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THE BIG APPLE:  Today was busy busy busy. We were getting ready for our trip, which starts tomorrow night, as we wing toward NYC. We ran to the bank, three stores, and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Of course all that work makes a person hungry, and one of the many times the kids asked for a snack, I told 'em to get it themselves, and so we had a lesson in how to safely cut an apple.

No one lost a finger, so I guess it was a success.

THE BIG IDEA:  A few days ago, CJ announced that he had a Big Idea and he started to jot it down and flesh it out.  It had to do with colonizing Mars. After a few edits to his draft, he came up with this, which he decided he really needed to send to NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. ...

I have an idea on how humans can colonize Mars. First of all, we would send a rocket up to Mars. Then, we would put some Earth medium in Mars’ dirt, so we would plant tree and vegetable seeds (from Earth, obviously) in the modified Mars dirt, and build a glass dome around the modified dirt.  (Note:  to make it fee more comfortable and natural, we would plant grass on top of the dirt.) Now one may ask, “How will we get the tress to grow if we don’t have any water?” What we would do is dig a underground canal from Mars’ polar ice caps to the glass dome, so that the plants would grow and the trees would convert Mars’ poisonous carbon dioxide onto oxygen.  (Note: the water would give the plants the nutrients they need, and the medium would give something for the roofs of the plants to hold on to.)
 Another thing we could do is help the plants grow more, and to supply food to the astronauts, what we would do is make the water from the polar caps go to a pond where fish would live. The fish’s waste would feed the plants (to help them grow) and we would breed the fish and we would eat the plants and we would eat the fish. This cycle shows how aquaponics can be useful for colonization.

Eventually, we would repeat the process until we have at least a neighborhood’s worth of people there. After that, we would expand the glass dome, and repeat the process until we have a colony’s worth of people there. 

Annabelle illustrated the concept, and CJ included the picture in his letter.  He carefully addressed it and it's going in the mail tomorrow.

LADDEE LIFTOFF: Tonight, just before 8:30, NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) took off from Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.
       
                                                                             Image: NASA TV
It's a robotic mission, and LADEE is about the size of a small car.
                              
                                                                                                     Illustration: NASA
 It will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky. More about LADEE here: http://www.nasa.gov/ladee.

WEEK 1 IN THE BOOKS: We finished both problem sets for the our first week of "From the Big Bang to Dark Energy."  It wasn't easy. In fact, it's a good thing we have a couple of physics classes under our belt.

The question posed was:  What is the size, i.e. the radius, of a black hole with a mass equal to that of Earth (MEarth=6×1024kg)? Give your answer to one significant figure.

Oh my.  Fortunately, we had this equation to work with and plugged in the mass of Earth's figures ...

r=2(6.67×10−11)×(6×1024)(3×108)2=?

Numbers with a whole bunch of zeroes don't scare us any more. :)

When we found out we got 100 percent on the seconds problem set, CJ and Annabelle did a happy dance to "Party Rock Anthem"  to celebrate.

Maths and Mao

MORE MATHS: I continue to power my way through "How to Learn Math" via Stanford online. I want to be done through Week 7 before we leave, as the course ends Sept. 27, which will give me a few days to finish up when we get back. I think I might just make it!

Today part of my homework involved solving a trio of algebra problems. They were ...
1) Daniel went to visit his grandma, who gave him $1.50. Then he bought a book for $3.20. If he had $2.30, how much money did he have before visiting his grandmother?
2) Can you make every number between 1 and 20 using only 4, 4, 4, 4 and any operation? Eg (4 / 4 + 4) x 4?
3) You have a total of 14 rocks. Pile B has two more than Pile A; Pile C has four times as many as Pile A. Then I was supposed to write three algebraic equations illustrating that.  For instance, my first one was x +  (x+2) + 4x = 14.

Naturally, I made the kids do the homework, too. I tried to adopt all the techniques I've learned from Professor Jo Boaler.  The first thing I did was tell them I had some FUN! math challenges for them. I sold it so well, they were looking forward to doing it. :)

We read the first story together - about Daniel and his money and his grandma. I stressed to the kids that there was absolutely more than one way to go about solving it, that they should draw lots of pictures. I told them not to worry about the RIGHT answer, just to play around, plugging numbers here and there and see what they came up with after a couple of minutes.

We reconvened about 3 minutes later and they had both figured out the right answer in completely different ways. We talked about each route, and my route to solving it, which was a bit different than either of theirs.  It was fun, so mission accomplished.

