Classy

PICTURE THIS: I received an email from an artist who used some of the photos I've parked on Morguefile to create new works of art. She has a business, Pixel Pixie Photopainting, where she uses some software and her artistic abilities to create pixel magic for customers. 

Below is one of my favorite baby photos of CJ. I like her new take on it - very soft and dreamy.

And with this photo she did a lovely job of switching out an ugly background, instead putting a cute pic of Annabelle with a pretty backdrop. 

Obviously, if you ever want something special done with a photo of yours, you might give Pixel Pixies Photopainting a try!

OFF TO COLLEGE: Today, the kids started their first college course, and I went back to school.

Thanks to a post from a Facebook friend, this a.m. I learned about a class titled "Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life"  offered through Coursera, a program via which top universities in the world offer free courses online for anyone. Per the Coursera Web site, "We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students."

What's not to like about that?

The class we signed up for is offered through the University of Edinburgh!  It's called Astrobiology and the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life.  The course addresses questions of the origins and evolution of life plus the potential for it to exist elsewhere in the universe. 

We watched the first two lectures today, an introduction to astrobiology, and the history of astrobiology, taught by Charles Cockell, a professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh. Cockell received his doctorate at the University of Oxford and was a National Research Council Associate at the NASA Ames Research Center. Cockell is currently Director of the UK Centre for Astrobiology.  Pretty good resume, no? 

We learned so much today, already. The professor talked about how we need a cosmic perspective to understand life here on Earth (for instance, how asteroid strikes have affected our planet). Astrobiology seeks to understand the origin and emergence of life, how it came about in this planet, was it inevitable  when did it emerge. We'll also be considering limits of the biosphere - issues of extremes and habitability. And, of course, we'll be considering whether or not life on Earth is unique. If there is life elsewhere, what's it like? If there isn't, why doesn't it exist? And things like, if we do discover life elsewhere, how does that effect our religion and societal structures? We'll also be examining the difference between science and sensationalism.

The second lecture we watched today was about the history of astrobiology. We learned it's not a new science. In fact, it dates at least as far back as ancient Greece, when Metrodorus noted, "A single ear of corn in a large field is as strange as a single world in infinite space."

Giodano Bruno could be considered the father of astrobiology. The Renaissance philosopher speculated about the "numberless earths circling around their suns, no worse and no less than this globe of ours." Poor Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic on Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori.

With the advent of telescopes, finally, speculators had some empirical evidence about astronomical observations. Unfortunately, their observations were often fraught with speculation. When Sir John Herschel saw the moon's craters in the 19th century, he thought some of them so round and perfect, they couldn't be naturally occurring, and chalked them up as the construct of Lunarians. He was wrong.

Sir John Herschel

And then, of course, there was Christiaan Huygens, a prominent Dutch mathematician and astronomer who discovered Saturn's moon Titan and centrifugal force. When Huygens saw spots on Venus, Mars and Jupiter and speculated that there were sophisticated societies on those planets with a love for the arts.

Here's a sketch form 1659 Huygens made of a dark spot on Mars.

Though Huygens might have been wrong about music-loving Martians, I do love this quote of his, from "The Discovery of Celestial Worlds," 1690

We might rise from this limited Earth and,
looking from above, thinking, whether nature all its
splendour and glory had wasted to this heaply of dirt.
So we will, like traveller in other far away lands,
get a better judgement about the things at home and
form judgement of any thing by its worthiness.
What the world calls great we will admire less and
all the nullities most of the people set their heart on
we despise noble, because we will know, that myriads of
settled and equally good fitted worlds like ours exist.

Harvard grad Percival Lowell founded an observatory in Arizona in the 1890s. He was certain the canals of Mars were constructed by Martians. (His observatory still stands in Flagstaff, BTW.)

Here's a map of Mars canals he drew in 1895.

Our professor pointed out that Herschel and Huygens and Lowell were "warnings from the past" and examples of speculation with very little (or no) data to back it up. 

I could go on and on - actually, it strikes me that I already have - but I'll stop here. 

After the lectures, we each took a 10-question quiz and we each got 100 percent - w00t! 

MISTY: This afternoon we headed up to Group Heath to get the kids' flu shots. Lucky for them, no needle was involved. They had plenty of the mist-up-the-nose version available. Ironically, the kids were both still skittish about it. And now that I think about it, I wouldn't be wild about having a live flu virus shot up my nose, much, either.