All Over

SILLY STUFF:  While out running errands today, we stopped at one of our favorite stores, Archie McPhee. It's chock full o' stuff you don't know you need until you see it. You know, things like bacon flavored dental floss, Jane Austen toothpaste and an Existential coloring book.                       

We walked out with a unicorn rubber duckie and a bobblehead Beethoven (the latter to send as a thank you token to the professor of our classical music course). 

SPICY SPROUTS: Last year, CJ went on a data mining binge eager to learn all about the world's hottest pepper plants. That research led to him being very interested in growing a Trinidad Moruga Scorpion pepper plant. Encouraging his interest, we ordered a plant starter kit online for about $20.  Here's an archival photo ...

We managed to get a couple of plants from that kit, which we started on our kitchen counter. The plants eventually made their way up to our garden. Come October, we were all thrilled when we found they'd produced a couple of small peppers.         

                                            

We used those peppers in some tomatillo salsa, but we also harvested seed from them.  A couple of weeks ago, we planted those seeds in some potting soil and crossed our fingers. 

Well, guess what? 

We have some baby plants! Hooray! No $20 starter kit needed - w00t!

FIRED UP:  Lots of NASA news today. First thing this morning, test firing of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The two-minute test was one of two that will qualify the booster for flight before SLS begins carrying NASA’s Orion spacecraft to deep space destinations.

Some pretty dramatic photos of the test started popping up on my Facebook feed, as a couple of my friends are photographers who were on site. NASA had some of their own photos, too, of course.  Like this one. ...

Per NASA, what you see above is the largest, most powerful rocket booster ever built successfully. The test was conducted at Promontory, Utah. You can watch two minutes of rocket fire via this great YouTube video from NASA's Marshall Center. https://youtu.be/Qn6OvHofcoo

More info on SLS: http://www.nasa.gov/sls

Midday, CJ got excited when I shared with him a story about NASA's Cassini space probe finding evidence of the first active hot-water chemistry going on somewhere other than Earth. Specifically, there are clear signs of interesting hydrothermal activity on Saturn's moon Enceladus. 

It's speculated that the activity seen on Enceladus mimics deep oceans here on Earth. According to NASA's press release on the topic, "The implications of such activity on a world other than our planet open up unprecedented scientific possibilities."

                            Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

For whatever reason, for the past couple of weeks, CJ has been obsessing about environments on moons in our solar system, so this news was very welcome. Gravity science results published in 2014 points to the presence of a 6-mile- (10-kilometer-) deep ocean beneath an ice shell about 19 to 25 miles (30 to 40 kilometers) thick.

According to John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, "These findings add to the possibility that Enceladus, which contains a subsurface ocean and displays remarkable geologic activity, could contain environments suitable for living organisms. ... The locations in our solar system where extreme environments occur in which life might exist may bring us closer to answering the question: are we alone in the universe."

Here's a great NASA graphic explaining more about what's going on on Enceladus.

         NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI

This illustration depicts potential origins of methane found in the plume of gas and ice that spray from Enceladus. Scientists believe the plumes originate from an internal liquid-water ocean beneath the moon's south polar region.

More on the Cassini mission and Enceladus: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

This afternoon, we watched a Soyuz capsule carrying two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut undock from the ISS, and a little after dinnertime, the trio was landing on frozen ground in Kazakhstan.

                       

                        Barry Wilmore via NASA TV

It was good to see Expedition 42 crew members Barry Wilmore, Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova land, as during descent, communication with the capsule was lost for a long, looooong time. 

Nor Far Afield

BOWLING:  This morning, CJ had a social studies class and Annabelle had art. His started a half hour before hers, so she and I killed 30 minutes on the track at the Queen Anne Bowl.

Annabelle and I found out that we can walk a quarter mile in four minutes at a leisurely pace. Then she decided to see how quickly a lap would go if she was running.

Can you spot her in the photo below?

Here, I've pointed her out with black arrow (which doesn't show up well, either, sorry!)

Annabelle learned she can run a lap in two minutes, exactly. In pink cowboy boots. :) 

COMICAL:  Discovered today: "A super-quick, super-painless guide to the theory that conquered the universe."  It's an online comic book about the theory of general relativity. Neat-o!

You can check it out here: http://spark.sciencemag.org/generalrelativity/?int-cmp=print-comic

The way to progress through the 'pages' can be a little tricky (scrolling down with your mouse or down key), but overall, super cool site!

