Spacefest Friday

FAR OUT FEST: We headed down to The Museum of Flight first thing this morning, as it is the site of Spacefest November 5 through the 7th.

First thing on our agenda today was checking out the special virtual reality experience that was being offered onsite. I'll let CJ tell you a little bit more about it.

On November 6th, 2015, we went to the SpaceFest event at the Museum of Flight, a frequent visit for us. Out of many fun things you could do there, including meeting an astronaut (more on that in my sister's review), they had three different stations, each with an HTC Vive, a virtual reality headset developed by HTC and Valve, a popular video game company. In the simulation, you could experiment with three different environments. The first of these environments was a landscape of Mars, based off of pictures taken by the Curiosity Rover (which you could visit). Using the hand-held controllers I was given, I was able to teleport across the surface. Next, I was put on A simulation of 67P, the comet that Rosetta and Philae landed on a while back. Like the previous simulation, I was able to teleport around. Lastly, I was put in a unique drawing program made by Google. In the program, I was able to draw in three dimensions, and multiple different tools to select from.

Overall, I enjoyed the VR experience at SpaceFest.

Editor's note - I told CJ he gets extra credit for spelling environment right. I told him that's important in COBOL (a programming language that has been in the news as of late).

For the virtual reality experience, we each donned a lightweight headset and had two handheld controllers. The kids took to it like fish in water. 

We got to walk on the surface of Mars (the whole landscape created with actual photos), and stand alongside rover MSL/Curiosity. 

Then, it was on to Comet 67P, made famous by the Rosetta mission and home to lander Philae.

Lastly, we got to test drive Google's Tilt Brush, which lets you paint in 3D. Awesome.

After that, we tore over to the mail museum, and got front row seats for the talk by the amazing astronaut John Herrington. I'll let Annabelle tell you a bit about about that.

John Herrington was the first Native American astronaut in space. Today during Spacefest, he gave a presentation about how he became an astronaut. He was born in Oklahoma. He used to play in cardboard boxes, pretending he was on a mission to the moon. Then, he moved to Colorado where he went to college. He also got interested in climbing and helped build a bridge using those skills. Eventually he decided to major in engineering, so he could become an astronaut. He even went to the same pilot school that Neil Armstrong went to! He was eventually accepted, and he flew on the STS-113 mission to the ISS. He reminded us that, even though there are a lot of astronauts that have aspired their entire lives to be on a straight path to astronaut-dom, there are also people who have “crooked” paths. Afterwards, we built gliders. I got mine signed by him! It was a short, sweet, and fun presentation, and I would’ve recommended it to anyone who wants to meet an astronaut but not listen to a long lecture.

I'll fill in a few holes in Annabelle's account. Herrington told the audience that his mother was a high school drop out, who gave birth to his older brother at age 17. Herrington's great grandmother was full blooded Chickasaw.

 Herrington was the first in his family to attend college. After a freshman year at Colorado, he had a D average and was not invited to return for a sophomore year.

 He always loved the outdoors, and  rock climbing, and when working a menial construction job, hanging off the face of a cliff, holding a glass prism which another worker bounced a beam off of to determine distance (the measurements to be used to build a highway bridge), Herrington discovered that math is actually pretty cool.

He returned to college and got a bachelor's degree in applied math. He worked as a tutor, and one of his students was an older gentleman, a retired fighter pilot who encouraged Herrington to join the Navy. He did that, and became an officer and pilot. While in flight training school, he realized that the names on a wall there of graduates included many astronauts, and he thought that maybe, just maybe, he could become one too.

His path was a bit crooked, but Herrington wound up becoming a NASA astronaut, flying on STS-113, to the International Space Station. He even participated in a spacewalk.

photo: NASA

After his talk, all of the kids in attendance (including a number from the Muckleshoot Tribal School) made gliders. 

CJ and Annabelle were pretty happy to get theirs signed by a real live spacewalker!

In the early afternoon, we went back across the street and had front row seats for a cool space-meets-the arts presentation in the museum's Charles Simonyi Gallery.

First up was Nick Malinowski, community programs manager for the Seattle Opera. He shared a compelling talk titled "In Space, No Once Can Hear You Sing." It was about how music has played a part in our space program.

For example, way back on December 19 of 1965, in the Gemini era, astronaut Wally Schirra became the first human to perform on a musical instrument in space. He played "Jingle Bells' on an 8-note Hohner "Little Lady" harmonica, accompanied by Tom Stafford, in a prank about seeing Santa. https://youtu.be/RmsOmqf7Hso


The harmonica and bells now reside in The Smithsonian.

