Playing Catch Up

CASE OF THE MONDAYS: We had so much going on this weekend, come Monday night, I never did get around to posting much about Monday.

We took a walk down to the kayak launch beach along the bay, on the south edge of the neighborhood. I love the mixed messages these signs present at the park's entrance.

CJ used the beach to run off some steam.  

In the background, the Josco Changzhou waits for a port. The bulk carrier is under a Hong Kong flag.

The kids had fun flipping over rocks and finding tiny crabs, and CJ was excited to share that he found an anemone clinging to a rock. 

UP AND DOWN: Today, we got our first glimpse at new footage of NASA's Morpheus Project's latest free flight (free flight 10, to be exact).

Morpheus is a prototype planetary lander capable of vertical takeoff and landing. The way the craft moves is stuff straight out of a sci fi movie, except now it's finally reality. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI5tsetrbpA&feature=share&list=UU_zapJXppyMGs3TjeiF_hEw&index=1


The footage in the video below is from Wednesday, April 2, 2014. On that day, Morpheus ascended to about 804 feet (245m), flew forward and downward, covering a total of about 1334 feet (406.5m) horizontally in 50 seconds. Then Morpheus descended to a landing pad. Its total flight time was about 96 seconds, its longest flight to date. In case you're wondering, Morpheus is propelled by a liquid oxygen (LOX)/liquid methane propulsion system.
IT'S ALIVE: CJ has another classic gaming console in his collection. This time, he's brought a Sega Dreamcast back to life. Believe it or not, Christian actually found the unit at the place we call "Binwill" - it's a Goodwill outlet, where stuff is just piled in carts around the store and sold by the pound.

Slowly, CJ has been getting components together (an AC power source, an AV cord to hook it to the TV, a controller, and so on). Finally, last night he fired it all up for the first time - and it worked!

When it powered back to life, it was definitely showing its age.

Last night, CJ has had big fun playing Dreamcast classics "Crazy Taxi 2" and SoulCalibur. 

PRESSER ONLINE: In keeping with what has become our B612 Foundation theme this week, here's a link to the asteroid hunting group's press conference at the Museum of Flight earlier this week. (This is not the event we went to, we were at a public forum later that evening.)
https://b612foundation.org/newsroom/video-gallery/#/b612-press-conference-at-the-seattle-museum-of-flight 


LEFTOVERS: Here are a few shots from yesterday that I didn't get around to posting until now. Early during the Mariners' matinee yesterday, I notices a WHOLE bunch of Seattle P.D. riding bikes on the rooftop of a nearby building. My guess is that they were training for what has become the annual May Day demonstrations.

And here is a shot from Safeco of our neighborhood, with big Port of Seattle cranes between the ballpark and Magnolia. 

On the righthand side of the frame you can easily spot the huge Louis Dreyfus grain terminal we often walk and drive by.

MATH AND READING: An IKEA purchase today led to a real life math problem for the kids. We bought some LED bulbs, and their packaging promised 25,000 hours of light. On the surface that might sound like forever, but I wanted the kids to figure out exactly how many days and years it really is. Unfortunately for them, they made it MUCH harder on themselves than solving it had to be, but they each eventually got the right answer.

Together, they read a beautiful non-fiction picture book Island: A Story of the Galápagos, written and illustrated by Jason Chin. It's a gorgeous book, compelling facts presented alongside fantastic paintings. At the end of the month, Chin has a new book coming out, Gravity. We'll have to hunt that down!

Asteroids and Dingers

BE A HERO: See this man? He's trying to save the world. Seriously. No superhero costume or comic book series needed. 

Meet physicist Ed Lu. He's a former NASA astronaut, and full time asteroid hunter. 

Last night we had the pleasure of meeting Lu at The Museum of Flight. He's co-founder of the B612 Foundation, a group that (for reals!) is trying to save the earth from killer asteroids. How? By placing an asteroid tracking telescope ("The Sentinel") in space to track asteroids headed our way, in hopes of changing their trajectory before they can take us out. 

I'll let the kids tell you a bit more about it. CJ's up first: 

Sentinel is a space observatory currently being developed by Ball Aerospace and the B612 Foundation. Sentinel's mission is to track around 90% of undiscovered asteroids in the solar system so that we can be more prepared for asteroid crashes. Asteroid crashes tend to happen every 100 years, but that does not mean that it always will happen every 100 years, in fact, there might not even be one for several centuries, or it might happen tomorrow.

The B612 Foundation is named after the asteroid that the Little Prince supposedly lived on, otherwise known as B612. Sentinel is claimed to be accurate to the point where if there was a piece of charcoal 10 million miles away from Sentinel, Sentinel would be able to spot it. Sentinel refers to a sentry or guard.

