Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

Have a Happy Thought:  A wonderful thing about being part of diverse humanity is being able to experience the work of people who think very differently than you do. Me? I’m pretty literal, I like numbers and words. I don’t “think” much in imagery ( you may already know why ). That’s possibly why so many of these Friday posts focus on visual artistry – it is a communication that I can appreciate, but can’t even imagine doing. That goes doubly for the artist this week – the medium she uses – metal – feels so solid to me that I am blown away by these designs: Some of these works exude the strength of the metal: While others almost appear delicate: And still others capture the delicate-yet-strong-at-the-same-time vibe: Anyway, go check out more of her art here: https://www.raeripple.com/gallery And I hope you find something “different” to appreciate, this weekend :)

Have a Happy Thought:  At some point in your life, you probably made up a code with some friends. Maybe it was just a few words that you attached a special meaning to, or maybe it was an entire language (and no, pig-Latin doesn’t count, because all the adults already knew it). Sometimes, though, people come up with codes to communicate more clearly (think the NATO phonetic alphabet to help make sure words are spelled correctly)… but end up just making everything more difficult. This is a case in point: a cypher code created in the late 19 th century to – apparently – make it easier to send telegrams about new discoveries in Astronomy. My guess is that either very few people used this… or the people that did use this spent as much of their time decoding messages from colleagues as actually doing astronomy. Here's the first couple of sentences in this explainer about this “cipher-code”… This concept was pretty complex, but I’m guessing if you really took the time, it wou...