Malinowski covered everything from songs on the Golden Record aboard Voyager to Chris Hadfield covering David Bowie' Space Oddity while on the ISS. It was all super interesting.

During the Seattle Rep Theater Company's presentation, literary director Kristin Leahey shared with us a short play from a Chicago-based theater company. Called "Laika's Coffin," it is (per its YouTube post) "an epic tale based on the biography of the doomed first animal in space. Three suitcases open to reveal remarkable miniature Sovietinspired sets while an operatic narrator and three puppeteers animate the melancholy saga."  

The play first premiered at Collaboraction's Sketchbook 2007, where it won best director and best production.
https://youtu.be/Mpg7zvJYLXA

Poor Annabelle got a little misty when the poor Soviet pup conscripted into space service met its doom. ... Probably doesn't help that we have a dog named after that space pup at home.

All in all, another amazing day at The Museum of Flight. We're so lucky to live so near such a great place of learning.

WAYBACK MACHINE: And speaking of space, four years ago yesterday, the kids' names were floating on a poster uploaded to the International Space Station. (CJ and Annabelle are on the poster's lower righthand corner). A rocket-launching friend of ours made the out of this world photo opp possible. 

In the photo is Japanese Space Agency's Dr. Satoshi Furukawa posing with our poster. NASA astronaut Mike Fossum took the shot. Note the pen floating in micro gravity. So. Cool. 

Close to Home

THE WAIT IS OVER:  It has been a full year since the kids got their fix of the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. We picked up "Old School" today, and the kids each tore through it in an hour or less, I'd guess. I'll ask them for a written review tomorrow. I think it's going to be four thumbs up.

THE SUPREMES: We continue in our "Introduction to Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases" from the University of Pennsylvania via Coursera.

Yesterday's lectures had to do with asking the question, "What is discrimination?" At one point, affirmative action and quotas came up, and the professor (Kermit Roosevelt) started talking about a relatively recent case involving a public school district assigning students to schools based on their race. It was a contrived, convoluted plan to bring about the district's own perceived measure of racial equality, driven by quotas. "That's Seattle!" I told the kids, much to their surprise. I remember the issue was before the court when we moved up here, back in 2007, and it was driven by parents of a girl living in our neighborhood whose daughter wanted to go to the closest high school (Ballard) to her home, rather than being forced to go across town. It seemed like a reasonable enough request, but SPS was steadfast that their crazy transportation spider web was in everyone's best interest. The issue wound up in front of the United States Supreme Court. I'll let Annabelle give you a synopsis. ...

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 was a Supreme Court case about the use of race to determine which schools you could go to. The gist is that schools in Seattle and Louisville decided that, because they wanted racially diverse schools, kids of certain races could not attend some schools. This means they would have to attend schools much further away than they might desire. Kindergartners could be put on a bus for 2 hours or more a day and transported far from home, just to attain a racial balance district officials wanted. The supreme court ruled in favor of Parents Involved in Community Schools (usually abbreviated as PICS), saying that it was racial discrimination because kids of a certain race were excluded from certain schools. It’s certainly interesting that this is racial discrimination in an opposite way we usually think about it.

In the decision, the court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court’s judgment.  “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts said at the time.

Another topic we learned about is people's very different viewpoints when it comes to race and constitution-related issues. I'll let CJ try to explain it.  

Our course professor described two kinds of people on our Coursera course about the constitution: "Anti-Subordinationists", and "Anti-Classificationists". Both of those represent different viewpoints on the current treatment of African-Americans in the United States. If you are Anti-Subordination, that means that you think African-Americans should get special treatment due to the horrible things the government did to them in the past. If you are Anti-Classification, that means that you think that if one racial group does not get special treatment, the others shouldn't, either. According to our professor, in the past, the Supreme Court mostly had an Anti-Subordination view, but in more recent times, they have taken an Anti-Classification view.

If you want to read something a whole lot more in-depth on the topic, check out this Yale law school article:
 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/theamericancivilrightstradition1.pdf

SALSA TIME!: We continue to make the most of our garden's bounty. 

Today, we made our third double batch of salsa verde, using tomatillos from our garden, along with (this time) FOUR of CJ's ghost chiles. 

