Cupcakes 'n' Stuff

HOUSE PARTY: The Big Deal of the Day is attending Rick's housewarming party this evening. CJ started talking about it at about 6:30 this morning. I couldn't figure out why he'd be so excited about a housewarming party - especially for a house he's been to dozens of times - until I surmised that he figured he'd get some chips and soda out of the deal, LOL. 

We went ahead and made some cupcakes for the occasion, as we've been known to do. Annabelle handled the decorating. 
               
OCEAN BELOW: Big news from the folks at NASA.  We've known for awhile now that Saturn's moon Enceladus spouts water vapor and ice from vents near its south pole. However, new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft and Deep Space Network suggest the moon harbors 
a large underground ocean of liquid water - w00t!  Where there's water, they might be life!

We can only hope there is an underwater, "sophisticated" civilization like the Gungans (of Star Wars/Jar Jar Binks' fame) lurking there, but it's astronomically more likely that the ocean is home to something closer to extraterrestrial microbes.  

                   

                          Image Credit: 

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The regional ocean could be around 6 miles deep, beneath around 20 miles of ice. Enceladus' spouts contain salt water and organic molecules, and could be coming from the underground ocean. It would be nice to get a closer look, but given Saturn's distance, the subterranean location of the ocean and NASA's budget, it's not going to happen any time soon, I don't suspect.

SING A SONG OF SCIENCE: This morning I was reading articles on the University of Washington Web site and came across one with the headline "Science-themed music videos boost scientific literacy, study shows."

A pair of UW researchers, Katie Davis and Greg Crowther, studied the ability of music videos to enhance students’ understanding of scientific concepts.

Crowther is a biologist by profession, but over the years the music lover has created a Web site featuring links to more than 7,000 songs about science, SingAboutScience.org.

Most of the songs are audio tracks, but some feature video, like this one we watched this morning. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClJ5lwl_wM0

Crowther and Davis set up laptop computers at five science-related outreach events in Washington state. Though they were targeting K-12, survey participants ranged from 3 to 76 years old, with a median age of 12. Each participant selected a science-based music video to watch on a laptop. They were given a pre-video quiz of four questions related to information in the video, plus one question not covered by the video.  Two thirds of those viewing music videos had more correct answers after watching the videos than before. 

LET IT GO: As we were running around this afternoon, we heard the song "Let it Go" from the Disney blockbuster "Frozen" on the radio. That was a first. Though the song is an Internet sensation and has been for months, we'd never heard it on the radio before. 

Here's a fun version of it from the Jimmy Fallon show. 

Since we were on a "Frozen" kick, we went ahead and watched the video of Kristen Bell singing as the Disney princess Anna at three different ages. Sweet song, with a lovely orchestral accompaniment ...

http://youtu.be/tXSnrQVJbXs

On the Trail

PONDERING: We had a busy day, but made time for a one-hour expedition this morning, destination: Discovery Park.

The 534-acre park is just a couple miles to the west of us, and while we've been there several times, we're not anywhere near knowing it inside and out.

Today, we parked in the "north lot," which is the park's biggest lot, and probably where we enter least frequently.

We headed south a bit, and on the way into the woods spied a green coat oddly dropped along the trail. Upon closer examination, we could see a very distinctive patch on the sleeve with a bald eagle and the word "NATURALIST" on it. Odd. We looked around for a naturalist working in the area, but saw not a soul. We hoped the jacket's owner hadn't been eaten by a bear or cougar or ??? I told the kids we'd leave it be, and if was there on our way back out, we'd pick it up and return it to the visitor's center.

We walked a ways south from the lot and chose a random trail on which to enter the forest. It ended up being a good choice.

After just a bit of a downhill hike, we came to a pond which Mr. and Mrs. Mallard made home. We watched them for awhile and then walked a bit more, coming upon a bigger pond. On the far side we saw a pile of sticks which just screamed "Beaver DEN!" to us. 

Walking the perimeter of the pond, there was plenty of evidence beavers are active in the area.

From the beaver haven, we continued westward. After a bit, I could see a large structure beyond the trees and suspected it to be the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. 

We came upon a fire pit and what we supposed to be an altar not too far from the center.

 And then we found a gorgeous terracotta sculpture, "Guardian of the Spirit." It was salvaged from the 1909 White- Henry-Stuart Building when it was demolished in 1976

And soon, we found ourselves at the cultural center. We've actually been here several times, but we'd never seen the back, and these big, bold mural before!

