Potpourri Post: Family Business and an Exoplanet With Air

It’s been quite a week.

Smoke, probably from fires near the Minnesota-Canada border and elsewhere raised — or lowered — air quality here to hazardous levels. I’ve probably got the best respiratory system in the household, but even I was feeling less than perky.

On the ‘up’ side, our second-oldest daughter and granddaughter came visiting. Son-in-law stayed back in North Dakota, keeping things running there.

That two-day visit was a very good experience, and gave us a chance to have a video conference with a lawyer to sort out family property/estate/whatever arrangements for at least the next generation.

That was a very good experience, but it was also a lot of excitement; and I haven’t been a 40-year-old kid for decades. Between the heat, the smoke, and the excitement, I’ve been feeling — I’ll call it relaxed and call it a day. A week.

The visit’s main purpose was to sort out the financial side of this family.

The good news is that we’re a family, and all on the same page with what that means. What makes it a tad complicated is that we’ve been trying to find a way to define how that works in a way that the legal system we live with will recognize. That’s where the lawyer came in.

I may talk about that later, but not this week.

Let’s see, what else?

Right: during that conference, explaining how the land two of our daughters, son-in-law and granddaughter are living on relates to the family this way: we didn’t settle near Hillsboro. Hillsboro grew near us. I may talk about that another time. Probably will.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Finally, and skipping to a favorite topic of mine, a couple science news items:

• “For The First Time, Astronomers Detect An Atmosphere Around A Rocky ‘Habitable Zone’ Planet”
  Ivan Farkas, Science Alert (July 17, 2026)
• “Fossil discovery solves 500-million-year-old mystery about the dawn of animal life”
  Written By Rebecca Shavit/Edited By Joseph Shavit, The Bright Side News (June 4, 2026)

Well, almost finally.

First: The Bright Side News is worth checking out. If, that is, you don’t mind reading news that isn’t drenched with anguish, angst, despair, anger, hatred and other currently-fashionable feelings.

Second, that ‘habitable zone’ planet’s atmosphere has at least a fair dollop of helium in it: so it’s another case where ‘habitable’ could be discussed.

But not by me, not this week. Besides, I’ve talked about that sort of thing before:

• “Eyeball Planets, Lobster Oceans? Studying Exoplanet Climates” (August 10, 2024)
  • LHS 1140 b: Water, With Nitrogen in the Atmosphere — Maybe
  • Extraterrestrial Life, the Universe, and Me
• “Silly Headlines and Space Aliens, Serious Science and UAPs” (September 16, 2023)
  • Existing UAP Reports: Acknowledging Possibilities
    • Attitudes
    • Questions