For the second problem, I told them to just play around with the fours, using addition, subtraction, division, multiplication and every combination thereof, and see how many different numbers between 1 and 20 they could come up with. I gave them a couple of minutes and then we got together and compared the equations we'd each come up with that were the same. The more fun part was sharing the equations that were different.

Lastly, I asked them to solve the rocks and piles problem, giving them pennies to use as rocks to make it easier. But the best part of that problem was not just plugging in the right numbers, but being able to write different algebraic equations that would let someone find the right answer.

End result: Math is FUN!

SEEING RED: CJ is into geopolitics in a big way. Or rather, a BIG WAY. We spend a SIGNIFICANT part of each day talking and learning about world politics. Today, he was asking about Mao (pronounced Mayo by him), and I told him that we have a book of Mao's teachings thanks to our friend Joe. Joe worked/taught in China and brought us a "Little Red Book" back home.  When I told CJ we had one, his eyes lit up like it was Christmas morning. ;)

He pored over the first two chapters before deciding it would be a great book to take on the plane to kill time. Let's just hope the TSA people don't think there's anything wonky about us traveling with Mao's teachings. ...

IN THE BEGINNING: We are very close to finishing up our first week's worth of lectures for "From the Big Bang to Dark Energy via Coursera. We're lovin' it!!

Today we learned why distant galaxies looked red and about the noise the universe makes (yes, the universe has a soundtrack!), as well as why the universe has cooled as it expands. From a formulaic standpoint, lambda gets bigger as the energy get smaller, therefore it's cooler. I think anytime I get to use 'lambda' in a sentence, it's cooler! :)

Black Holes and Snocones

FIRST DAY: Today the kids checked in to their Shoreline school first time for the 2013/14 school year. We'll be up there one day a week for science and math classes.

Today, there was none of that, though. They had their photos taken, got free hot dogs and snocones. CJ was adventurous and chose a "Graveyard" flavor, which was a mystery mix from the older students running the stand.

Annabelle opted for the "Tiger's Blood," which was a mix of the red flavors.

At 1 p.m., we reported to the library where CJ was issued his 'new'/loaner Mac book, about which he is Very Excited. He/we started to get to know it today.  CJ doesn't seem to have any trouble navigating the Mac environment so far.

WORKIN' THROUGH IT: We're making good progress on Week 1 of "From the Big Bang to Dark Energy." Today, there was talk of Einstein's space warps, which was compelling, of course. We also were introduced to the formula for escape velocity, which is the speed needed to be free from the gravitational attraction of a massive body, without further propulsion. 

                                                            

I asked the kids who might work with escape velocities on the job. They both pretty quickly came up with rocket scientists. Per Wikipedia, "On the surface of the Earth, the escape velocity is about 11.2 kilometers per second(~6.96 mi/s), which is approximately 34 times the speed of sound (Mach 34)."

                                        

Launched in 1959, Luna 1 was the very first object to reach escape velocity from Earth!

We also learned how to calculate the radius of a black hole, using the Schwarzschild radius.  It's 

where  is the Schwarzschild radius;  is the gravitational constant;  is the mass of the object;  is the speed of light in vacuum.

I know this will come in handy countless times in the future. :)

FOR A SPIN:  We've been watching and reading about preparations for the launch on Sept. 6 of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) observatory.  Recently, it went through final preparations, which included checking alignment, checking the propulsion system for leaks, inspecting and repairing solar panels, and final electrical tests. After those things checked out, it was time for spin testing and fueling.

                           

Per a NASA press release, "To make sure that the spacecraft is perfectly balanced for flight, engineers mounted it onto a spin table and rotate it at high speeds, approximately one revolution per second. The team measured any offsets during the spinning, and then added small weights to the spacecraft to balance it. Once the spacecraft was balanced dry, the team loaded the propulsion tanks with fuel, oxidizer, and pressurant. The spin testing was performed again "wet," or with fuel, in order to see if the balance changed with the full fuel tanks."  The photo above is of the dry spin test. Look at that thing go!

LADEE has now been encapsulated into the nose-cone of the Minotaur V rocket at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia/

                  

                         PHOTO CREDIT: NASA EDGE/Franklin Fitzgerald

It's set to launch Friday evening at 11:27 EDT. We're selfishly hoping the launch is delayed a couple of days, so we could potentially see it from NYC. 

In case you're wondering just what LADEE will be looking for on the moon, check out this NASA overview.