STRINGY: We checked out a couple of lectures in our C# programming course this afternoon. Much of the talk was about strings, and how they're used when writing a program.  We also got our grades back from our first week's assignment. The kids and I each got perfect marks. Hopefully, we can keep it up. It's only going to get harder and harder as the weeks progress. 

PI TIME: The "Pi Day" of the century is almost upon us - 3.1415!  Once again, the folks at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have come up with some activities to celebrate the math-minded day.

Link to fun and games: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=430

GAMEY: Last night we played a few tabletop games, including the always-engaging Chrononauts. 

As much as I enjoy the detail and strategy involved in the game, I don't think I'll ever quite get over having to sometimes root, in effect, for someone to be assassinated in order to get the win. though. 

Blossoming

 
EARLY BLOOMERS:  Behold, a Edgeworthia chysantha or Chinese paper bark, a native of China and Nepal was putting on a show for us in the garden on the north side of the locks in Ballard. Gorgeous.

We went for a good long walk Sunday, parking on the south side of the estuary between Lake Union and Puget Sound. From there, we walked the path past the stand of trees famous for harboring blue heron nests. Because we're locals, we knew to look up. ...

Lots of action going on overhead. We could see several single herons and pairs sharing a nest. Tourists followed our lead and trained their cameras overhead, too. ;)

We fought out way through the crowds and checked out the gardens on the north side of the locks. 

Meanwhile, back at the MPA ranch, we're still waiting on the kids' daffodils. They planted the bulbs last November, and we've been excitedly watching their progress these last few weeks. Most of the other daffodils in the 'hood have bloomed already. We're wondering if these two are taking longer because they're newbies.

IN REVIEW:  Annabelle just finished reading a book called "Cold Cereal." Here's a short synopsis from her...

Cold Cereal is a book series written by Adam Rex about a young boy named Scottish Play Doe (his real name is Macbeth, but it's bad luck to say that). Scott thinks he sees things, but realizes he doesn't when one of his 'hallucinations' tries to steal his backpack! It turns out that the elf-man stealing his backpack was a leprechaun, one of the mythical creatures known as the Fay, which can only be seen by certain people. The Fay are being captured by the local GoodCo™ brand cereal to drain their magic, and now it's up to Scott to save them! The book is not only centered around Scott, though. It also features Erno and his sister Emily, who isn't exactly normal either. The book has good humor and great story line. The characters are realistic and everything just seems to click together. I would definitely recommend the Cold Cereal book(s).

THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES: The European Space Agency has released a second cartoon about their Rosetta spacecraft and its amazing little comet landing probe, Philae. 

The first cartoon was absolutely charming and the second one continued in that tradition. It's definitely worth a look!

http://youtu.be/33zw4yYNGAs

GET WITH THE PROGRAM:  We are in week 2 of the newest Coursera class we started, "Beginning Game Programming with C#."

We're slowly but surely. I feel like I'm in over my head already, but the kids seem less daunted. 

Our assignment this week was to create and load three 'sprites' in a program and write code so that the sprite images would be randomly generated to the middle of the screen and then move about the screen. Sounds simple, doesn't it? 

And frankly, it looks simple when you see a screen capture video of what I created. ... 

But it's actually rather complicated. And we're nowhere near creating anything like a real game yet. ... :0

On the Move

                                   

Image Credit: 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

CERES-LY: Big news from NASA today. Launched seven and a half years ago and traveling 3.1 billion miles using an ion propulsion system, Dawn is now orbiting a dwarf planet - a spaceflight first!

The photo above was taken on March 1, when Dawn was closing in on Ceres. (It's about 30,000 miles/48,000 kilometers away in the photo.) Dawn was captured by Ceres' gravity at about 4:39 a.m. PST today.

We're looking forward to learning more about the dwarf, including what the heck those bright spots are that Dawn spotted on it back in February.

You think it's E.T.s signaling us with mirrors?! ;)

The bright spots are "truly unexpected and still a mystery to us," Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, said in a NASA press release.

Check out this short, interesting video from NASA about the Dawn mission.

More info about the Dawn spacecraft and its mission is here: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn

QUICK TRIP: I didn't post last night because we were in the midst of a whirlwind road trip. Thursday, when the kids got out of class at noon, we hit I-5 southbound to Vancouver. There, we met up with some family (hi Nonnie and Bops!) for a nice evening of food, fun and games. This morning, we were back on the freeway at 9 a.m. in order to be back to Seattle by noon, to get Christian to work and the kids to their film making class. 