And here's Annabelle's report:

The B612 foundation is, well, a foundation. But B612 is working to... (drumroll please!) deflect giant asteroids away from Earth! The foundation is named after the asteroid The Little Prince lives on, B612. One thing that B612 foundation wants you to know is that asteroids are NOT RARE! A large asteroid impact happens around ~100 years, but this does NOT mean it WILL happen once every 100 years, there might not even be a asteroid at all, or there could also be two asteroids this week! The Sentinel mission will be on a Venus-like orbit around the sun, ensuring we catch asteroids both in front of Earth and behind, and it will warn us if it spots an asteroid! In fact, Sentinel is SO accurate, that it can spot a piece of charcoal from tens of thousands of miles away! Sentinel and B612 will be key items in our quest to defend the earth!

The asteroid hunting isn't just pie in the sky talk. B612 plans to launch their telescope in 2018. It's being built by the same people who constructed the amazing Kepler telescope, Ball Aerospace. Lu said there are many elements of the scope that are similar to Kepler's, which saves the mission some money. He also credited Elon Musk for offering a "friends and family discount," launching the telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket. Go SpaceX!

At the end of his talk, Lu told the kids in the audience he had a special message for them. "Together, we can do big things," he declared.  

After the presentation, there were absolutely no formal autograph or photos, but the kids didn't hesitate to (politely) ambush him after his talk anyway. 

Lu loved CJ's shirt (it read 'Save the planet, it's the only one with baseball'). He was kind enough to sign something for the kids, too. 

It's a night - and a mission - we won't soon forget.

TO BE: Today marked Shakespeare's 450th birthday. Before I told the kids that, I gave them clues about whose bday it was. When I said "he wore a funny collar," Annabelle immediately yelled, "Shakespeare!"

The kids watched a BrainPOP video about The Bard, took a test, about the video, and then I told them to write a sonnet (14-line poem). 

Bee's sonnet: 
Shakespeare was a poet
a playwright, no doubt about it
romance and tragedy
history and comedy
he had his very own style of art
his audience laughed
cried and more
once Shakespeare opened his playwrighting door
all his plays were fun and inspiring
exciting, lovely, and for his rivals, hindering
he had a great legacy
inspiring trillions
with crowds of millions
did Shakespeare

CJ's sonnet

William Shakespeare was his name
Writing plays which are still performed to date
He did very well at life's game
Proved by the fact that Romeo & Juliet were mates
He was a very intelligent man
Oh, I just love what he wrote
He could always open the can
No matter what happened, he would stay afloat
His funerary monument is in Stratford-Upon-Avon
Hearing of those things made me cry
For all of that news made me think "this is wrong!"
That the three letters Shakespeare had were die
Goodbye, William Shakespeare
For your story has made me shed a tear

GOING YARD: We went to the Mariners matinee today. The team was on an 8-game skid. No big deal, right? ;)

They were looking every bit that bad for most of the game, down 3-0 going into the 7th. In the bottom of 7, the Ms Kyle Seager came to the plate. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not a big Seager fan. He plays an OK short, but I get frustrated with his performance (or lack thereof) at the plate (because clearly I could do better, snort). So, Seager is up and he's down two strikes and calls time out and steps out of the box and I say to Christian, "He's trying to decide whether he wants to go down swinging or be caught looking."

Turns out my statement was MAGIC! Seager immediately steps back into the box and hits a 2-run home run. SWEET! I take back everything I ever said about him. :)

Until the bottom of 9. By that time, we'd made our way from our third-level, last row seats and were standing behind home plate. Robinson Cano (named after Jackie Robinson, BTW) was first up. 

He got on base. Sweet!

Then Corey Hart got on, and lo and behold, after Justin Smoak disappeared back to the dugout, it was Kyle Seager's turn at the plate. In the best interest of the team, I turned to Christian and said, "I just want to take this moment to say Kyle Seager sucks and he's going to strike out."

And of course that statement propelled him to hit his 3-run, walk off home run. Mariners win!!!!

I just started snapping shots. 

"Sarcasm works!" Annabelle observed, gleefully. 

Big fun. Go Mariners!

Earthy

EARTH DAY: Isn't it lovely? Our spacecraft, our home, our Earth.

This photo of Earth taken this very morning, on Earth Day, 2014! It was taken by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 's GOES-East satellite at 7:45 a.m. EDT (4:45 Seattle time). Right then, I was wide eyed, in bed, listening to the rain pour, thinking about how our #GlobalSelfie was going to be ruined, ha ha.

The gorgeous photo was greeting me in my inbox first thing, however, immediately brightening the day. The satellite which captured the image is geostationary - it stays in the same place with respect to the rotation Earth. That allows GOES to always be on alert for changes that signal sever weather conditions. (For more information about GOES satellites, visit: www.goes.noaa.gov). 

