Fire and Ice

AMANI: CJ and Annabelle each came out of yoga class wearing new bracelets today. They say "Amani" which is Swahili for "peace."

Next year, their wonderful yoga teacher will be going to Kenya to teach yoga to underprivileged children there as part of the Africa Yoga Project.

ICY HOT: imagine our surprise today when we read that Mercury (that's right, the fiery planet closet to our sun) has ice. In fact, there's "abundant water ice and other frozen volatile materials" on Mercury, per a NASA press release.

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington/National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, Arecibo Observatory

Really? Ice? On Mercury? How is that possible, we wondered.

Turns out NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft has returned three sets of data that definitely point to ice on the planet's polar caps. Which led us to our next question. "Mercury has polar caps?" Who knew?

As it turns out, the reason the caps are there is because Mercury has almost zero tilt on its rotational axis, so there are pockets at each of its poles that never see sunlight. Amazing.

You can learn lots more about Mercury from the MESSENGER mission pages here: http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/  and here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html

MARK YOUR CALENDARS: Good news - NASA says the world won't end on 12-21-2012.

Every few days or so, CJ will start making noise about the Mayan calendar and the supposed doomsday approaching, and each time he does, we do our best to debunk that myth, by pointing out things like they didn't account for Leap Year days on their calendar, so when you add those days in over all these years, it would have already happened. And I tell him that the calender maker(s) probably just got tired of carving stone and so they quit on that random day. Or they ran out of room on the stone tablet. Or any number of really boring but plausible reasons that the Mayan calendar isn't a written in stone (pun intended) recipe for the world's end.

All that said, he keeps asking, so I'm thinking he isn't quite buying into our reasoning. Hopefully he'll take NASA's take more seriously. One thing I learned from the article on SPACE.com, was that just because the calendar on your wall at home or work doesn't extend past Dec. 31 of the current year, that doesn't mean time stops. It's just the start of another time period. Apparently the Mayans had something called a long count period, and though one of their calendars ended on Dec. 21, 2012, another one starts right after.

PLOTTING AND PLANNING: Yesterday I borrowed an overhead from the kids' school up north as a tool to use as we finally get started on the murals in Annabelle's new bedroom.

Today, Bee and I spent a couple hours with the Internet and Photoshop, coming up with a design for her east wall. It was fun to cobble it together, print it on transparency film and put it on the overhead. She loved seeing what her walls will look like in the not-too-distant future.

ISTANBUL NOT CONSTANTINOPLE: This morning CJ asked me when Constantinople became Istanbul. Heck if I know. Really, I'd know NOTHING about it at all if not for a song by "They Might Be Giants" which was featured on a Tiny Toons music video when Rick and Kennedy were about CJ and Annabelle's ages.

Of course, after we listened to the song, I had CJ do a little research to find out the answer to his question. Turns out before it was even Constantinople, the city was Byzantium, from 660 BC to 330 AD. Then, it became Constantinople and remained so until 1453 AD, when it became . Istanbul, which it remains to this day.