Out front, there was a totem pole that looked like it was being painted/repainted. I noticed that the name John T. Williams was the top most/predominant name on its base. The name was instantly recognizable to me, as he was the woodcarver who was brutally gunned down by a Seattle Police Department officer in a crosswalk a few years back.  Terrible tragedy.

Speaking of police actions, as we were walking back through the woods to our car, in the distance I could hear sirens. SO many sirens, wailing on and on. Reading the headlines tonight, timing-wise, it had to have been in conjunction with a cross-dressing bank robbery suspect SPD caught and shot. 

CANNONBALL:  During the lecture we enjoyed at the University of Washington's Theodor Jacobsen Observatory last night, we were introduced to Sir Isaac Newton's cannon on a mountain thought experiment.  He used it to hypothesize that the force of gravity was universal, and it was the key force for planetary motion.

The thought exercise involves a cannon atop an imaginary mountain, with its top far above the atmosphere.  It fires a cannonball. At low speeds, the cannonball doesn't get far relative to the Earth's size. Gravity gives a parabolic path and it drops down to the Earth. At higher speeds, the cannonball goes far enough that the direction of gravity changes, and so does the shape of the path it travels. 

You abolutely should give it a go: http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/more_stuff/flashlets/NewtMtn/NewtMtn.html

This thought experiment appeared in Newton's 1728 book "A Treatise of the System of the World." It's so significant to science, an image of the page from the System of the World showing Newton's diagram of this experiment was included on the golden record on board Voyager when it was sent to our solar system's outer reaches. 

There's a wonderful Web site will all of the golden record images, sound, etc. files: http://goldenrecord.org/

Observatory Adventure

STAR PARTY: We had a super interesting evening - our first date with the observatory on the campus at the University of Washington! Today dawned with complete cloud cover, but as the afternoon wore on, the clouds started to part and we got our hopes up. 

Traffic (mercifully!) wasn't bad, so we arrived on campus a little after 6, well in advance of the 7 p.m. lecture time. We were happy to have the time to stroll around the campus a bit.

Just south of the William Gates (law school) building, we found an intriguing sculpture called The Department of Forensic Morphology Annex. Fabricated by Cris Brusch, it was installed in 2004.

We took a tour around the exterior of Denny Hall, the oldest building on campus.

Above, the kids stand at the northwest corner of the building named after Arthur A.  Denny, who donated most of the land for the original UW campus. 

The building has lots of lovely details to ogle, including an ornate belfry.

Per a UW Web page about the history of the campus, the bell inside was purchased for $368 during the Civil War. It traveled from Troy, NY, around the Cape Horn to Seattle. It was first installed in the original UW building in downtown Seattle, in 1862. It was moved to its present location in 1895 and was used to signal classes until 1912. It's only rung once a year now, at Homecoming. 

The front (south-facing side) of Denny Hall looks like a castle!

From there, we wandered down to The Quad, as I wanted to see the trees in bloom. They didn't disappoint.

We headed back toward the north part of campus and checked out the state-of-the-art PACCAR Hall. Completed in 2010, the 135,000 square foot hall is a gold-certified LEED building and one of the homes to the UW Michael G. Foster School of Business. 

Before too long, it was time to headed to the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory, the second-oldest structure on the UW campus. It was built in 1895, using Tenino sandstone blocks left over from the construction of Denny Hall. 

The observatory's namesake was a former UW astronomer. Theodor Jacobsen spent 70 years studying the pulsation of variable stars. He joined the UW faculty in 1928, and was the sole member of the university's astronomy faculty until 1965 (today, there are over 30 faculty members in the department). Jacobsen died in 2003, at age 102! The observatory was named after him in 2004. You'd think they could have done that while he was alive. :/

The Jacobsen observatory has a 120-year old, 6-inch refracting telescope. Members of the Seattle Astronomical Society were on hand to operate the vintage star gazer in the observatory's dome. 

When we arrived, it was still daylight out, but we enjoyed checking out the telescope itself.

The dome of the observatory rotates - in a very old school way. You have to pull on ropes.

When you tug on the ropes, the roof, resting on a few steel balls, rotates.  There's a rumor that the steel balls are actually Civil War era cannon balls, but the UW can't confirm this.

We got a chance to look at the clockworks which makes the telescope rotate at the same rate as the Earth, allowing it to track whatever you're looking at. 

The telescope is so old, it even has cobwebs. :)

The observatory is also home to an old transit telescope.

Used to keep the time standard, find latitude and longitude and map the night sky, it was in service on campus from 1904 until the late 1950s.