Unfortunately, the text along with the pretty picture noted "a low pressure area in the Pacific Northwest is expected to bring rainfall in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, stretching into the upper Midwest, according to NOAA's National Weather Service."  

Today, to celebrate Earth Day, NASA was asking people all over the world to take photos and share them on social media in a #GlobalSelfie event, in part to raise awareness about the Earth-based science that NASA is involved in every day, and their Earth Right Now campaign.

There are soooooo many sunny day photo opps in Seattle, but we had to play the hand we were dealt, so where to take an outside photo that would be interesting? ... 

Before long, the good ol' Troll living under the (Fremont) bridge came to mind.

Let me tell you, he is one popular dude! It took nearly 10 minutes to find parking anywhere near him, and he was crawling with people speaking a variety of languages. We managed to get a usable shot, and I uploaded it around noon. Turns out the troll was a hit with people - he got dozens of likes on the NASA #GlobalSefie page.

It was fun looking at others' posts on the page. Response was widespread and huge! We saw posts from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, all over Europe, North and South America, down under - you name it. Students, celebrities, scientists, and everyone in between responded to the campaign. Well done!

THE COSMOS: Spoiler alert - if you haven't seen the latest installment of "Cosmos" yet, you won't want to read CJ and Annabelle's reviews, following. I will make the generic statement that the show was, as always, terrific. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a compelling storyteller, and this story tied in history, health, science, politics and more.  

CJ's recollections:

Sunday night, I watched Cosmos, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Last night's episode was about Clair Cameron Patterson, who had a very large worry about lead poisoning in the public. For a very long time, lead poisoning was a very large problem that drove people insane and killed plenty. Several people tried to deny that lead even posed a threat in the first place, but by the time Cameron pointed out that lead poisoning was indeed dangerous in the first place, it became obvious.

Not only that, but Cameron discovered the age of the Earth using lead-lead dating, which proved that earth was 4.55 billion years old, instead of the prediction that earth is 6009 years old, which was proposed by Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. In my opinion, I find Cameron's statement much more plausible, as there there are things that have been dated from before Sunday, 23 October, 4004 B.C.E.

Annabelle's review:

Sunday night on Cosmos, the whole thing was about how one man named Clair Cameron Patterson, who had discovered the age of the Earth (using lead) and stopped gas companies putting lead in their gas! Some of the animated sequences showed a man in a lab coat, and when he looked around, he saw a bunch of pink blotches! At first i thought they were germs, but as Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about it, it became obvious it was lead! When Clair Patterson was testing the lead in rocks, he was getting WILD results, and no two were the same! he was forced to work in a sterile environment, and study lead there. He wondered why results were so varied in the non-sterile environment, and discovered that there is tons of lead on the surface, but none in the deep sea! Therefore, it was something on land that was producing the lead. This lead (get it, lead?) him to gas companies! He campaigned to stop the lead in gas, and that's why the gas now is "unleaded".

LITTLE PRINCE: Earth Day evening we headed to The Museum of Flight for a special presentation by the B612 Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting Earth from an end-of-life-as-we-know-it asteroid impact. (You know, like the movie "Armageddon"!)
Here's a video all about B612. 

https://b612foundation.org/
Former NASA astronaut Dr. Lu was evening's featured speaker. 

Before we went this evening, I had the kids do some research on B612, and asked them if they had any idea where the unique name came from. They hadn't a clue, so I gave the kids some of the back story about the classic book "The Little Price" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  In the story, the prince lives on an asteroid named B612. He travels around space meeting others, including other asteroid inhabitants. 

We turned to YouTube in search of video, perhaps of someone reading a bit of the story. Instead, I found an animated version from 1983, called "The Adventures of The Little Prince." It had a National Education Association endorsement, so I thought we'd give it 22 minutes of our time. Per the poster's description, it was Season 1, episode 6, "Somewhere in Space." 

http://youtu.be/EEf8qA_d4VU

I'm not gonna lie, we three found elements of the cartoon super corny. But it did hold the kids' attention for the full 20-some minutes, I'll give it that! By doing a little research, we learned it was originally broadcast on Nickelodeon back in the day.  Apparently there were 26 episodes in all. But enough about the old cartoon!

The presentation tonight was compelling. I will post a few quotes, the kids' synopses, and a few photos tomorrow.

HERDING: Forgot to mention yesterday that the weekend involved a trip to the money sucking black hole, er, I mean Build a Bear Workshop, LOL. For his birthday, CJ took ownership of the latest My Little Pony Build a Bear is offering. This go-round it's Rarity. 

The kids sure enjoy picking out the floppy, unstuffed animal, picking its heart, a sound chip, getting it stuffed, taking it to the 'spa,' adding personality characteristics, picking out an outfit (yes, ponies wear clothing sometimes) and printing a birth certificate.