I (rather stupidly) didn't take a single photo (!) during our trip, gosh darn it.  We did, however, manage to use the time in the car to finish week 8 of our "Introduction to Classical Music" class. The lectures covered minimalism, modernism, and post modern classical music (think Philip Glass). We took all of our quizzes and have now officially finished that class. What a wonderful, worthwhile endeavor that was. I know we'll all miss it, and predict we listen to lots more classical music than we did before we took the course. 

Wednesday Work

SPRING CLEANING: We stayed home 'most all of today by design. One HUGE magnet was the fact that the Mariners' first televised spring training game was on. How wonderful it was to see and hear baseball once again!

Of course, Annabelle made a pony-themed cartoon to mark the occasion.

And we were absolutely spoiled by an extra-inning game with a Mariners' win today! Fantastic!

We also worked our rears off cleaning out and reorganizing many cubic feet of storage space in the kitchen while the Ms played. In the process of doing so, we unearthed many treasures, including an origami kit. 

Annabelle followed one pattern, but embellished the face details. Cute!

While cleaning, we also found some oversized, fake scissors. Because everyone should have a pair of those, right? They made Kirby a tad nervous as she was getting a bath and trim today. 

SHAPELY:  The kids' math as of late has been pretty simple algebra and now we're moving into working with solid shapes. An exercise in their book this morning asked them if the nets presented would fold up into cuboids. :0

After figuring out what the heck that meant, it was pretty straightforward (will this flat design fold

into this shape ...).

Many they could tell they were a go or not just by looking at the drawings. Others were a bit trickier. For those, they made little templates and tried folding them. 

Worked like a charm!

CIRCLING:  One year from today, we'd love to be in California. Why? Because NASA's next Mars lander, the InSight mission, will be launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base!

In the photo below, you see the lander's arm being tested inside a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, last September.

                     Photo:  NASA/JPL-Caltech

InSight  is an acronym for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. Rather than roving all over and taking surface photos and measurements, like Spirit, Opportunity, and Mars Science Laboratory have, InSight is all about the Red Planet's deep interior and investigating how rocky planets like Earth evolved.

InSight will mark the first California launch of an interplanetary mission. It's sure a lot closer to Seattle than Florida is! InSight is expected to reach Mars on Sept. 28, 2016. 

More information about InSight is on the mission site: http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov

NO BONES ABOUT IT: This video is making its way 'round the Internet rapidly, with good reason. It had me tearing up over coffee this morning, darn it!

Set to one of our favorite Macklemore & Ryan Lewis songs, the PSA by the Ad Council aims to take on "implicit bias" or subconscious prejudice and its implications on how we view and interact with others who are different from us.

The video (http://youtu.be/PnDgZuGIhHs) is part of their "Love Has No Labels" campaign: www.lovehasnolabels.com

No matter how we're 'wrapped,' under it all, we're just bones. :)

A Night at the Theater

ANTIQUE FUTURE:  A few weeks back, we took a tour of Seattle's lovely Paramount Theatre. During that tour, we learned that in March, the theater would be showing some silent films, including Metropolis, the first full-length feature sci-fi film.

Of course, we simply had to go! And so, during rush hour yesterday, we set out for the confluence of Capitol Hill and downtown. Did I mention it was rush hour? Amazingly, traffic was downright light. I have no idea why, but we were amazed and overjoyed. :)

The theater holds about 2,800 people, and it looked to be a pretty darn full house!  I only saw one other kid there, though. I don't understand why more families wouldn't turn out to see "Metropolis" with a live orchestra. ... But I digress.

As previously mentioned, "Metropolis," filmed in 1927 and set in 2026, is a silent movie. Over the years, multiple, varied soundtracks have accompanied the film.  For last night's performance, we had the good fortune of hearing Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE), a Seattle based performance company. DAE composed an original score for the film, which featured everything from lush, orchestral melodies to pounding, industrial riffs to super synth effects. The 17-piece ensemble's music was spot-on and captivating. I had to keep reminding myself that a live orchestra was performing, it was so seamlessly integrated.

Here's Annabelle's review: 

On March 2, 2015, I went to go see a presentation of Metropolis. Metropolis is a German silent film made in 1927. The film was actually broken apart and had to be salvaged over many years, but they have finally produced an almost complete version of the film, save a couple scenes.

