Cat turds on Mars

The Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars on Sunday night. It landed up near the north pole, so it could use its scooper to look for ice under the soil. Here's the view:


It will use the same scooper skills that Claire and I use when we clean out the cat box looking for kitty nuggets, albeit these are typically not frozen. There is enormous evidence that water once flowed all over the surface of Mars a billion or two years ago. Rivers, and maybe even lakes and oceans. But where is it now? It's probably locked up as ice in the crust. And maybe, just maybe, life began there when Mars was warm and wet, at about the same time it was getting started on Earth. And maybe, just maybe, we can find fossil evidence for that life. Or maybe it's still alive there. If life evolved on Mars AND on the Earth, it means that life is probably easy to make throughout the universe, and the chances that aliens live out there somewhere goes up, well, astronomically.

Rash decision

So I found out yesterday that I have Lyme disease. Claire found a tick on me three weeks ago, after I'd been rooting around in the woods looking for red wolf pups (long story). Anyway, last week the tick bite suddenly had a little rash around it. The rash grew angry, and now it looks sort of like this:


I know! I'm a freak (that's not my actual armpit, in case you were wondering). Anyway, so yesterday I went to the doctor and showed her my "classic Lyme disease bulls-eye" rash, and told her that I had done a little investigation on WebMD and that I thought I had Lyme disease. I think she was annoyed at this. How could I possibly diagnose myself? I have no formal training! What the hell do we need doctors for if the patients are going to diagnose themselves? Who am I to question her 10 years of medical school? Anyway, she agreed that I probably had Lyme disease and she gave me a prescription for antibiotics.