The whole process is pretty impressively high tech. And rather expensive ... Good thing birthdays only come once a year. (But unfortunately, ponies have been coming out at a rate of about 4 a year. ... )

IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: On our walks, we often spy little lending libraries, like this one, outside the Irish pub a couple of blocks away. 

The one pictured above happens to be part of a formal network of little libraries, called Little Free Library . Here's a video about how that network works:

Little Free Library Story from Beargrass Media on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/72957294

In looking at their Web site, Little Free Libraries are anything but free to get one started. For instance, that cute red British phone booth inspired one above will set you back $600. Yikes! 

We have seen plenty of people who have made their own libraries which aren't part of any formal network. That's definitely on our 'to do' list. I'm sure we can find something during one of our salvage yard stops which we can repurpose into a library. And we always have books around here that need to find new homes.

Sunday Funday

ELEVEN: On Sunday, we celebrated CJ's 11th birthday. He was born on Easter and this year, April 20 fell on Easter again. 

All day Saturday, Annabelle helped with CJ's cake. We made a herd of My Little pony character cookies, which adorned his cake.

CJ seemed to like them.

The bottom three-layer cake was a rich brownie chocolate with malted milk filling. The upper part was a luscious vanilla with apricot filling. Per CJ's choice, we celebrated with dinner at Wingdome, and gave about 2/3 of the cake to the staff. They were SO HAPPY. :)

After dinner, it was time for Barney (pinata) to meet his doom. We strung him up from a soccer goal at Greenwood Elementary, where Rick spent many hours working back in the day.
                        
The birthday boy got the first whack, of course. He gave Barney a good body shot, but the dino remained intact.

Annabelle was up next. She inflicted some damage, too.

Before long, big brother Rick went ninja on Barney, completely decapitating the purple critter. That was awesome! Afterward, we played soccer with his carcass to get the rest of the goodies out.

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA: To celebrate Earth Day, NASA is promoting a #GlobalSelfie social media campaign.



They're asking people to share photos of themselves with picturesque places on Earth. You can download a #GlobalSelfie sign here: http://bit.ly/globalselfie. Or, as they point out, "If you don't want to use a sign you can tell us where you are by writing in the sand, spelling with rocks—feel free to get creative!"

Once you snap your #GlobalSelfie, post the photo to Twitter, Instagram or Google+ using the hashtag #GlobalSelfie, or post it to the #GlobalSelfie event page on Facebook or the #GlobalSelfie group on Flickr. You can also join the #GlobalSelfie Google+ event page.

The #GlobalSelfie campaign is just part of NASA's attempt to make 2014 a big year for Earth science with a campaign called Earth Right Now. While NASA is perhaps best known for its work off planet, the fact of the matter is, he space agency studies no planet more closely than our own. In fact, there are 17 Earth-observing missions orbiting our home planet right now, plus several more launching this year.

EASTER DELIVERY: First thing Sunday morning, we checked the news to see if SpaceX's Dragon capsule had been captured by the ISS while we slept. We were happy to see that it had!
Image credit: NASA

On board are nearly two-and-a-half tons of supplies and scientific payloads to the station with the arrival of the third SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo spacecraft. Wonder if it included any chocolate bunnies or Cadbury creme eggs!?

TINKERING: Now sure where, but CJ found out about a way to modify one of his Wii games, Super Smash Brothers, so that it supposedly would be more fun. Once he learned about it, he became pretty obsessed with doing what it took to make it happen. It was a several step process. He outlines it for you here:

Project M is a modification for Super Smash Brothers Brawl to make the game more like its predecessor, Super Smash Brothers Melee. While Super Smash Brothers Melee was more focused on skill and appealing to hardcore gamers, Brawl was meant to make the series more appealing to casual gamers and those who relied more on luck than skill.

Project M adds back the characters Mewtwo (http://www.ssbwiki.com/Mewtwo_(SSBM)) and Roy (http://www.ssbwiki.com/Roy), who appeared in Melee, but did not return for Brawl. This pleased several people who had mastered Mewtwo or Roy but were disappointed to not see them in Brawl. KoreanDJ is a smasher who is notable for maining Mewtwo in Project M.
The way dad and I got Project M on to the Wii is by:

1: Getting a 2 GB memory card2: Putting the 2 GB memory card in dad's computer3: Downloading the Project M zip file on dad's computer4: Copying the Project M zip file to the hard drive5: Copying the file from the hard drive to the memory card6: Putting the memory card in the Wii
Following that, we went to the stage builder in Brawl, where you could make your own battlefields for fighting. The game would check the SD card for battlefields you have made, but there is a *BIG* security hole in the checking system that allows you to mod the game with whatever happens to be on the SD card.

I managed to get Project M started, and that, my friends, is how you play Brawl *MELEE STYLE*