The movie is about a city in the future that has a very lovely and livable above-ground section. Deep below the ground, however, there lies the Worker's City, a place where thousands of people are sent to feed the machines that run the city. One day, a privileged young man named Freder, the son of the mayor, Frederson, finds out about the poor working class and goes on a mission to help them be treated better. Along the way he meets a woman who tells the workers they will soon find a mediator that will allow them to be known as equal to the 'brains' of the city. He soon finds out he is the mediator, while his father sends a search for him. The father finds out about the woman encouraging the workers and asks an inventor named Rotwang to use a machine he has invented to create chaos between the workers and the woman. Little does Frederson know of the inventor's plan to overthrow him.

The movie is filled with suspense and action. It has a good story line and characters, and I personally find it amazing they were able to restore so much. The special effects were also great for its time. I would definitely recommend watching it.

CJ also had some thoughts to share:

Metropolis is a 1927 silent film directed by Fritz Lang, which was the most expensive silent film at the time. However, Metropolis was a box office bomb that lost 5,025,000 Reichsmark upon it's release in 1927. Since its original release, over a quarter of the film had been lost, with the most complete copy currently known missing 5 minutes of footage.

In 2026, Freder Fredersen, a wealthy man in the high class of Metropolis, discovers the Worker's City of Metropolis, which he had been previously unaware of, and the workers in the city being forced to perform hard manual labor with little to no pay.

After this, Freder finds a worker who he agrees to trade lives with, curious about what it is like being a worker in the Worker's City. It is a clock-like machine designed with two long boards that Freder has to turn to match up with certain lights.

The film is quite long, and you can probably find it on YouTube (make sure it's the 2010 restoration made from a copy recovered in Argentina) and in the end, Metropolis is a very interesting film.

You can read all about the newest release of the best to-date restoration of Metropolis on the official Web site: http://fwm-stiftung.de/projekt-metropolis.  OK, so the page is in German, but that's what Google Translate is for. :)

Now here's something CJ and Annabelle didn't write about ... the evening was 'presented' by Trader Joe's. Upon entering the theater, we were all given brown paper bags (think what you'd stick a loaf of French bread in) stuffed with TJ goodies. There was a bag of kettle corn, several individually wrapped chocolates, some trail mix, a fig bar. All good stuff BUT all stuffed individually factory wrapped, and sealed up by machines that apparently like vexing humans. Now, think about having 3,000 biggish, brown paper bags filled with multiple, hard-to-open items in foil-y type wrap, and pair that with a silent movie. AAAAAAAAAARGH. I honestly don't even like going to a regular (couple hundred seat) theater because people are so da*& loud eating regular popcorn out of a tub. Honestly, the sounds last night from people opening food and rustling their bags was SO LOUD. It sounded like hard rainfall, I kid you not.

And don't get me started on the guy to my left who took off his boots. And then his SOCKS, as well. People ... sigh.  

CHARACTERS:  The kids are now taking a movie making class once a week, on Friday afternoons. Their homework from last week was to develop characters for themselves that they would like to play in the film the class cooperatively makes over the next three months or so.

Here's what Annabelle came up with for herself. ...

CJ fleshed out a character, as well. Annabelle's cartoon helps bring "Jonathan" to life.

TAKING A BREATHER:  While we're all doing our thing down here on Earth, Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) continues to toil away on the Red Planet.  Check out this cool photo it took of itself, shortly after. It's a raw color view from its Mastcam, right after it finished drilling at Telegraph Peak on Feb. 24.  

                               Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

However, on Feb. 27, MSL has had a little hiccough, it seems. A fault-protected action occurred while transferring the sample it drilled, and now the roving lab is on a bit of a break while scientists back on Earth do a little troubleshooting.

Rocketeers

I'll let CJ tell you a little bit about it. ... 

On February 28th, I went to the Pacific Science Center for the annual Polar Science Weekend event sponsored by the University of Washington.

One of the activities I took part in was a demonstration where I put a cardboard narwhal horn and learned about the fact that often times, to get food, narwhals have to dive the length of the Space Needle down below the arctic water just to get some food. During autumn, the narwhals have to dive the length of 5 Space Needles just to get the fish that they need to eat!

