude the sensitive filters, detectors, and mirrors from the sun’s heat. The sunshield will, indeed, only allow through less than one-millionth of the sun’s heat! Having a vacuum between each layer ensures that each layer will radiate away any heat so that virtually no heat gets to the cold side.
There will also be a smaller mirror opposing the larger one. Light will bounce off the larger mirror into the opposing one and then on onto the cameras and instruments. The mirrors are infrared mirrors and they will need to be kept at such low cryogenic temperatures of about -233 Celsius degrees so that they are not a source of infrared radiation themselves. Otherwise, that would interfere with photons being looked for. The telescope will also have a near-infrared camera with a larger field of view than Hubble’s. The camera will have a corona-graph to make faint objects visible and will serve to detect light from the universe’s earliest stars and galaxies.
The telescope will be positioned opposite the sun at the second Lagrangian point (L2) which is four times further away from Earth than the moon is. At this point, the telescope, the Earth, and the Sun would be lying in the same position in a straight line, since the gravitational forces and orbital motions of the bodies balance each other, establishing a stable position between Earth and the James Webb telescope and allowing for ease of communication.
One of the reasons why this telescope is pitted to be very promising and revolutionary is that, unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Telescope is an infrared telescope. Since the beginning of the big bang, the universe has been expanding. As the universe expands, the galaxies move apart from each other. Light travelling from those galaxies is therefore stretched in the process. In other words, light is red-shifted towards the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus, light emitted from the far-away first galaxies (that started travelling billions of years ago) would be shifted to the infrared end of the spectrum.
Infrared astronomy is also quite important when peering back through clouds of dust in order to observe stars and planets lying behind them. Clouds of dust can block objects in space from view because they absorb visible light. Infrared light from such objects however would be able to “penetrate” such occluding clouds of dust. A telescope optimized for infrared light would therefore allow us extend our vision into a hidden past world - an ability would allow us to trace the earliest stages of stellar evolution!
If Hubble’s history is any indication, we are yet to imagine what the most powerful telescope ever built will unravel!
09/06/2019
https://www.facebook.com/148122158539047/posts/3249469165070982/
Wednesday, September 4, 1957
On this day, 10 African American students will attempt to enter Central High School for the first time.
Late Tuesday evening, the principals of Dunbar and Horace Mann had informed the students that they would be going to Central the next day. Daisy Bates had then called the families of the students to inform them of the logistics for that Wednesday morning: do not come to Central High alone, but meet near the school around 8:30 a.m. where a group of local African American and white ministers would es**rt the students to the high school.
Elizabeth Eckford does not receive notice about this plan of action - the Eckfords do not have a telephone. Mrs. Bates intends to try to reach the Eckfords on Wednesday morning, but forgets in the hurried pace of the morning.
Elizabeth rides a bus to Central, approaches the school just before 8:00 a.m. and sees the soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard surrounding the school. Barred by the soldiers in several failed attempts to be allowed past their ranks, Elizabeth finds herself in the throes of an angry mob of protesters numbering over 300+ on Park Street (below photo).
Chants ["Two, four, six, eight! We don't want to integrate!"], racial epithets, terroristic threats and spit descend down on this fifteen-year old student as she attempts to make her way to the end of Park Street where perceived safety awaits her at another bus stop.
After arriving at the bus stop, Elizabeth waits for 35 minutes; in the interim, she is denied entrance to Ponder's Drug and supported by Benjamin Fine (see below) and Grace Lorch.
"The mob of twisted whites, galvanized into vengeful action by the inaction of the heroic state militia, was not willing that the young school girl should get off so easily. Elizabeth Eckford had walked into the wolf's lair, and now that they felt she was fair game, the drooling wolves took off after their prey. The hate mongers, who look exactly like other, normal white men and women, took off down the street after the girl." - Buddy Lonesome, St. Louis Argus
"Here she is this little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves seeking to destroy a little lamb." - Benjamin Fine, New York Times
Photo - Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service