Creativity

In my general ed astronomy class I assigned the students a creative project.  They can do absolutely anything they want to do, as long as it demonstrates a knowledge of astronomy.  I have gotten some very nice poetry, paintings, drawings, etc.  Perhaps I will show you those later.  But first, there's this one.  A student chose to make a website about black holes.  Seems straightforward.  Until I received it and discovered that it looks eerily similar to xkcd's recent tribute to GeoCities.  If you missed it, the great free web server of the 90s shut down in late October, and xkcd commemorated the occasion by styling their page in a manner similar to every GeoCities page that ever existed:

Yes, I had a website that looked like that when I was in high school.  And do note the use of comic sans.

And now for my student's website on black holes:

The yellow text scrolls across the page and the comic sans continues lower on the page in orange, blue, and purple.  Ah, gotta love creativity.  The very interesting thing is that this student is a freshman, therefore born in 1990, so he was barely even alive when the early websites were out there.  I guess history is doomed to repeat itself.

(Note for the astronomers: one of the physics professors here doesn't think that black holes exist, and instead thinks they are "frozen stars" with the material stuck just outside the Schwarschild radius.  He gave a talk about it this semester, which is probably where the student got this idea.)