Another activity we took part in was a taste test where I would take different samples of different water and determine which were saltier than the others. The jars that I took samples from (not labeled in order of saltiness) were A, B, C, D, E, and F. They were all from natural lakes, and the saltiest (be glad you didn't taste it) was D, which was from the Red Sea, dividing Africa and Asia.

One other activity I took part in was where about 1000 wood toy boats would be set free in the Arctic Ocean and we could write messages on the wooden boats while they lasted. I don't know if the boats are on their way to the Arctic Ocean yet, but they will eventually be there.             

                             Annabelle's boat was sporting a pony by the time she was done. 

And here's Annabelle's report. ...

On March 1st, 2015, I went to an event at Pacific Science Center called Polar Science Weekend. The event includes many different activites from many different companies and researchers. There are so many things to do, and I can tell you 3 of them.

The first activity was about guessing the size of different waves in the oceans; they had options like the Atlantic and South before they got to the Arctic Ocean. The waves could get huge in hurricanes and storms in other place, but what about the Arctic? They told us that it depended on the ice. The ice melting could provide more open water for waves in the summer, or ice growing could leave less during the winter.

Next was the salinity taste test, where you got a cup and tried water from 6 jugs, labeled A-F. Some water was not salty at all where others made you want to spit it out. After you had tried the water you had to put the right percentage of salt on the right water jug. There were different options like freshwater, soup, blood, the red sea, and more.

Lastly was the narwhal mysteries stand. The stand has you put on a fake narwhal horn and go through the ocean as you learn a narwhal's feeding patterns. A fun fact I learned was that narwhals can dive 8 Space Needles deep on one breath just to get food. The stand was certainly my favorite out of all.

We also visited with folks from Point Defiance Zoo. They have a cool polar bear display there, and they brought a pelt for people to feel.

We also learned about how water (and whatever's in the water) flows up around Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago. 

LAUNCH:  Sunday afternoon, rockets on board, we headed out to 60-Acre Park, some 40 minutes north and east of home. It was our destination because that park is the only one in the greater Seattle area where it's legal to launch model rockets. 

The Northwest Rocketry group was holding a rocket launching session when we arrived. They had a pretty sweet set up for launching rockets one after another. 

We had our own launchpad, however, so we set that up.

We decided to launch an old red rocket we found at Goodwill years ago first.

Unfortunately, we had a few 3-2-1 countdowns with no lift offs. ...

Turns out the contacts in the remote weren't working well, so Christian did a like MacGyvering, as the saying goes. ...

Did I mention the local rocketry club even had a weather balloon? It was very helpful in determining where our rocket would wind up ... if the chute deployed.

Turns out wind was not a 'problem' with our launch of the red rocket, because the parachute didn't deploy. :/

Turns out parachutes don't deploy too well when they are melted together.  

Bummer.

Next up was the rocket CJ built last weekend at The Museum of Flight.

It took off just fine, but it stuck the landing. ...

As in no-parachute, so it stuck into the ground after a rapid descent. Doh!

CJ ran across the field to fetch it. Fortunately, it absorbed the landing well and will live to see another launch.

Sensing a (not-good) parachute trend, Christian added more wadding on subsequent launches. That, and I asked them if they'd used talcum powder on the chutes. I remembered from rocketry class back when I was in fifth grade that's a good idea to help them deploy smoothly.  

None of our chutes on Sunday had talcum on them, it turns out. Fortunately enough, I immediately through of a work around ...

my makeup compact!

Fortunately, the wadding and powder did the trick. Annabelle's parachute deployed nicely!

We saved the SpaceX rocket or last. It lifted off as expected, but we had too-puny a rocket motor on it, so I didn't exactly soar the clouds. Rather, it reached an Apex of about 25 feet before it started descending and its chutes popped. Oh well, next time we'll go bigger!

DATE WITH A DWARF:  This Friday, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will make history when it reaches dwarf planet Ceres, some 257 million miles from Earth (about 100 million miles farther than Mars). Ceres is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's the largest unexplored world in our inner solar system.

During its travels to Ceres, Dawn spent a year orbiting Vesta, a giant asteroid, from 2011 to 2012.

This morning, we watched a live news conference from Jet Propulsion Laboratory's von Karman Auditorium. We learned about Dawn's interesting ion propulsion system, which Dawn project manager Robert Mase called "big science on a small budget."

Here's a short, silent movie about Dawn's approach of Ceres: http://youtu.be/LP2zbGFXyk0

And here's a link to the presser from this morning, if you are so inclined: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/59452133.