At 7 p.m., it was time to head to the 'lecture hall,' which was really just a cozy classroom. (Based on the way the desks were shoehorned together, it's pretty obvious people were a whole lot smaller in 1895!) To get there, we walked through T.S. Jacobsen's former office.

We enjoyed a lecture featuring Dr. Ana Larson covering “Toys in Space.” Larson gave some introductory remarks, and then each child in the audience was given a toy to play with, make observations of, and then write down some predictions about how that toy would behave in space. Larson reminded the audience that while space is a vacuum, it's not ZERO gravity. Rather, there is microgravity.  CJ got a wind up toy that flipped to experiment with; Annabelle had a ball and jacks.

After the lecture, we got to go back up to the dome and use the telescope to spot Jupiter and four of its moons (Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa). Cool! 

Outside, through some telescopes considerably newer than the observatory one, we had additional glimpses of our solar system's largest planet and those four moons.  

All in all, it was a lovely evening. How lucky we are to live so close to such a wonderful educational resource.

AND LAST NIGHT ... : Inspired by Professor Mike Brown's suggestion, last night as the sun slipped below the horizon, we started scanning the Eastern sky for Mars rising. It was easy to spot, and boy did it put on a show. It was practically strobing red and white, with an interesting tinge of blue, even to the naked eye. We broke out the binoculars and the telescope and got a better look.

Once we'd IDed Mars, with our freshly printed out "The Evening Sky Map" from Skymaps.com, we set about identifying other heavenly bodies.  We noticed  a star right above Mars, and determined it to be Spica, the brightest star in the Virgo constellation. The blue giant is 260 light years from Earth.

Overhead, by far the brightest object had to be Jupiter, per the map. Nearby it were significantly fainter Castor and Pollux. Once we also found Orion's belt, it was easy to spot Betelgeuse, in the top 10 of brightest objects in the night sky and distinctive for its reddish orange glow.  Amazing how easy it is the pick the planets and stars out when you have a map in hand!

NASA "CLASS": We rushed home from science class in Shoreline to be in time for a live via-Internet NASA class all about the Kepler mission. 

Right now, the Kepler spacecraft is some 40 million miles from Earth. It has discovered more than 3,500 potential planets orbiting distant stars in the Milky Way galaxy, including some exoplanets near the size of Earth. The webinar was supposed to share the latest NASA Kepler mission data and explore how the Kepler team identifies planet candidates and learn about Transit Tracks, an activity where students can use algebraic equations to analyze NASA data with the hopes of discovering planets in habitable zones of a star.

It was not the best NASA Webinar I've ever been a part of. In fact, it was the worst. The host took 20+ minutes past the start time to figure out how to upload the PowerPoint presentation. It kinda got worse from there. :(   The host had trouble remembering the difference between planets and constellations, confused Jupiter and Venus (despite a huge graphic of Venus on the screen), observed aloud he was "making myself look like an idiot," a statement I had to agree with, and when someone asked him about the naming convention of planets in the Kepler system (which was a big part of what the presentation was about), his crack answer was, "Let's see, I always get that wrong." NICE!

For the first time, I quit a webinar midstream. It was a horrible use of my time. Watching paint dry would have been a slightly better use of my time, in fact. Wrong information is worse than no information. I hate to think that this webinar was some attendees' first experiences with NASA and their educational webinars. 

THE FORCE IS STRONG IN THIS ONE: Well, WELL worth your time. We all actually started clapping and cheering here at home when it ended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2S72eajLzw#t=376

April Foolin' Around

BLOOMIN' BOULEVARD:  We took a walk up and over the hill this morning, enjoying a lovely first day of April.

Blossoms are bursting out all over. 

Along the way we found a looooong earthworm making its way across a sidewalk. We determined he was a foot (and a paw) long.

Even the neighborhood baseball field looked amazing to our eyes, infield freshly groomed and not the muddy mess it has been for months now. 

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM: This morning we started a new online class, "The Science of the Solar System." It's a 9-week class taught by professor Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, better known as Caltech. Brown told us the class we're taking is actually the same one that's taught to sophomores at Caltech who are in the geological and planetary science track.

The first three weeks are all about Mars. We watched three lectures this morning, all of them fascinating. We're hooked on the class already!.

One of the graphics introduced today was this great drawing Johannes Kepler made of the geocentric motions of Mars relative to the Earth. 

                                   

It was published in Astronomia Nova (1609). We love the retrograde loop de loops! It reminded the three of us of a Spirograph drawing!

NO JOKE: We had fun reading April Fools stories online today, including one about shuttle Endeavour being 'liberated' and launching from a Los Angeles museum, one about a new condo complex for rabid Seahawks fans, and a Facebook post from The Museum of Flight announcing a special display of Area 51 artifacts. 

