EARTH DAY: Monday dawned with lovely sunshine in Seattle (w00t!) How lovely of Mother Nature to do that for Earth Day. Above are a couple of coffee-filters turned Earth art CJ and Annabelle crafted at a pre-Earth Day celebration at the Museum of History, Advertising and Industry on Saturday.
April 22 is the official Earth Day, and we started our morning by tuning into a NASA Digital Learning Network special broadcast, "Beautiful Earth," live from Goddard Space Flight Center, at 9 a.m. our time.
The program started with an interview with NASA's Dr. Claire Parkinson, who discussed climate change and how NASA is studying our planet. Parkinson is a project scientist of NASA's Aqua satellite mission, which measures Earth's processes including temperatures, clouds, vegetation cover and water vapor.
Parkinson also talked about the Aqua mission. The Earth-observing satellite was launched in 2002, before CJ and Annabelle were born. Aqua circles the globe every 98.8 minutes, in south to north circles. It manages to cover the entire Earth each day, said Parkinson.
The program also featured director and musician Kenji Williams. He narrated and performed as part of BELLA GAIA®, or beautiful Earth, a multimedia show. Williams said his inspiration for Bella Gaia was wondering, "If the Earth had a voice, what would it look and sound like?" He discussed his inspiration and why art and music are important in science. Williams said that artists and scientists "are similar in many ways" and that both groups "have a passion to learn and explore the mysteries of our world."
Williams has appeared on NASA DLN broadcasts on Earth Days past. Here's a short video from his 2010 appearance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f8NiE-O51MY
Williams said that he uses images and video from several NASA sites, and that Science Visual Studio is a favorite. We've visited a lot of NASA sites, but this one's new to us. After the Beautiful Earth! Broadcast, we checked out SVS and learned that the studio works with scientists to create visualization products, systems and processes with a goal of promoting greater understanding of Earth and space science research activities at NASA. SVS has over 4,600 visualizations online. Quite the treasure trove!
The broadcast featured live links with students in three locations: California, Pennsylvania and the Blackrock Castle Observatory in Ireland. Students at each site got to ask questions.
One of the students asked about climate change, and how quickly it was happening. Parkinson noted that climate change has been going on for 4.6 billion years, and even if humans were not around, it would still change. That said, she said that humans are having significant impacts on our planet's ecosystem.
There were germane questions from the students in the selected classrooms, including multiple ones about bad things going on environmentally, but especially given that it was Earth Day, I was kind of surprised that none of them concerned what humans could do to help make things better-or at least less worse.
At the beginning of the broadcast, the host said they'd accept questions from viewers, and an email address was provided. In the first half of the show, just one from-the-Intertubes question was answered. I asked the kids if they wanted to submit a question. They said they did, and so we quickly sent in an inquiry, about the 30 minute mark into the 60 minute program.
Imagine our surprise and delight when, with 5 minutes left to go in the show, the hostess said there was time for one last question, and "CJ and Annabelle in Seattle want to know what we can do to help preserve the ice on Earth."
Woo hoo! Lil ol' MPA got in! (It was one of two from the masses questions answered during the show.) Those kids in the observatory in Ireland have nothing on us! ;)
Dr. Parkinson spent the next five minutes answering the kids' question. Her suggestions ranged from don't put black particular matter on the ice (ok, hadn't planned on it, but thanks for the tip!), to reducing one's carbon footprint, say by bicycling and walking more (can do!).
For more information about the Beautiful Earth program, visit http://beautifulearth.gsfc.nasa.gov.
LIVE FROM THE WHITE HOUSE:
From 8:30 to 9 a.m., we watched interviews with amazing students who presented projects at today's third annual White House Science Fair. These kids' inventions are absolutely mind blowing in their scope and scale. I would highly encourage you to watch this. You'll feel better about our future and all of humanity. :)
Some of the innovations are remarkably sophisticated - like early, accurate tests for pancreatic and breast cancer. The trio of young men in the White House photo below came up with shoulder pads that help keep athletes cool and safe.
There was one camera filming the event, and it seemed to be sitting on a table in a far corner of the room. You couldn't see the students, their exhibits or the president. All you could see was the press pool's backs, filming the event. So not cool. I'm not just complaining on our behalf - those young inventors totally DESERVED the live, worldwide audience they could have had if not for the lamesauce camera angle used. Ugh.
