Friday, 23 January 2015

To pink or not to pink

Photographer JeongMee Yoon took this portrait of her daughter Seo Woo and Her Pink Things in response to feeling Seo Woo's life was being overtaken by pink.
Photo courtesy JeongMee/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
I have an issue with pink. I haven't been thinking a whole lot about it, it's been more of a fact, something gathered over time - I just don't like the colour pink.

This has changed though. At some point during the pregnancy with my youngest I have suddenly gone from not liking to accepting that it can be a pleasant colour. What? What happened there?

Pink is such an unnecessarily controversial colour! Why is that?

I just read an article where the author Elisabeth Camp looked at that very fact. :-)
http://aeon.co/magazine/society/should-i-let-my-daughter-wear-pink/

Saturday, 10 January 2015

I was

I was going to write something bitter and/or insightful here regarding separation and the process of forcefully moving someone out of my life.

But I played Warcraft instead.

Wednesday, 7 January 2015

Life, summed up

I read a poem today, on Reddit. The "assignment" (challenge?) given to readers of the thread was to use a ten word sentence followed by a nine word sentence then an eight word.. etc etc. until you reach the final sentence consisting of just the one word.

The best one by far was entered by user "aquifolly":

In the car on the way home from the hospital.
Half your life in half an hour - infant eternities.
On the bus on your way to school.
Your life blurs past outside the window.
On the train, commuting to work.
Days like hours were, once.
Flying to visit grandchildren.
Teenagers born yesterday.
Final car.
Hearse.



I just think it's a thing of beauty. Life summarised in these ten sentences. :-) I am happy I "wasted" that moment on the internet!

Tuesday, 6 January 2015

Water on Mars


That the potential for a historic presence of water on Mars is high is old news I suppose. But from time to time I still find it fascinating to read about what the Curiosity rover is up to over there. :-)

Just now I was reading a report on drilling for samples of soil in the "Confidence Hills" within the outcrop called Pahrump Hills on its way to Mount Sharp. There were higher concentrations of hematite there than expected. The article offered an interesting read about erosion states compared to expectations of samples from other sites higher up the mountan side where erosion is expected to be less advanced (Hematite Ridge) since it gives out a strong mineral profile when measured/analysed from space.

All of this puts me in awe of the whole business of space exploration.

All of it.

The fact that Curiosity is still there exploring, actively performing tasks and still operational after well over two years (it landed a few months before my youngest was born). AWESOME.

The fact that we are able to scan and make analysis of the surface of a planet from space. AWESOME.

The fact that we will be able to estimate and theorize on the history of a planet not ours based on the data collected by and communicated back to us from Curiosity. AWESOME.


The fact that what I will remember a few days from now from this article - that there is a mountaneous area in the Gale crater called Pahrump Hills... heh, not so awesome, but I couldn't stop saying it aloud to my self once I realised what it was called... X-)

The article: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/msl/nasas-curiosity-mars-rover-finds-mineral-match/#.VKwXDiuG-9U