Big Bang

                            
TICKET TO RIDE:  As we were out in Ballard/ Greenwood doing some pre-trip errand running this afternoon, the kids talked us into going to Chuck's today, a beer an ice cream parlor. It doesn't take much arm twisting to get us to go there. ;)

One of the primary reasons they and we love it is because we always play board games there. Today's challenge was Ticket to Ride, a super fun game where you're trying to build railroad empires/lines.

About 15 minutes into the game, we could see that Christain was up to no good (for us), and we tried to block him, but it was already too little, too late. We're looking forward to a rematch.

BACK TO SCHOOL:  Seattle Public Schools were back in session today. That didn't affect us. ;)   However, we did 'report' to class with the University of Tokyo!

Months ago, we signed up for a 4-week long class called "From the Big Bang to Dark Energy" through Coursera. A couple of days ago when I saw that half of it overlapped our trip to NYC and London, I told the kids I thought we should drop out.  CJ was AGHAST and pleaded for me to reconsider. Of course I yielded to his higher wisdom.  :)

So, we watched the first five lectures of Week 1 today. We already love our professor Hitoshi Murayama and we're going to find a way to make it work, despite our travels. After all, what's more important than the origin of life, the universe and everything?

I'd like to invite each and every one of you to join it with us! :)

ROOT, ROOT ROOT:  As regular readers know, yesterday we ventured up to the Everett AquaSox game. It was big fun, and one of the ways they involved the crowd was by inviting kids to come down on to the field to sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the 7th inning stretch.

Christian took the kids down and CJ and Annabelle did their part to help rouse the crowd. Here's them singing "and it's one, two three strikes you're out."

Sliding into September

SEPTEMBER SUN:  Another page on the calendar turned.  September has arrived, and so far, it has been lovely. We've continued to get our daily Statue of Liberty climb training walks in. Poor Laika and Kirby are going to be all ready, and they don't get to go to NYC. :(

I glanced out the window this afternoon and found the kids had set up the slip and slide all by themselves. Unfortunately, it was set up so that they'd slide right into an old tree stump, so Christian helped them relocated it further up the hill. 

Annabelle, in her familiar 'jump right in' style took to it like a fish to water. 

Initially, CJ was a little more tentative, and wasn't making it very far down the slide.

So Christian was kind enough to show him how it's done.

CJ had plenty of good runs after that.

DRAFTY: Sunday afternoon the Number One Cause for Concern in our household, at least for Christian and me, was drafting our fantasy football teams. The draft was at 3, and we logged in a little before.  As we were getting cued up for the activity, CJ kept peppering us with a steady stream of in depth questions about world politics - everything from monarchies to dictators , and so on.  He does this about 5 hours a day, on average, actually.

I was trying to concentrate and finally told him to "STOP for the love of God, because something much more important is going on. We're drafting our fantasy football teams."

He questioned, "So you wouldn't care if a nuke hit us right now?"

I told him, "Not if I got to draft Adrian Peterson."

I didn't get Peterson.  Guess that means I have to go back to worrying about getting nuked by North Korea. Sigh.

Speaking of football, we had fun Saturday with the return of college football.  Rick and Kennedy went to the new and improved Husky stadium for the season opener. Though, we didn't go, we sent a part of us with them - in the form of HuskyCakes.

I adapted my very favorite (strawberry) cupcake recipe, using organic blackberries picked from our alley. That turned the cupcakes a nice shade of Husky purple.  I topped them with a buttercream frosting recipe I improvised, and topped them with a little (edible) gold spray. Cute and oh-so-tasty!

One of the boys' tailgating neighbors requested the recipe, so I emailed it to her while they were pre-func-ing it. Turns out the woman was a member of the 2009 national championship UW women's softball team. 

OCTOPUS DELIGHT:  Yesterday Annabelle dug into her craft drawer, found some Sculpey, whipped out an octopus and a small friend for it, and then she drew a cute portrait of it.

A MINOR: This evening we used up a Groupon we had for cut-rate tickets to an Everett AquaSox game. They're the Mariners' Single A affiliate. 

It was a 4:05 start time, and we were in our seats about 5 minutes before the first pitch. 

Pretty little park, with a nice view of the Cascades and all the between inning cheesiness you would expect from the "Frog Squad" (the AquaSox have a frog as a mascot). 

A highlight of the afternoon was the kids going onto the field and singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the 7th inning stretch. Hopefully video to come tomorrow.