However, one of the most fanciful and untrue stories we saw today was about Percival Lowell's 'observations' of the Martian made canals on the Red Planet. 

The story was published on page 11 of the New York Times on December 9,1906, when Lowell  was declared "the greatest authority” on the Red Planet. Lowell founded one of the oldest observatories in the United States, in Flagstaff, AZ.

It seems Lowell took the observations of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli too literally. In 1888, Schiaparelli made a detailed map of Mars, complete with numerous canali, or channels (map is below).                

Professor Brown contrasted Schiaparelli's map with a recent photo of the Martian surface. The map above is pretty darn impressive!

And then, there are Lowell's fanciful drawings of the canals and constructs he 'saw' on Mars. ...

                               

If you start researching Lowell, you'll quickly come across a quotation attributed to him. Lowell purportedly said, "Imagination is as vital to any advance in science as learning and precision are essential for starting points." 

Professor Brown suspects Lowell saw what he wanted to see when gazing at Mars through his telescope. (Fun fact: You can read Lowell's entire book on Mars, published in 1895, online: http://www.wanderer.org/references/lowell/Mars/)

Another one of Lowell's claims to fame is that he predicted the planet Pluto (then Planet X). Quite a feather in his cap, except now Pluto has been stripped of planethood, darn it!  Ironically, per his bio on Coursera 'our' professor "is best known for his discovery of Eris, the largest object found in the solar system in 150 years, and the object which led to the debate and eventual demotion of Pluto from a real planet to a dwarf planet."  

I love photo of Lowell from 1914, observing Venus during the daytime via his 24-inch (61 cm) Alvan Clark & Sons refracting telescope. It was installed in the summer of 1896 at the Lowell Observatory.

                       

We learned a little bit more about Lowell from a great BBC Web page with video clips about him. Lowell was laid to rest in Flagstaff. This public domain photo of his mausoleum is from the Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC USA. Fittingly, the name of the place he's buried is Mars Hill. 

                                

A couple of other things we learned about Mars today: Its obiquity, or tilt with respect to the orbital plane, is similar to Earth's. We're at 23 percent, Mars is at 25 percent. Mars' rotational period is 24 hours and 40 minutes, less than an hour longer than Earth's rotational period. 

Professor Brown told us to find Mars in the night sky this month - it rises in the East shortly after sunset and is overhead about midnight right now. He recommended we resource Skymaps.com to get a monthly night sky map for where we're living. We've printed one out and I'm going to keep it up on the roofdeck, so we can refer to it as we're checking out the night sky.

Fresh Starts

PLAY BALL: Today, the Seattle Mariners' Major League Baseball's 2014 season got underway.  Maybe *this* will be the year we win the pennant. After all, if the Seattle Seahawks can win a Super Bowl, why can't the Ms win the World Series?  Hope springs eternal!

The Mariners opened their season on the road against the Angels, but that didn't keep us from heading to Safeco Field for their opening day open house.

Gates opened at 5:30, and we were in line by 5:15. :) Because you *have* to arrive nearly 2 hours early for a game that's not even being played in person before you, right? ;)  

Waiting in line, I couldn't help but wonder how "King Felix" likes being pushed back behind Robinson Cano, who hadn't yet played a regular season inning for the Mariners yet. Hopefully the field is big enough for the both of 'em.

It was so great to be back at the stadium! We walked the warning track and visited the dugouts. I took lots of great photos of the circuit, but the kids BOTH had a case of major Derpy Face as we call it, so there are no photos to prove we did that. 

The flags posed nicely for me, tho. ;)

I do have a photo of Kennedy and Abby walking the track. They're just to the left of the Trader Joe's sign below. 

As you can see, it was a lovely evening - clear blue skies. Baseball weather!

Here this the very first pitch of the Mariners' season. Inside, ball 1!

And below is Robinson Cano's first at bat (a photo of the big screen). 

Robinson didn't reach base on this at bat, but a funny story about the first time he *did* reach base. 

So, it's the fourth inning and I needed to use the ladies room. I was in a cold, steel and concrete stall on the main concourse, and the game action is being played through speakers in the bathroom so you don't miss a thing. Robinson's up and he raps a single down the third base line and I hear the announcer say, "Robinson Cano has his first hit as a Mariner!" and immediately thereafter I hear in a stall next to me, 'Ye-ah!!"

Problem was, the voice was VERY deep and pretty clearly to me, male. Oh. ...

