This work by Jason M. Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Header image credit seakwenby.
Twitter button by Randa Clay Design.
So still in York on the Thanksgiving holiday, doing stuff with Donna’s family. Today we ate dinner with her cousin Connie and son Dillon. They are cousins, but were really close growing up, so are more like sisters. So to Dillon we are Aunt Donna and Uncle Jason. He is crazy cute and strong like Bam-Bam. He’s also extremely durable. I’ve never seen a kid who gets a bigger kick out of falling down, being thrown in the air, and being tossed (from short distances) onto cushions.
I caught Randy Pausch on Oprah yesterday (and yes, a dying CMU professor IS the one of the few things that will make me endure watching Oprah). His last lecture focused on the importance of childhood dreams and he mentioned the landing of men on the moon as a pretty fundamental motivator. Heck, it inspires me still and I wasn’t even alive. So I especially love it when NASA gets kids involved in the space program (I’ll return to this after a brief rant). Too much today, launches of the shuttle, the existence of the International Space Station, and probes sent to other planets are just routinely ignored or sidelined by the mainstream press. Discovery launched today carrying the Harmony module to the ISS and it got about 3 seconds on the Today show. The result? People think the space program is totally useless. It doesn’t help when Nobel laureates like Stephen Weinberg call the space station an “orbital turkey” that “has produced nothing of scientific value.” That brings to three the number of Giant Turds with Nobel Prizes (joining James Watson the Racist and Al Gore the Murky-Green Fraud). For a nice rebuttal of the Weinberg gibberish, there is this article from adAstra that mirrors the point by Randy Pausch a bit.
Anyhow, returning from my rant. NASA has announced a contest for school kids to name a place for the Cassini probe to point. Cassini is currently in the Saturn system. It recently left Iapetus, which I indicated looks like the Death Star. Currently it is focusing on Saturn’s moon Titan and will be doing some close flybys of it over the next few months. For students to participate the contest, they need to write a 500-800 word essay on why Cassini should look at one of four possible targets on November 30, 2007. So if you know a kid in grades 5-12, let them know.
Four Targets:
According to a report by Discovery Channel News on a new study, the personality of the dog shapes the human-dog relationship far more than the person’s personality. It turns out that the key to a good human-dog relationship is that the dog be generally agreeable and open to new things. Maybe this is why I love Daedalus so much. He’s always up for any adventure and will let you do anything to him (though he may squirbble a bit if he doesn’t like it). My nephew Dillon used to pull on his ears and skin when he was a bit younger (Dillon is just over a year old, fyi) and Daedalus tolerated it perfectly. He’s such a good dog.
