Monthly Archives: April 2010

It all started with the Big BANG!

Just when I felt I had watched my Friends DVDs one time too often, a fellow physics teacher told me about a TV series about physicists that apparently is on TV in Germany right now. She always watches it with her husband, another physics teacher, and said she thought I might like it. I watched a few scenes of The Big Bang Theory on Youtube and decided to order the first two seasons on DVD from the UK (no, we still don’t own a TV set). I was hooked after the first few episodes!
I have since finished both seasons and am eagerly awaiting the release of the third season on DVD.

Today, the New York Times had an article about the sitcom: Exploring the Complexities of Nerdiness, for Laughs. The show’s physics advisor, David Saltzberg, who is a professor at UCLA, has a weblog called, of course, The Big Blog Theory.

“Houston, we’ve had a problem…”

Forty years after the Apollo 13 mission, Universe Today takes a look at the missions, the accident and how the astronauts got back to earth safely: 13 Things That Saved Apollo 13 (Link via MetaFilter: Surviving a Space Scrape 40 years Ago.)
So far, nine of the 13 parts have been posted. (I’m going to add the other links as the pages become available.)

Gene Kranz was the flight director for NASA‘s Gemini and Apollo Missions. Here’s a Discovery Channel Video of Kranz talking about his experiences with the Apollo 13 mission. I’m reading Kranz’s book Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond right now and enjoy it immensely.

Frohe Ostern!

We had some visitors over the long weekend and visited the butterfly garden in Sayn and then went to see the birds of prey at Burg Maus yesterday.

Links are only available in German, sorry:

André took some awesome photos, the best of which you can see on his Flickr page. Here’s a little preview:

Eagle vs Duck

Wow, you know you haven’t posted on your weblog for too long if you have to login first… In case you were wondering, I’m still alive. I’ve been quite busy with my job during the last few weeks and have a major sewing project underway as well. Right now I have two weeks off (Osterferien), and family and friends are taking the opportunity to visit us.

I don’t quite remember where I found this yesterday, but here are some awesome photos of an eagle trying to attack a duck – scroll down a little bit.