Well, you could but probably just the one time.

HAHAHAHAHA!!

The thing I didn't expect about buying a house was how much I love my backyard, which is smaller than some living rooms, but has trees and shade and flowers and patio privacy. If it weren't 49F and dank here today, I'd be out there with the laptop writing this.

Speaking of kids. We got back report cards, Emaryn got all A's. Not unexpected, but quite cool. There will be Krispy Kreme donuts soon (you get free donuts for A's on report cards, then we buy the kids some donuts as well). Leif doesn't get grades until next year. However we got the results of his IQ testing. They put him in the range of 154 - 172 with 95% confidence.

You can't exactly tell a 4 year-old to head over to Prospect Park for half an hour so Mommy can clean the kitchen.

EM grew up in Fort Greene (Brooklyn) in the 60s and was on the loose as early as age four. But every family in that four tower complex she lived in knew her. All the families felt comfortable disciplining each other's kids, and also taking them in. She would literally just knock on a door when she was hungry and that family would invite her to lunch or dinner.

But that was a different era, culture and set of assumptions with a lot more continuity in the neighborhood.

The PTEmbitterednessD strikes me as a useful concept. If it helps a couple people before they commit murder-suicide on an ex-spouse, or shoot up a Post Office, it would be a blessing indeed. Not to mention a bunch of less violent lives that it could make better.

For whatever reason, I'm watching a rerun of a national spelling bee, and a child named TINO just showed up.

My parents' farm was 80 acres (plus they rented an additional 40). All that space was useful for flying kites, model airplanes and rockets.

Way to go Emaryn and Leif! Smartypants galore.

Emmett's grades were really good this quarter - All A's and a B in math. Then he bombed out on his polynomials test and his grade dropped from a B to a C.

I kept flashing back on Jon and I driving around with Emily S. at the Chicago F2F and her talking about polynomials, and wishing she were still in San Francisco to tutor Emmett.

I feel like I'm riding herd on everyone today. I hope it isn't coming across as that, I just want to see where things stand on a bunch of stuff that's sorta been drifting for a couple weeks.

Scientists think they'll find an earth-like planet around another star sometime within the next 1000 days.

Race to the Bottom

The bottom line is that the discovery of a true analog to Earth is so close; researchers already feel its hot breath. But if such a planet is found, will the public care?

Gauging from the enthusiasm that greeted the discovery of Gliese 581e, the answer is emphatically yes. My in-box will be flooded with emails urging that our SETI experiments target the new world, and of course we'll do that. But keep this in mind: a single Earth-like planet (or even several dozen) is like a single kiss – it's not enough. Terra firma has been around for 4.6 billion years, but life clever enough to transmit signals into space has been walking Earth's surface for less than a century. If you're sanguine enough to believe that we'll continue to be technologically proficient for another 10 thousand years, then the fraction of our planet's lifetime during which someone was "on the air" on Earth will have been no more than two parts in a million.

If this estimate is even roughly typical of other worlds, then we'll need to aim our radio antennas in the directions of 500 thousand Earth-like planets to have a decent chance of hearing anyone. That may sound daunting, but new instruments — such as the Allen Telescope Array — can pull that off in two decades' time, if Earth-like worlds are common.

Yay!