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Have a Happy Thought: For Earth Day (March 22 nd ) this year, six women were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, long called the “Green Nobel Prize”. The Goldman Environmental Prize honors the achievements and leadership of grassroots environmental activists from around the world, inspiring all of us to take action to protect our planet. The prize goes to six people each year, representing the six inhabited regions: Image: representation of the six regions for prize consideration: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands & Island Nations, North America, South & Central America. Source: Overview of the Prize - Goldman Environmental Prize While this is the first time that all six winners are women, this prize has a much more equal gender ratio than the Nobel Prize: Goldman (Green Nobel): 112 women out of 239 total Nobel Prize (all fields): 64 women out of 967 total   All that aside, the real story is the amazing ...

  Have a Happy Thought: We live on an incredible planet, in an incredible universe. And I have pics to support this claim, from the very large to the very small: Image: The Vela Supernova Remnant, an expanding nebula of cosmic debris left over from a massive star that exploded about 11,000 years ago. This image was taken with the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA, Image Processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF NOIRLab) Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Austr...

Have a Happy Thought: Sometimes you hear a phrase and think it must have come from a philosopher, or famous author… And then you look it up and find out it has a way more mundane (and possibly therefore more interesting) origin story. Some of these are amazing no matter their context, sometimes it is the context itself that makes the phrasing so incredible. Some phrases that have struck me thusly lately:   And what is the purpose of a living man if he lives not for the ones he loves?           ~from a silly youtube skit about playground drama   I was happy in the eyes of a drunken owl. ~misheard lyric from Heaven Knows I’m miserable Now by The Smiths   The circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are. ~ Pokemon (cartoon character) Mewtwo.   Luck favors the prepared. ~ Edna Mode in The Incredibles (kids movie)   Thi...

Have a Happy Thought: Sometimes the only way to keep your sanity (or hearing!) in a noisy environment is to wear noise-cancelling headphones. Sometimes you just want to wear noise-cancelling headphones to hear your music/podcast/phone call/whatever more clearly. Either way, if you are out and about while wearing these, you may find that you are missing some important noises that you wish you had heard. This is increasingly a problem where bicyclists and pedestrians share spaces.  One car company (yes, you read that right) has come up with a solution: a two-toned bike bell that can cut through the noise-cancelling technology and let you hear the “ding” anyway. Without making the bell louder. You see, Noise Cancelling headphones work in a couple of different ways. First, the big foam earcups or well-fitting silicone or foam earpieces. These physically insulate your ear canal from sounds coming from the environment. Then, you can have Active Noise Cancelling – and th...

Have a Happy Thought: Humans are heading back to the moon (what else would I have written about today?!) I still tear up watching humanity's early steps into space.   What really caught me today was the juxtaposition of this transmission from Artemis II / Integrity commander and the NASA commentator's words just after.   Integrity: "We have a beautiful moonrise, we're headed right at it."   NASA commentator : "Commander Reid Wiseman confirms he has visuals of his destination."   Me: 🥹   This exchange takes place at around T+0:05:00 (5 minutes after liftoff / 7.5 hours into this coverage https://youtube.com/watch?v=m3kR2KK8TEs) Image: Artemis II Launch: Watch NASA Send Humans Back to the Moon (Live)   Thanks to NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and all of the NASA partners in the USA and abroad for helping us all lift our eyes to the stars.

  Have a Happy Thought: Content warning: gratuitous use of what many consider a swear word.   We have all, on joining a new organisation or industry, had to learn a whole bunch of new words. Or potentially had to re-learn the meaning of a word in that new context. This is often called “jargon” – being words that have a very specific meaning in a specific context. There can however be words and phrases that more rightly can be termed “bullshit”. And this is in the technical, jargon-y use of the word “bullshit”, as defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 1986 : basically, a complete disregard for whether the words being conveyed are true or false, so long as the bullshitter is convincing their listeners to go along with what the bullshitter wants. Turns out that this is not confined merely to politics (let’s be honest, your brain had already gone there), this is a problem rampant in business culture. So common, in fact, that a recent paper has developed a “ Cor...

Have a Happy Thought: Dams on rivers have many benefits to humans (power generation, managing downstream flow, ensuring year-round drinking and farming water, etc). Unfortunately, dams have equal (or often greater) dis-benefits to creatures that live in and around those rivers. One major issue is allowing fish that use the length of the river for feeding and spawning, to actually travel the length of the river! The city of Utrecht, Netherlands, has addressed this issue by having a “ fish doorbell ”. When fish pass in front of a camera, the lock keeper can let the fish through. But to make sure the lock keeper doesn’t miss any fish… there is a website where you (and about 1,000 others at any given time, it seems) can watch the live feed, and press the fish doorbell on the fish’s behalf! Image: The Utrecht canal lock keeper opens the lock. About — The Fish Doorbell   Many other rivers, canals, etc have had fish passages installed, such as this one on the Waikato River in Ne...

  Have a Happy Thought: Lightning can be spectacular to watch. It’s beautiful, and a little bit awesome (in the “terrifying” meaning of the word) to see the visible manifestation of electricity in the atmosphere. Especially in those dramatic cloud-to-ground discharges.   Lighting strikes the ground in Placitas, New Mexico, July 25 2009. Image: John Fowler   What I had never thought of before, is that there is a lot of cloud-to-ground transfer of electricity that doesn’t wait for a massive bolt of lightning. It can happen in lots of little transfers, say across the tops of trees. And that these small transfers might create corona: Coronae glow on the tips of spruce needles, induced by charged metal plates in a laboratory. These weak electric discharges subtly singe the tips of leaves and needles, and new observations indicate they may occur ubiquitously across treetops under thunderstorms. Credit: William Brune   Researchers recently used essentially a...