Beaming

SPRING STROLL:  The rain stayed at bay most of today, so we squeezed a short walk in this afternoon.

We couldn't help but admire signs of spring popping up all over. There were too many daffodils to count, and sweet little flowers from other bulbs were everywhere.

We also stopped to admire this little lending library, cleverly crafted out of an old dollhouse!

MEANWHILE, HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD: This afternoon I read aloud that there was a total solar eclipse, visible in Indonesia.

Annabelle only heard the first part and started scurrying around to find our sun-safe viewing glasses, until I repeated the "Indonesia" part loudly.

Here, from ScienceAtNASA, is a short video about the event.

https://youtu.be/MQjPFwcjh9c 

And here's what it looked like - if you were in Indonesia.

    photo: NASA TV

LEFTOVERS: I rather lamely managed to miss including CJ's review of Polar Science Weekend at Pacific Science Center in yesterday's post. Here it is, without further ado. 

For every year since 2005, the Pacific Science Center has held the Polar Science Weekend event, where several UW researchers and a couple Coasties (Coast Guard members) run booths relating to their research and scientific discoveries at both the North and South poles. Although there are booths that are there every year, with every year, there are also new and interesting ones. One example of a new booth was a section dedicated to research of fishes' diets, what the food chain looks like, and stomachs. On a tray with different fish carcasses, we got to see what a small fish looked like at different stages of digestion, and we learned that some sea-snails could survive when they would be digested by staying in their shell. In a jar, we also got to see what a large (and rather disgusting) fish stomach looked like. As usual, we took the Salinity Taste Test, where we would taste-test different sources of water, with salt contents equivalent to different fluids. One had salt equivalent to human blood, another to the world average salt amount for oceans, and the saltiest by far was equivalent to the Red Sea.

This year's Polar Science Weekend was very fun, and I look forward to seeing what is at the next Polar Science Weekend.

OVERHEARD: CJ and Annabelle were struggling with a math problem about converting Earth weight vs. the same weight on Mars. After a couple of starts and stutters, I heard Annabelle say, "Let's see if we can figure out a way to reverse engineer this."

Fortunately, they succeeded.