Seventy

Photo credit: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

OPERATION OVERLORD:  So many men. The stakes were so high. 

It's the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, when Allied troops stormed the beaches in Normand to fight against the Nazis. 

I looked to multiple resources for something to show the kids to convey the importance of D-Day to them. There are so many retellings, but one thing I learned at my wonderful college, where almost no textbooks were used, is that there is no substitute for primary sources. And so, when I happened upon a Smithsonian newsreel featuring boots-on-the-ground footage of the ramp-up and invasion, I knew that was the ticket. 

Truth be told, I hadn't planned on us watching the whole 28 minutes of minutes of the Smithsonian video, but once we tuned in, it was IMPOSSIBLE to tune out. It wasn't flashy, it was raw and it was real.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/3play_1/archival-footage-of-d-day/?no-ist

According to the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA, 2,499 Americans were lost on invasion day. Hundreds upon hundreds of allies were killed, too. There were so many heroes that day, including Star Trek's "Scotty," James Doohan, who was shot multiple times that day. 

I WEAR MY SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT: It's darn near summertime, and the kids have been lobbying to sleep out on the deck. Last night was their first 'summer' sleepout.

It happened to coincide with a long, bright flyover of the International Space Station last night!

As we watched it buzz by, I remarked that it seemed unusually bright.  Today, we read that the solstice is bringing unending day to crew aboard ISS. On th etop half of the diagram (from NASA/SDO/Rice)
 is the ISS' typical sunset-every 45-minute path.

Ont he lower half is the present path.  Big difference!

MYSTERY SOLVED: Yesterday we reported seeing three WWII era planes overhead and said we surmised they were part of a WWII/D-Day commemoration. Turns out that was the case, and here's a WAY better image of their flyover.

Christian found the photo on Reddit. The planes are P-51s, and one of them actually flew in the D-Day invasion.  The story of the honor guard fly over is here: 
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2023779055_ddayplanesxml.html

Not a Normal Thursday

IN GROUND AND OVERHEAD: Newsflash - we planted more stuff in the garden today! I know, no real surprise. ...

Into the garden went six kale plants, and our three Trinidad Moruga scorpion pepper plants. CJ handled the pepper plant relocation.

Hopefully they'll like they're new home at the top of our lot. 

While we were toiling in the soil, I heard a drone of aircraft unlike the range of what we normally hear. Imagine our delight when we were buzzed by four WWII era aircraft! They flew RIGHT over our lot and fairly low. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera in hand.

CJ went and fetched it, and lucky for us, they made a second pass, though not as low this time, and I didn't have my zoom lens, so you can't see much detail, but they were super cool!

We figured perhaps they're in town for a D-Day event at The Museum of Flight.

Also outside, Annabelle scrubbed the deck ... 

and CJ lounged with the dogs (as he's been known to do on more than one occasion). 

FINAL!: We did it! Today we finished our "AstroTech: The Science and Technology behind Astronomical Discovery" Coursera class with professors Andy Lawrence and Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh.  

All in all, it was a wonderful course and we loved learning about the inner workings of land- and space-based telescopes. It makes us appreciate the Hubble all the more, and we can't wait to see the images from the James Webb Space Telescope, under construction now.

Image: Artist's rendering of JWST from NASA
JWST is expected to launch in 2018 from French Guiana on a European Space Agency Ariane 5 rocket.


GOING AND GOING:  More good news from the folks at Space College/Project Reboot, who have recaptured control of a loooooooong-ago mothballed NASA exploration craft, ISEE-3.  On their Facebook page today they announced "analysis of telemetry from ISEE- 3 shows that *ALL* of its science instruments are still powered on. Telemetry also shows that ISEE-3 has a power margin of +28 watts - after 36 years. It is important to note that ISEE-3 has not had a functioning battery for decades. Indeed, this power capacity is what was projected for the spacecraft to have had in 1982 after 4 years in space."  Amazing! 

HAIL TALES:  Scijinks, one of NASA's (many, many!) educational Web sites has just undergone a major reno, and so I pointed the kids in its direction today:  http://scijinks.jpl.nasa.gov//, a site all about weather. 

