Month: January 2019

Ben just dropped by my office with a Christmas gift.

Pizza socks!

Yep, they’re just as awesome as they look.

Thanks, Ben!

Zaque works at Get Air, a local trampoline park where kids pay $13 to bounce on tramps for an hour. The other day Laralee and I stopped by to see him (and also to see Get Air, as we’d never been there). He wears a spiffy “referee” sort of shirt and gets a whistle, which he twirls professionally on his finger.

Seminary started yesterday, so after a nice Christmas break I was back at it early in the morning. Luckily I was rewarded with a beautiful sunrise after class.

Now that we’ve hit the new year, it’s time for the scammers to start making their fake IRS threat calls. I had one this morning. As a general rule, though, I feel like I can hang up any call that begins with a computerized voice saying “Do not hang up!”

I saw some random statistic that something like 50% or more of calls these days are “robocalls”. What spam has done to email, robocalls and scammers have done to phones. Thanks, guys.

Physics still works, despite our ridiculous government shutdown, and two NASA spacecraft fulfilled their mission plans in the past few days even if there was only a skeleton crew to celebrate the accomplishments.

OSIRIS-Rex arrived at the asteroid Bennu and took a magnificent photo of it:

Instruments on the spacecraft have detected water ice, which has the astrophysics community abuzz. If an asteroid this small has water onboard, perhaps the substance is far more plentiful than we expected. That’s good news for mining and other futuristic uses of asteroids.

And New Horizons screamed past Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object a billion miles past Pluto. This is officially the most distant object we’ve visited, and although the picture isn’t breathtaking…

… it’s a monumental achievement. Scientific data will continue coming in, and we’ll be able to learn about the primordial solar system.

As a space aficionado, I love reading stuff like this. We’re doing cool stuff these days, even while our government leaders continue their petty bickering. Learning about the mystery and grandeur and, frankly, surprises of the universe around us puts some of that stuff in perspective.