Beans & Streams

SEEING GREEN:  Do you see what I see? Amidst all the leaves of green? It's a big, honkin' green bell pepper!

We've tried to grow peppers in years past, with no luck, but our early and often summer has helped our cause this year. The pepper you see above is considerably bigger than my fist. We're thrilled.

The kids harvested some green beans today, too.

See them trying to hide from us? Well, CJ and Annabelle hunted them down and plucked them.

And then they ate all 8 of them, raw. Delicious and nutritious!

UP AND AWAY: Thanks to a Facebook post by Spaceflight Now, we caught the live, steaming coverage of a launch of an Ariane 5 rocket from Guiana Space Center, Kourou French Guiana (that meant the countdown was in French!). 

On board were the Alphasat, reportedly Europe’s largest and most sophisticated telecommunications satellite, and the INSAT 3D satellite. It launched right on time, at 12:54 our time. Here's one of the rocket bells igniting with T-minus one second until lift off!

Today's launch marked the 56th consecutive success for the Ariane 5 rocket since 2003. That's an impressive track record.

The Alphasat was also carrying four Europeans Space Agency demonstration payloads: an environmental and radiation testing sensor from Efacec (Portugal); the Aldo Paraboni Q/V-band experiment from Thales Alenia Space (Italy) and Space Engineering (Italy); a star tracker from Jena-Optronik (Germany); and a laser communication terminal from TESAT (Germany), provided by the DLR German Aerospace Center.

Here's the launch ... that thing got off the pad quickly!

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HOOPLA!: We learned today that Seattle Public Library has become a part of a new streaming video and music service called Hoopla. We had to check it out, of course!

Hoopla allows users access to thousands of movie, TV and music titles online. You can stream it through the Hoopla Web site, or via its iOS and Android apps.Turns out SPL has offered this since March, when they became the first public library system to do so.

We quickly browsed their educational titles and saw a Weston Woods animation listed. The kids have enjoyed many a Weston Wood storybook-turned-cartoon, so we fired it up, so to speak. The video book was called "Whitewashed." It was based on a true story about an incident that took place in the Bronx in 1992, when a young schoolgirl was attacked and her face was painted white. 

The video we watched was about a half hour long. It was a long half hour, IMHO. And the animation was showing its age. In fact, I would say it wasn't state of the art in 1994, when it was made. Nonetheless, the story kept the kids' attention. They were pretty surprised to hear racial slurs (including the 'n' word) in the cartoon. I told them it was appropriate for the story being told. 

When it was over, CJ said it reminded him of the movie "42" in some ways. I found a lesson plan about the show, which included some vocabulary and points to ponder. We talked about the show, and were curious to get more details about the actual incident. However, because it happened in 1992 (on Jan 6, to be specific), before the Internet boom, there wasn't much to be found online. I did manage to dig up a New York Times story from '92, with a headline "61 Acts of Bias: One Fuse Lights Many Different Explosions." It touched briefly on the original incident, but most of the story was about crimes that came afterward, in retribution and frustration.

I browsed around the Hoopla site a bit and saw they had a nice selection of documentaries and science-related titles. We'll definitely be tapping into Hoopla in the future - it's just one more free, easy resource to add to the 'tool box,' so to speak.