The kids had a grand ol' time poking around, playing fun games (like Spectrix, where you have to create perfect combinations of colors to produce vital information about weather and the environment, and Slyder, where you solve a weather photo puzzle).  They also checked out an interactive page all about weather folklore.  Afterward, I asked them to write a folk tale explaining hail.  I sent CJ's back to his 'desk' for some fine tuning. In the meantime, here's Annabelle's. 

Once upon a time, there was a god. This god was known as Yawada. There was only one problem: He didn't have anything to rule over! As the son of the rain god, Shiwana, he asked her if she could give him something to rule over. Shiwana replied, "I shall see. For now, please be patient". Yawada was devastated. He would never rule anything! Little did he know that Shiwana was making some snow, as it was a very cold night. What turned out wasn't snow, however: it was hail. Shiwana called for Yawada, saying she had something for him to rule over, and thus, Yawada became god of hail.

MADNESS: I was on the phone with a friend today around 3:30 and I told her I couldn't hear her for all the planes and helicopters and sirens near my environs. After we hung up a few minutes later, I soon found out why, via email alerts and social media posts. There had been a school shooting very near our home, at Seattle Pacific University. 

News reports started coming in fast and furious, and initial accounts had 7 gunshot victims, and two gunmen. It turned out there were 'only' four shot and 'just' one gunman (of course, any number over zero is too many). 

According to a story in The Washington Post, as of February this year, there were at least 44 school shootings on K-12 or college campuses in 24 states — an average of more than three a month — since the homicidal bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

This has got to stop. 

Midweek

ROCK ON: Our mosaic project continues.  The eight is now set in concrete - or mortar to be more specific. 

With the eight out of the way, it was time for a 's time for a 4!The kids helped me lay it out today. It involved plenty of math and pattern recognition. 

CJ helped at first, but before long, he was hanging out with the pups. They appreciated it tremendously, so I can't fault him too much for it. 

WIRED:  Science class was Big Fun today! The kids got to wire up circuit boards which they'll now turn into quiz devices, putting clues on the left and potential answers to be matched on the right. 

The kids also got their graded circuits and electromagnets final exams back today. They each scored 96.3 or higher. :) W00t! Way to go, guys!

BOOKISH: We worked on reading down the stack of public library books today.  

"Baseball Is ..." was a picture book poem, per the kids' description. Written by Louise Borden and Illustrated by Raul Colon, the pages finished the phrase in different ways.

I asked them to each give an example of how they'd finish the phrase.

 ...a great pastime. All you need is a bat and ball, and you're good to go."

... the fans cheering, the players playing, and every single part is important."

I also told the kids that my favorite "Baseball Is" poem was written by Greg Hall, and published by ESPN radio in 2000.  You should do yourself a favor and read it here and see if you can make it through without tearing up, if you're a big baseball fan.:

http://www.greghallkc.com/index.php/baseball-is/

They also read "Thomas Jefferson - Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Everything" by Maira Kalman.  It was a really cool booth with an interesting format (check on the preceding link to see some pages), and contained interesting factoids, such as the fact Jefferson designed his bed so that he slept slightly sitting up and open to two different rooms.

The author does a good job pointing out the genius and conflict of the man who was, at alternating times, "optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous." 

COMPELLING STORY: This evening we watched "Hubble's Amazing Rescue," a NOVA documentary which originally aired on PBS in October of 2009. Engrossing at any time, watching the show now about how Hubble was basically brought back from the brink of death is especially enthralling after this week's  front page, national news about its latest images. 

Drew Fuestel was one of the astronauts prominently featured in the show, which was fun for us, as he's the astronaut we won the chance to meet awhile back by winning a scavenger hunt here in Seattle.

The show is available on DVD or iTunes. We 'rented' it from our library for free. HIGHLY recommended viewing!

LOL: "Mom, what's a 'humanitarian'? CJ asked this afternoon.

"Someone who does good things for people," I answered.

"Oh. I thought it was a more formal word for a cannibal," he replied. 

Peering into the Past

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI)
Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014

HUBBLE STUNNER:  We spent over an hour this morning listening to Week 5 lectures for our AstroTech class. This week focused the important of computers in modern day astronomy. We learned how computers are linked to detectors, how computers control telescopes, how computers are used in computations and calculations and how they're important for storing data. 

We learned the difference between 'brute force' calculations as compared to smart ones and the pros and cons of each. There was talk of kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera- and petabytes (a thousand trillion bytes!). Our professors specifically talked about just how much space it takes to store a whole sky image from the Hubble. 