Remarkable

"Helen Keller with Anne Sullivan in July 1888" by Family member of Thaxter P. Spencer, now part of the R. Stanton Avery Special Collections, at the New England Historic Genealogical Society. See Press Release [1] for more information. - New England Historic Genealogical Society. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helen_Keller_with_Anne_Sullivan_in_July_1888.jpg#/media/File:Helen_Keller_with_Anne_Sullivan_in_July_1888.jpg

WHAT A WOMAN: It wasn't planned, but we ended up talking about Helen Keller at length today. I have a friend who is deaf, and today she posted a wonderful old 1930's newsreel featuring Keller and her lifelong teacher Anne Sullivan. The women were demonstrating how Keller learned to talk - a remarkable feat for a woman who had been blind and deaf since age 18 months. https://youtu.be/Gv1uLfF35Uw

I was rather horrified to learn that neither CJ nor Annabelle had heard of Helen Keller before today. My bad. So, we fixed that. 

We watched another short, biographical video about Keller. It's rather melancholy as she shares her "acute disappointment in not being able to speak normally." 

Frankly, I think most would think it amazing she could speak *at all,* but clearly Keller had high expectations for herself. No doubt that's one of the reasons she was able to accomplish so much. (Keller was the first blind and deaf person to earn a bachelor's degree.)
https://youtu.be/8ch_H8pt9M8


We also watched a short video about Helen Keller's engagement. Years and years ago, I read Keller's autobiography, "The Story of My Life," and remembered this happy-and-sad chapter in her life. Her own family basically kidnapped her and forbid her to marry the love of her life, Peter Fagan, a 29-year-old Boston Herald reporter. 

Hopefully, I can get the kids to read Keller's autobiography. And we should see if we can track down a copy of the film "The Miracle Worker," from 1962. 

MAKING NORTH AMERICA: This evening we watched NOVA, which is basically guaranteed to be good stuff. Tonight's topic" "Making North America."

Tonight was the first of three parts of the show, which is described like this on the PBS Web site:  "Mighty, elemental forces molded North America—fiery eruptions, titanic floods, the grinding of great ice sheets, and massive impacts from space all shaped our homeland. The epic three-part series unfolds in a forgotten world that existed long before our own, crossed by long-lost mountain ranges, deserts the size of Africa, and vast inland seas."
https://youtu.be/Wmqb7bCv5tI

Awesome. :)

Back in the Saddle

NOTEWORTHY: On November 2, the International Space Station reached a milestone. For 15 years now, the ISS has served as an off-planet outpost with a continuous human presence. Fifteen years in space for humankind - pretty cool. Now, if only we humans could boldly go even further again, beyond low Earth orbit.  ...

To read about 15 years on station, check out this NASA link: http://www.nasa.gov/station15 
#15YearsOnStation

HALLOWEENY: It has been a super busy spell for our bunch, and the blog has suffered for it. Frankly, for three days last week, I was up to my elbows in cake batter, buttercream and fondant. That makes using a computer difficult.

Friday afternoon the kids had a meeting with some peers, and they took some snacks along, including these cutely decorated marshmallows.

They were quick and easy to make - just edible ink pens on a kiwi lime marshmallow. And then we put them on sticks because every food is more fun on a stick! They were a big hit with the kids at the meeting.

Later, we went trick or treating in the business district in our neighborhood, Magnolia. 

 They close the main street down, and hundreds of kids mill around from shop to shop. In a quick half hour, CJ and Annabelle got pounds of Mounds, Kit Kats and more.

 They even hit up the liquor store. No, they weren't giving out minis/airplane sized bottles of alcohol. It was just candy.

Saturday night, we had a Halloween costume wedding reception to attend, hosted by Rick and his bride, Rachel.

We got there early and helped set up, including the three-tiered cake we'd made. The top tier was mocha chocolate with cookies and cream filling; the middle was pumpkin spice with brown butter buttercream, and the bottom layer was banana cake with brown sugar frosting filling. 

We'd made gum paste pieces for a haunted village scene on the bottom layer, and attached them at the venue. 

The top layer was hand painted, in swirls. 

THE WRITE STUFF: It's November, and that means it's NaNoWriMo, or national novel writing month! The kids are participating for the first time. They're going to spend at least a half hour every day writing a work of fiction. 

Annabelle is working on a story about dragons and humans. CJ is working on a story about a video game becoming an obsession of a national government, with life or death consequences. It will be fun to see what and how much they have by month's end.