Three things for Sunday

[nwhiker]

1. On my family's weekly Skype call, we talked about getting together for a trip because we are all desperate to travel. Costa Rica, Fiji, Hawaii were all mentioned. Because my phone was acting up, I was on mute most of the time, but I broke in to talk about how wonderful it would be to see the Northern Lights (which I know is on my sister and my aunt's bucket lists, AC's and mine as well) and the nice thing about visiting a Nordic country is that there would be "city" things to do as well. 180 turn, and now they're all thinking about travelling to Oslo (AC found some cool trips) for Christmas, either 2021 or 2022 depending. LOL.

2. This week, I passed level 3000 on Candy Crush Saga. They sent me an email congratulating me, and informing me that only 8% of users got that far. Cringe is all I can think. That's not a group I'm particularly proud to be part of. That said, I've been playing for a few years, I play when my brain is occupied at something else (like listening to Jen Psaki), and I haven't paid a single cent, so I guess it isn't as bad as it could be. My sister deleted her account, and the game from her phone after she found she'd spent $20 over a weekend on extra lives, LOL. The conference she was at must have been very boring.

3. mRNA. Injected as a vaccine -thanks Pfizer and Moderna- gets translated into protein etc. Question. I can haz GFP mRNA injected to I'll glow green (or YFP for yellow) under UV light? If it could be tailored to express only in presence of something else, could it be used for temporary tattoos with some weird ink that binds to something "transparent" that was "painted" or "needled" into the skin. I'll have to think more about that.

Comments

[quatorze]

Oslo is pretty far south for Northern Lights, though. I live a lot further north and even up here it's not an every day thing. If you want to maximize your chance of actually seeing them, look at places on the north side of the Polar Circle.

[nwhiker]

Thanks, that's good to know! The tour and cruise my kiddo found does Christmas in Oslo then heads to -eventually- Lofoten and Trondheim. None of us are cruise people, so that might be a no-go.

We'll see, right now we're just tossing around ideas of what we'd want to do. But hopefully it won't be a hot sandy beach! :)

[quatorze]

Lofoten would definitely be north enough. Plus, a city is not the place for Northern Lights. Even here, in my rather small city, you cannot see them if you're surrounded by streetlights and other illumination. You need darkness around to really see them properly.

I remember once, a few years ago, I was driving home at night from a trip to the southern part of the country, and started seeing *something* in the sky but couldn't really make out what it was. Finally I got past the towns and cities and reached a stretch of road that runs through a forest where there are no lights, not even very many houses by the roadside, and there I actually had to stop for a while just to admire. This was about 350-400 kilometers south of the Polar Circle and the light show was unusually bright and unusually far south because I could see them right above me. Usually we see them quite far away in the northern sky.

[nwhiker]

That must have been SO cool!