Monday, January 03, 2005

Childhood passions

I was wondering how much various amateur/home science things cost these days, and delightedly found Edmund Scientific's website.

As a child and a teen (in those ancient times, as my son likes to tease), the Edmund Scientific catalog was one of my favorites to receive. Until I left home, I secretly (from my peers) kept a weather station growing up in Indiana (secretly, because even I thought it might be a little too geeky for a girl of the times). I kept logs and manually collected information, including calculating dew point with a sling hygrometer, etc. My little station anemometer was hard wired to flash a light for each revolution. I counted flashes and then converted that into MPH. For a while even as an adult, I had an anemometer like that first one, mounted up high on the amateur radio antenna tower (yeah, I played with amateur radio too, thanks in part to WD9BFA).

Weather and Radio weren't my only science forays, but other than geology, they were the ones I spent the most time involved with back then.

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