Then, a bit later today, in came news from HubbleSite of the release of the most colorful deep space image captured in Hubble Space Telescope's 24 years. I'll let the Hubble folks tell you about it in their own words (from today's press release): 

Researchers say the image, from a new study called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, provides the missing link in star formation. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 image is a composite of separate exposures taken in 2003 to 2012 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. ...

Now, using ultraviolet light, astronomers have combined the full range of colors available to Hubble, stretching all the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The resulting image — made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time — contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang. ...

Ultraviolet light comes from the hottest, largest, and youngest stars. By observing at these wavelengths, researchers get a direct look at which galaxies are forming stars and where the stars are forming within those galaxies.

Studying the ultraviolet images of galaxies in this intermediate time period enables astronomers to understand how galaxies grew in size by forming small collections of very hot stars. Because Earth's atmosphere filters most ultraviolet light, this work can only be accomplished with a space-based telescope.

I had the kids read the press release and they were both pleased that they understood the whole thing! (For instance, the fact that UV light comes from the hottest, largest and youngest stars has been covered in our AstroTech course, too!)

More on Hubble: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

LET'S TWIST AGAIN:  We also made our way through some more lectures in our History of Rock class. As always, they lectures are engaging and informative - a real history lesson and about so much more than 'just' music.

We learned about giants of the "Sweet Soul" era of rock, like crooners Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, and Sam Cooke, and the group The Drifters.

I played "Unforgettable" (Cole), "Chances Are" (Mathis), "There Goes My Baby" by The Drifters, and "You Send Me" by Cooke (on American Bandstand, no less!) 

Another lecture was about the folk revival at the end of the 1950s, early 1960s. The professor talked about how some groups avoided political messages, while others embraced them. We listened to the original Capitol Records recording (1958) of "Hang Down your Head Tom Dooley" by The Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul & Mary's performance of "Blowing in the Wind" at the 1963 March of Washington. 

A third lecture we listened to was about TV, movies and dance crazes of the late '50s. Of course, "American Bandstand" was an important part of that. Until today, I didn't know that was a daily, Monday-Friday show starting in 1957, plus Dick Clark had weekend specials. It was also the era of Elvis movies, variety shows, and songs that were about dancing. 

Here are Annabelle's picto-notes about this lecture. 

I fired up a video of Ernest Evans, better known as Chubby Checker (a spin on the name Fats Domino) performing "The Twist" on the Dick Clark hosted Saturday night . CJ and Annabelle now officially know how to do the Twist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKYEdFCa6TI

The kids danced right along.

Out of Doors

We have spent the vast majority of the past three days outside, enjoying the end of May and a lovely start to June, weather wise.

Above, Annabelle works on prettifying the alley behind our house. It is now full of colorful chalk ponies

Saturday, we worked on our garden, washed an intricate fence for repainting (which took place today), and we went hunting and gathering supplies to make mosaic stepping stones for our parking strip. We'll have four stepping stones, one for each of our house numbers. We're working on the two first, and decided to use recycled glass from Bedrock for the numbers.

After weighing several options, we ultimately decided just to go with glass pebbles from Dollar Tree (hooray! cheap!) around the number.

This morning, we set the first stones in mortar.

It should be ready to be taken out of the form tomorrow, and we'll get busy making the next number, 8.  As I looked at this and its colors, I couldn't help but think I should be making "12" stepping stones for Seahawks fans! :)

While we were looking for supplies, one of our stops took us near the Bitter Lake reservoir and park. There was a great climbing structure there.

There was also some neat-o fitness equipment, and a really pretty P-Patch.

A couple of 70-something ladies working the patch were VERY pleased that we were admiring their patch, and taking photos. We learned from one of them that the wire cages containing stone used for terracing the place are called gabions. We're thinking we might do that on our hillside. 

Sunday, we spent most of the day at Rick's place, helping him with his yard. We planted dozens of plants on his hillside, and did a little logging, which is always exciting.

Monday afternoon, Christian took the kids swimming at the local municipal pool. When I stopped by to say 'hi,' they nearly had the deep end to themselves!

METER READERS: For the kids' science class homework this week, they have been reading our electric meter each day.  It's interesting to watch those dials turn and wonder what we could do to slow them down or stop them.