Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

Have a Happy Thought:     At the end of this week, possibly as you are reading this email, you get to have some separation between work colleagues and home life. (If you’re retired… well, I’m already jealous, so don’t @ me with a “ what is a week-end ” sort of quote).   But four very lucky people (yes, I’m somehow jealous of them as well), this week began a 378-day “week”, being shut in with their colleagues.   June 25 2023 was the start of the CHAPEA Mission 1 - a simulated Mars habitat at NASA's Johnson Space Centre. For just over one year, these four people will live as if they were on Mars, giving us valuable insights into logistics and human psychology. You can watch the emotional press-conference / shutting-the-door-behind-them , it’s actually very cute! Mission patch for Chapea-1 https://www.nasa.gov/chapea/mission1  with the mission motto Ad Martus A Domo and the participants' names Selariu, Haston, Jones and Brockwell.   Of cour...

Have a Happy Thought:     The new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is opening up the origins of the universe and very distant galaxies, stars and exoplanets to our understanding.   You’d think we’re only looking that far because we’ve figured out how everything works closer to us, right?   Wrong! Science is great because there’s always something new to explore and figure out. Here are just a few of the mysteries that remain for us to solve, or maybe just a few things you didn’t know, right here in our own solar system:   Q: What is our sun’s surface actually made of? A: We’re… not 100% sure, actually! We know mostly, by analysing the light that comes from the sun. You see, every time light passes through an object, including a bunch of gas, it changes the spectrum that we see – that object, or gas, absorbs some of the energy of light at specific wavelengths (or sometimes absorbs-and-re-emits-at-slightly-different-wavelengths). So astronomers ca...

Have a Happy Thought:   We are coming up on the mid-year solstice, 6 days from now to be exact - That’s the date where the Earth’s tilt has the greatest impact on the length of the day.   For those of us in the Southern Hemisphere, this means the days will be getting longer soon!   And for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere – you get to really enjoy those long, slow evenings, and need to get up really early to catch those sunrises!   6 months ago exactly, I wrote to you all about the wonderful practice of cities naming their snowplows .   I am back to tell you that cities all over the world name all sorts of their infrastructure… including (and Aucklanders will immediately resonate with this): Storm drains!   Yes, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, specifically, has an “ adopt a storm drain ” programme. The main point of this is to recognise the work that people do to keep their storm drains clear (and also give some safety tips). But anyone wh...

Have a Happy Thought:     For those of us in the southern hemisphere, winter is well and truly taking hold. And the idea of having a fluffy down coat sounds absolutely wonderful. For those readers in the northern hemisphere, you may be feeling quite the opposite, but you may be able to see these sorts of images in <gasp> real life!   Sometimes you need to snuggle against mum or dad. The warm glow of a setting sun softly illuminates a Piping Plover parent and its downy chick. Piping Plovers. Photo: William Pully/Audubon Photography Awards   Sometimes you need to snuggle against all of your siblings and friends, too! As five Common Goldeneyes rest on a lichen-speckled rock, the mother, on the left, keeps one eye open to carefully guard her four chicks, capped in black down and sporting a distinctive white cheek stripe. Common Goldeneyes. Photo: John Kay/Audubon Photography Awards Just remember that, even in winter, getting out for some exer...

  Have a Happy Thought: Bumble bees are some of the happiest creatures out there. They’re just buzzing around, playing games , and finding pollen to get all over their round fuzzy bodies, right? Unrelated, but I love it, the genus name is Bombus. Image:  A black and white fuzzy bumble bee on a purple flower : https://www.flickr.com/photos/hillsboroparksrec/50037359926 ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) And Wikipedia has some great descriptions: Bumblebees vary in appearance, but are generally plump and densely furry. The largest bumblebee species in the world is B. dahlbomii of Chile, up to about 40 mm (1.6 in) long, and described as "flying mice" and "a monstrous fluffy ginger beast" Image:  A very large ginger furry bumble bee on a green leaf : https://www.flickr.com/photos/20ojos/5503786213 ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ) Turns out, these flying beach balls (not just the huge ginger ones) are also really smart, when it comes to… gardening? L...

Have a Happy Thought:   Animal names are fun, even if they don’t even always make sense in English. Like butterflies fly, but they’re not made of butter. Or starfish. Not fish. They are vaguely star-shaped, though. Here’s a bearcat. Not a bear. Not a cat. Picture of a Binturong in a tree. Black vaguely-cat-shaped creature.  Image from https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-misleading-animal-names-ever.html   King Cobra – not actually a cobra. Also, there is no evidence they follow any sort of monarchy. So you see the problem we have in English. German, meanwhile… well, Germans made it simpler. There’s a flow chart. You’re welcome. A flowchart explaining German names for all of the following: pig, guinea pig, porcupine, capybara, raccoon, dugong, porpoise, turkey, tortoise, slug, armadillo, skunk, sloth, squid, bat, and platypus.   If this link still works, this is where I found this wonderful flow chart! https://twitter.com/TeaDriv...

Have a Happy Thought:     One of the very first Happy Thought emails I ever sent gave us all a different perspective on the warning lights in our cars .   And when you think about it, warning lights and all sorts of other symbols are really just like emojis – it’s all about packaging a lot of information into a little symbol, right? Side note – the word emoji comes to English from Japanese: and literally means picture-character or picture-letter : (picture, 絵 , pronounced eh)+(letter/character, 文字 , mōji).   Well, how many times have you hunted through the entire emoji list, trying to find the one that matched the exact thing you were trying to convey? (If you’re like me, about twice, and even then you probably gave up partway through – there are so. many. emojis!)   Others have felt this pain, and have proposed other emojis. Since not every emoji can (or should!) exist… there is a graveyard of emojis that.. just haven’t made the cut. (yet? S...

Have a happy thought:   Your car is trying to talk to you. Ok, it’s not your car, it’s the engineers and designers that created the car. And not so much “talk to you” as “make sure you know important things about your car”.   I’m talking about all those symbols that come up on your dashboard. If you’ve been driving for more than a couple of years you probably know most of these. That’s why I especially love this website , that explains all of the symbols but then describes them the way you probably first saw them. Hope these make you chuckle (and you might learn something, too!)   I’ve included a few of my faves; but hit up the links at the bottom of the email for more funny, and then actual, explanations of your dashboard lights. This concludes your public service announcement in advance of a long weekend during which you’re probably going to go for a long drive and you should really pay attention to your car’s warning lights!   A pirate ship with it...