I try to steal a look under the stall door to check out my neighbor's shoes but he/she was one more stall over, so I couldn't see him/her.

I expedited my visit and was standing at the sink, washing my hands, ready to make a hasty exit when a large, African American male with shoulder length dreadlocks emerged from the stall. I greeted him with a smile and he greeted me with a horrified look and said, "Am I in the women's room?" 

I answered in the affirmative, and told him that it was OK, it was just the two of us and I'd been know to use men's room in an emergency. We walked out together and he looked up at the sign to confirm it was, indeed, the women's room. 
.
Oh, and once I got back to the family, the fun was just starting. 

I guess watching a Mariners game on the big screen wasn't quite exciting enough for some. Including this guy, belly down, spread eagle, below. 

We shall call him Idiot #1. He decided to charge the field (the empty field, might I add). It was a mistake. For, you see, there was this security guard who had been standing just feet from where our family was sitting most of the game. This guy, a 30-ish African American gentleman, was so cool he had to wear shades at night. His expression never changed all night, as he had to quietly and authoritatively modify dozen of people's errant behavior, without ever wrinkling his pressed khakis. 

Well, when Idiot #1 started springing around the roped-off infield, Mr. Pressed Khakis was ON IT. Nearly instantly. It was as fine an open-field tackle as I've ever seen. I noticed the security guard's sunglasses went flying a few feet when he took the idiot out. What I loved was that within 3 seconds of taking Idiot out, Mr. Pressed Khakis, laying atop Idiot's back, calmly reached out, collected his glasses, and put them back on, LOL!

The photo below shows the clean up crew cuffing Idiot #1 after the cool guard moved on to other work. 

 But wait ... what's this? Notice in the photo above that people are looking off to the left!? That's because Idiot #2 decided to storm the field. 

Now, the guy in the gold King Felix shirt at least gets some props for being agile. He out-juked no less than four security guards, hopped the rope, and hopped the stadium wall before being taken out.

Meanwhile, as Idiot #1 was being marched out, he was looking over at Idiot #2, only wishing he could have those moves. 

Idiots aside, it was a great night! Not too frigid, and we all enjoyed the sights and sounds. 

Annabelle created some ballpark-inspired art on her Nintendo DS. 

We left about the 7th inning, and were home to watch the end of the game AND THE MARINERS WIN. 

That's right. We're in FIRST PLACE!

FRESH STARTS: Today, we took to the garden in earnest. We pulled dozens/hundreds of weeds from our big raised bed, and tilled the ground to get it ready.  

Today we planted corn. Hopefully it will be high as an elephant's eye as the summer months stretch on.

We planted our sunflower in big pots down in the alley.

They're not much to look at yet, but we're hoping for a forest of them a few months from now.

ABOUT LAST NIGHT: We dropped everything and (rather uncharacteristically) turned all of our attention toward the TV at 9 last night. The occasion: The latest installment of the new "Cosmos" series.

It was wonderful, as always. The show covered a lot of ground, er, space, last night. I asked the kids to each share three things they learned from watching the program.

Here is what CJ wrote: 

I learned several things last night on Cosmos, hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Here are 3 of them:

1:Black holes: Thanks to Super Mario Galaxy, I thought for half of my life that black holes were pitch black discs that sucked you up and killed you as soon as you fell into them. Thanks to Cosmos, I now actually know that black holes look much different then that, and there actually might be something inside.

2: Ghosts in the sky: Although you will not find human ghosts, whenever you look up into the night sky, there are plenty of ghosts. Light takes a *VERY* long time to get from some stars to earth. This means that some starlight you see is actually centuries old, and the star is very likely dead.

3: The speed you are going at: I want to stop you right now, and take a little break. Go take a walk around the block, and come back.  When you come back, look at the bottom paragraph. Don't read any more of this until you are back from your walk.


So you just came back from your stroll. What if I told you that when you were enjoying yourself during your peaceful stroll, you were actually moving faster than a jet plane! The earth is constantly moving, which means that you are moving very fast right now, even if you are sitting on your chair reading this!
Conclusion: Our world is full of science, and so is Cosmos!

Annabelle's factoids were shorter. Here they are ...

You can travel 99.9% the speed of light, but can NEVER get that last decimal point.

The star that connects the head and the body in the constellation Leo is actually a star circling a black hole.

You are always traveling faster than a jet plane!

I love how NASA continues to capitalize on "Cosmos" airing with a steady stream of posts on Facebook and Twitter about topics which are related to the show. One of their posts last night was a cool graphic about black holes. 
              
The graphic comes from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. (http://chandra.harvard.edu/learn_bh.html)