This week has just been great. Great weather, great class, great stuff to do. Ah, this is why I love March and the beginning of spring. I know, it’s not technically spring for another few days, but Houston has different seasons than the rest of the country, believe me. Here, it’s already spring. (Of course, here, it never really was winter. Just straight from fall to spring.)
To make matters even better, this morning I got a FedEx package. They’d tried to deliver it yesterday, but I wasn’t home, so they left it in the office. I assumed it was race numbers for the Yuri’s Night race, which I’ve been expecting. But it was even better. I opened the envelope to find the most beautiful thing I think I have ever seen: pages and pages and pages of baseball tickets! 81 of them, in fact, 3 per game for 27 games. Yeah!! The arrival of the Astros season tickets that Jason, Chris and I bought reminded me that the beginning of the season is less than three weeks away. I can hardly wait!
One of the cool things about working at NASA is that there are always interesting people coming to visit us, because they think we are cool. (Whether we are cool is a matter of debate, but that’s another story.) Yesterday James Cameron was at JSC. Yes, James Cameron, director of Terminator, Terminator 2, The Abyss, Aliens, and Titanic–talk about an impressive resume! Anyway, he was here to screen about an hour of footage he took last year during dives to multiple hydrothermal vent sites in both the Atlantic and Pacific; we’re talking primordial stuff spewing out of the earth thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. Since he already had funding to do the dives to make a 3D IMAX movie, he invited NASA and some other scientists and grad students to come along for the fun. A couple people I know got to go along, and were featured prominently in the footage that we saw that will actually be in the film, so that was cool–I now know some IMAX movie stars!
The rest of the footage he screened was science reel stuff that he’d picked out specifically for the JSC presentation, and it was absolutely incredible. Thousands of blind shrimp crawling all over each other trying to get nutrients out of the vent, mussel colonies, crabs, tube worms, weird-looking fish, and even some wispy anemone/amoeba things that no one’s seen before. In some spots, the vents have formed the huge gravity-defying chimney structures that rise tens of meters from the ocean floor without toppling under their own weight. In another place, this really weird mushroom-shaped structure has formed, with the heated hydrothermal vent stuff spilling up around the edges.
It was so cool. I need a job where I can do cool stuff like that. Of course, I think I would have gotten a bit frightened/claustrophobic to go down into the dark in a bubble that’s supposed to protect me from thousands of pounds of pressure…but still. It looked so cool.
And I love it when directors like James Cameron get excited about science stuff (or actors like Tom Hanks get excited about the space program). They really help get the message out to the masses.
Anyway. Point being, Cameron’s casual lecture was incredibly interesting.
As of today we have 37 people signed up for the Yuri’s Night 5K. Yeah!! The registrations are starting to come more frequently now that the event is getting closer. I’m hoping for at least 60, which I think is totally going to happen. I’m so excited.
