Constellation Orion, partly encircled by Barnard’s Loop, appears upside down (on the left) when seen from the southern hemisphere.
Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky.
On the far right, near the top, are the two Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.
There’s a sacred place at Almaden Quicksilver Park that few people know about. A hike there is refreshing to the soul, yet could be exhausting to the body.
It’s a fair trade.
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars, and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.
So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish by Douglas Adams (1999)
Love? I will tell thee what it is to love! It is to build with human thoughts a shrine, where hope sits brooding like a beauteous dove; where time seems young, and life a thing divine. All tastes, all pleasures, all desires combine to consecrate this sanctuary of bliss. Above, the stars in cloudless beauty shine; around, the streams their flowery margins kiss; and if there’s heaven on earth, that heaven is surely this.
Charles Swain (1801 – 1874)
scalar.usc.edu/works/lucas-collection-poetry-scrapbook/explication-of-love-by-charles-swain
A man walks upright. For him it is strenuous to climb a steep hill, because he has to keep pushing his own vertical mass upward and cannot gain any momentum.
The rabbit is better off. His forelegs support his horizontal body and the great back legs do the work. They are more than equal to thrusting uphill the light mass in front of them.
Rabbits can go fast uphill. In fact, they have so much power behind that they find going downhill awkward, and sometimes, in flight down a steep place, they may actually go head over heels.
WATERSHIP DOWN (1972) by Richard George Adams
Why the electric vehicle charger? Because Gary is sold on the environmental benefits of electrifying transportation. And he was looking at ways to contribute more toward easing the climate crisis by making the use of battery powered vehicles more convenient.
