Storms & Such

OUT OF DOORS:  This weekend got a little grey on us, but today the sun put up a good fight. We celebrated its efforts by going back to Golden Gardens and

playing in the sand.

                 
Golden Gardens has sandy and rocky beaches. It has daisy and clover filled fields. It has a great playground and a nice concession stand and more.

Seattle, your roads suck, and your police dept. is suspect, but your park system rocks. 
WEEKEND REWIND: Saturday we felt compelled to take advantage of a couple of events I'd learned about online.

First, was Astronomy Day at Pacific Science Center. On our way in we saw there was a live science show about illusions and so we parked ourselves and waited for it. It was fun and entertaining.

Once the show was over, we headed out for astronomy day activities. They were geared for kids a little younger than CJ and Annabelle, but they had fun stations throughout the center,  building paper space shuttles and such.

At one stop, we had a chance to visit with a man associated with Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope.  We were familiar with the software from a visit to the UW's planetarium some months back. But on this day, imagine the fun the kids had directing a tour of the universe with Kinect software!

After Astronomy Day, we headed across the pond (Lake Washington) to Bellevue for "Math Fest" event at a mall.

 The "mall" factor should have been enough to stop me. I would rather get a filling than go to a mall, no lie. But I was willing to set that aside in the name of education.

Because we pre-registered, the kids each got a free t-shirt, which was super cool.  Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, a whole lot of other people were interested in free t-shirts and math games. ;) That meant for pretty darn long and often disorganized 'lines' at every station.  We left after about a half hour.  :/

STORMY WEATHER: Normally, a hurricane is something to be feared. But if it's on one of Saturn's poles and this pretty, it's OK to just admire it. Thank you, NASA, for the lovely photograph.

ANOTHER ONE DOWN: We have managed to hang in through week 3 of a Stanford course all about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. That makes me feel pretty damn good.

None of us had any trouble with this week's tests, mercifully. The homework, however, was harder. We had to calculate the length of wavelengths, based on the frequency of a radio signal. And they had to calculate things like how long it takes light from the surface of our sun to reach Earth, and how long it would take to travel to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, if we could travel at the speed of light. (It's a long, loooong time, but I can't be more specific without breaking the honor code.)

Going in, I told the kids that this math really wasn't any harder than anything they'd already done, it was just on a larger scale (more zeros!). I showed them how to change their Windows calculators from regular to scientific view (so it could deal with way bigger numbers).

I'm happy to report they each aced the test. How cool is that? Each of the three weeks we've completed of the class, I feel like we've been hanging on by the edge of our teeth, but the kids are doing great. Guess I should just worry about myself.