DOUBLE DIGITS: The Big News this weekend was CJ's 10th birthday on Saturday. He started the day with his dream breakfast - Kickstart (Mountain Dew's 'breakfast' drink) and pizza. I told him that it was basically a college student breakfast. He's looking forward to college. :)
For lunch, CJ had his first ever Big Mac. Going to McDonald's is already kind of a big deal for us, because we don't do fast food very often, so going there and getting a Big Mac was a really Big Deal. CJ blew through the burger quickly.
After lunch, we headed to the Museum of History, Advertising and Industry (MOHAI) in South Lake Union. There, Caspar Babypants (also known as Chris Ballew of The Presidents of the United States of America) was putting on a concert. The kids dig Caspar, and they shook their booties for a solid hour.
You can imagine how thrilled CJ was to get an autographed CD from Caspar as a birthday present. Afterward, we wandered across the street to World Sports Grille, where they have a whole bunch of arcade games. CJ and Annabelle played around a bit and even actually won a stuffed animal from those impossible crane/claw machines. They were stoked!
That evening, we went to CJ's favorite dinner spot - The Wing Dome. Afterward, we tore into presents, and enjoyed the cake CJ had requested I make.
He wanted it to resemble the cake from a favorite video game, Portal. (One of the memes from that game is "the cake is a lie," as the female narrating the game keeps promising the player cake for their accomplishments - but in the game (spoiler alert) the cake is a lie. Here's a still shot of the cake in the game.
Have I mentioned we're geeks?
FINALLY SKYWARD: Orbital Science's Antares test flight was supposed to happen on Wednesday, but there was a technical malfunction. On Friday and Saturday, weather didn't allow for a launch. Finally, on Sunday, at 2 p.m. our time, up it went, from the pad at Wallops, a NASA facility in Virginia.
We enjoyed hearing so many "nominal"s post-lift off.
In the photo below, you can see CJ taking some 3D photos of the event with his new Nintendo 3DS, a birthday present.
It. Was. Hard. I'm not gonna lie. On Monday last week, I read over the week's homework assignment problems and my first and only thought was, "There's no way we'll ever be able to do this." It read like Greek (or any other unfamiliar foreign language) to me. I thought about unenrolling us in the course, but then I thought, "Wait. Let's at least listen to this week's lectures, and see if, somehow, some way, between now and then, we might actually get this stuff." And so we carefully took in each lecture, and took each pre-test and were as ready as we could be come Sunday.
We're bound by the course's honor code, so I can't post any of the test questions here, but I think I can safely share a couple of practice test questions, as we get to take those an infinite number of times for practice.
One question from the lecture about Galilean Transformation was,
"For the all the questions in this quiz, consider person #1 moving to the right (positive x direction) at a constant velocity v with respect to person #2. Assume that at time t = 0 the two were side by side. Each person measures distances using the same units (such as meters), and each person uses their own location as the origin for their measuring system. In other words, each person measures distances in terms of how far away something is from where they are located. Let the measurements of person #1 be represented by x1 and the measurements of person #2 be represented by x2.And then there were lots along these frames of reference lines ...
Consider an event that happens at some position x1 and time t (after time t = 0), according to person #1. Person #2 measures the location of this event at position x2. Would the value of x2 be greater than or less than x1?"
Consider Bob on Space Station Omega in deep space. At time t = 0, Alice flies by in her spaceship at constant velocity v, heading to the right, while Kris flies by in another spaceship at the same velocity as Alice, but heading left. (Same situation as the first two questions.) Which diagram represents the world lines of Bob and Kris in Alice’s frame of reference?And then we'd have our choice of diagrams. So that's the kind of stuff we were up against. We were able to work on our homework assignment as a group, per class rules, but the tests were individual, and each of our tests were different.
I was THRILLED beyond measure when I got 21/24 on the homework, as it's pass/fail and 70 percent was needed to pass. I think the kids both got a bit higher score than me. And on the Week 2 final, I was stoked to get 11/12 and called it good. Annabelle aced it on her first go round (you can take it up to three times, but you get different questions each time). CJ got 11/12 the first go round, and he was determined to get 12/12. His second time he only scored a 10, but his third time he got the perfect score he was after.
So in the end, the kids ended up acing tests I thought maybe we shouldn't even take just a few days prior. Not bad, not bad at all!
Those are relatively hard questions. Congrats on your scores
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