STS-125

As a kiddo in the eighties I was sooooo fascinated with the NASA space shuttle program. Still am, of course, although the shuttles are pretty old by now. One thing I could not have imagined as a child was that one day I’d be sitting at my own kitchen table, watching a shuttle launch live on my very own computer.

NASA TV is VERY cool for us space geeks. STS-125, the Atlantis mission to service Hubble, is about to launch and here I watch. (And comment on the launch on the phone to Henri, who cannot watch because he is on the train from the Copenhagen airport to Lund.)

Google Your Genes

My husband has a habit of giving weird but excellent gifts. For my 32nd birthday in the beginning of January I received a genetics test. (When I turned 30 I got a very nice table for reading in the bathtub.)

Genetics test? Well, it works like this. A company in California sends you a tube, which you spit in. After spitting, you close the tube and send it via FedEx back to California. They tinker with your spittle and then, after 6-8 weeks, you log into a website and see the results.

They will tell you information about your heritage (am I perhaps South European / North European / Asian / African etc), your traits, and your certain risks. At the moment they have information about over than 50 ethnic groups and over 90 traits. What people seem to be very interested in is their risk level. Will they be at risk for breast cancer? What about Parkinson’s disease? Or MS?

This risk level information is also probably the most misunderstood. People see their risk level grow because of the genetic test and get scared. A slightly larger genetic risk does not mean that you are in danger (well, the Parkinson’s thing seems to be a bit more scary but anyway). Many people would prefer not to know this stuff, I guess – me, I’ve always been too curious for my own good.

Anyway, my spit is now traveling towards California and in a few weeks I will find out what and who I am, genetically speaking.

Here you see a testtube filled with biohazard.

September

September was a month of getting reacquainted with the Academy after the summer, with the Netherlands after spending two months away, and with life mostly alone after hanging with H and the relatives for most of the time. We began the new work/schoolyear apart, and that is how it will be for the whole year; H’s job is in Sweden, I am in the Netherlands and my friends and family are in Finland.

It will not be easy.

What small things happened in my life: I got new glasses after 10 years, planned a trip to Japan for November, followed the rocky start of the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, followed the American election battles and felt ashamed for Sarah Palin (a quote from someone wise: “…it’s as though there’s this massive blob of embarrassment that someone should be feeling but they’re not, so it attaches to you, the watcher. I could never watch “I Love Lucy” for this reason: Lucy wasn’t embarrassed, so by some sort of Law of Conservation of Shame, I had to be.”), watched the International Space Station pass over me, drank too much beer with the other foreign students and studied.

It was a weird month because I only read two books, The Complete Stories by Isaac Asimov (very good science fiction, but I for some reason never much cared for Asimov’s robotics) and Truth and Consequences by Alison Luria. I’ve noticed that my attention span is getting noticeably shorter; it is now easier for me to relax in front of the TV’s stupid sitcoms than by reading a good book. Worrisome.