Here’s a set of NASA pictures of Ham and a brief history of animals in space.

As we get ready for the show, I’m blogging on the Revels website. That blog is mostly by me, but the music director has written a few posts and the artistic director may eventually write something, too. Follow along as we get ready for the big show!

The Phoenix-to-Flagstaff flight is a 26-minute hop. As the plane headed north, I was watching the lights of Phoenix pass by below us. Then I saw three bright lights flash in a row, traveling in a line in the same direction we were going. It happened again and I realized it was the full moon, reflected in the swimming pools below. The flashes followed us to the edge of town; once I even saw the whole moon in a larger body of water, maybe a lake.

It was cool.

The taxi driver who brought me (and some other conferencegoers) from the airport to Flagstaff said Science News is his favorite magazine.

Kandula was born at the zoo in 2001. One of the highlights of my journalism career was in the summer of 2002, as an intern at NPR. Kandula was about seven months old and I got to go into the elephant enclosure and follow him around with a mic to get sounds of him playing in the water. SO CUTE. Here’s the story about elephant lungs.

My favorite memory of Bernie is when some executives from a major medical association came to try to convince the U.S. News health section that they, the doctors, had the right position about some issue of the day. She tried her darnedest to get them to engage in intellectual discussion on the topic, which was fun to watch, because they weren’t interested in anything but repeating their position. She was opinionated and smart and a lovely colleague, and the world is worse off without her.

Here’s a nice remembrance by my former colleague Deborah Kotz.

At certain times of year, ships have to slow down when they’re going through right whale habitat. For example, they have to go slow off Georgia in the winter, when moms and babies are hanging out, and off Boston when the whales are feeding there in the spring. The whales aren’t totally lockstep about their migration, but they are more likely to be in some places than others at particular times of year.

One of the niftier items I mentioned in the story is the buoys in the Boston shipping lanes that listen for right whales. If a buoy hears a right whale call, they send it back to shore where a human checks it, then somehow the information gets out to ships.

You can see this for yourself – the Right Whale Listening Network has a nice website that shows which buoys are active right now and which of those have heard a whale in the last 24 hours. Right now I see one red whale outline out east of Cape Cod. The buoys in Cape Cod Bay aren’t working because there aren’t as many right whales in the area at this time of year.

photo: NOAA

The best social network you’ve (probably) never heard of is one-five-hundredth the size of Facebook. It has no video chat feature, it doesn’t let you check in to your favorite restaurant, and there are no games. The company that runs it has just four employees, one of whom is responsible for programming the entire operation. It has never taken any venture capital money and has no plans to go public. Despite these apparent shortcomings, the site’s members absolutely adore it.

My friend Lila told me about Ravelry soon after I started knitting, and wow, it’s amazing. I use it to catalog all my projects, so if I was really happy with that hat I made for Joanna and I want to make another one, I can go back and see what size needles I used. (4.)

I also use it to look for patterns – a couple of years ago I bought the yarn for this scarf, then when I wanted to start it last week I just searched for “scarf” on Ravelry, and it was the first one in the search results, out of 21,962. (If you go look at the guy’s blog post you’ll see why. It’s stunning.)

I’m sure this sort of site could be useful in other areas, too – the writer of the Slate piece mentions cooking, but there are so many hobbies where you can imagine people using a linked database.

Oh, and if you want to be friends on Ravelry, I am hey-helen. (Unlike this website, which is heyhelen. I wish I’d signed up on Ravelry as heyhelen…but I’ve been on there longer than I’ve had this URL.)

The book, Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom, is about animals that are buddies. There’s a monkey that befriends a kitten, a hippo that follows a tortoise around, a snake that hangs out with a hamster – all sorts of good stuff. Sure, it’s not investigative journalism, but who doesn’t want to read about a monkey that adopts a kitten?

Jenny’s a beautiful writer, and I can’t wait to read the book myself – I just added one more sale to those Amazon stats.

Here’s a nice item about the book in today’s issue of Parade.

Well, right now they’re trying to make magic again with “Hurtigruten – minutt for minutt.” This time it’s a live webcast from the Hurtigruten, the coastal express boat route. A ship left Bergen, on the west coast, three days ago with a live webcam on board. Right now it’s making its way through the fantastically beautiful Lofoten Islands. In a couple of days it will reach Kirkenes, the last town before Russia.

We’re coming up on the solstice – the perfect time to be in the north of Norway! The ship won’t see another sunset until it gets back south of the Arctic Circle, well into the return journey.