If you love baseball, you have to like Junior. His joy for the game was apparent from his 1989 rookie start with the Mariners to his retirement in 2010. Junior, with his sweet swing and flashy leather, was a squeaky-clean class act in the PED-tainted years of MLB.
No surprise, after the announcement, the Seattle Mariners were ready with a nice round up of his impressive career numbers, which include 13 All-Star selections, 630 career home runs, 10 Gold Glove awards, 7 Silver Slugger awards, and the unanimous selection as the AL MVP in 1997.
We're sure looking forward to listening to Junior's Hall of Fame induction speech on July 24!
MEANWHILE, AT MARSHALL: This afternoon, the kids and I checked in on what's new at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. That is one happening place! In 2015, the center did everything from testing the Space Launch Systems' engines to checking pioneering 3-D parts printed on the International Space Station. Marshall also manages multiple exploration programs and missions, including the New Horizons of Pluto fly-by fame, and the amazing Chandra X-ray Observatory, which is shedding light on the makeup of dark matter, one of our favorite topics 'round here.
You can get caught up by watching this: "Marshall Space Flight Center 2015: Advancing Technology to Power NASA’s Journey to Mars."
https://youtu.be/gUFFkrnE1pY
Next up, we watched a video featuring NASA propulsion engineer Nick Case explaining how engineers configured engine parts in a breadboard (or spread out) manner to test "additively manufactured" engine parts as a system.
True confession time: The kids and I were scratching our heads at the repeated use of the phrase 'additively manufactured' parts by the engineer. Fortunately, when we followed a link from the video to a press release on NASA's site, it right away let us know the term references what many probably know only as 3-D printing. Mystery solved, and we learned something new. Bonus!
NOT YET: We have been keeping our eyes on the Oculus Rift virtual reality hardware for what seems like years now. We've been fortunate enough to have test driven it on multiple occasions and love it, and were waiting for the announcement of the consumer price and computer specs necessary to run it in its first widespread market introduction.
This morning, pre-orders went live, and the headset and controller were announced at $599. A bit steeper than anticipated, however, we were still interested and tested our computers via their Web portal (https://shop.oculus.com/en-us/cart/) to see if our were up to snuff.
They weren't. In fact, we failed rather spectacularly, missing four out of five hardware categories. Bummer. So for now it's a pass, as investing the $1,000 or so more to bring a computer up to speed seems a bit steep for a VR system that has just two games bundled with it at the present.
I guess we - and a lot of the rest of the world, per Forbes - watch for the Sony PlayStation 4 VR introduction later this year. Stay tuned.
SAY IT AIN'T SO: Bad news for the pistachio lovers among us (me! me! me!). They can spontaneously combust.
No, seriously!
I mean, YES, seriously! I'm not making this up!
Today, we sat captivated and horrified as we watched a SciShow video about the fiery side of pistachios. Fast forward to the 7:23 mark in the video below for the pistachio down-low.
https://youtu.be/3iR3WjtAGec?t=7m23s
No comments:
Post a Comment