I spotted several undocumented and unpaid workers in my front yard today. I stooped next to them, took photos of them and told them "thank you." You can clearly see a "yellow pollen basket" on the bee in the top photo.
Want to watch/read an entertaining and inspiring three-part discussion covering the frontier of astronomy? All you need to do is follow this link to the article and videos at Discover Magazine. The participants include Saul Perlmutter, Debra Fischer, Mike Brown and Andrea Ghez, in a panel moderated by Discover's Phil Plait. It's lively, accessible and mind-blowing. Here are a few of my favorite quotes: [Debra Fischer]
We started out with a solar system where many planetesimals were forming, and that evolved into a system where all the stable niches are filled. To me that’s one of the most exciting discoveries in this field.
[Mike Brown][I]t’s the small objects that really matter. The small ones are little particles that sit in the outer solar system, and they’re gravitationally swept around by planets. The analogy I like is that these objects in the outer solar system are the blood splattered on the wall after some horrendous murder. I love this analogy—it’s disturbing, but I love it. As Debra just suggested, there might have been additional planets that used to be here in our solar system [but were ejected due to gravitational instability]. The bodies have all been removed.
[Andrea Ghez]The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just “Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?” But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions. What happened with my research is that the stars we studied to prove that there was a black hole turned out to be very young. Young stars have absolutely no right to be next to a black hole because a black hole should shear them apart. We have no idea how these stars formed. So that’s one of the major questions we’re trying to address today: “How do baby stars form next to this completely inhospitable object?”
Last week I received my DVD of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the new documentary about Harlan Ellison. I've watched it a couple of times now, thoroughly enjoying it. Neil Gaiman makes the observation in the film that Ellison has been engaged in a great big piece of performance art called "Harlan Ellison" and I think he's spot on. Harlan---he is one of the only writers who ever worked in the realm of fantastic literature to be known almost immediately by his first name---is very much part and parcel of his work. You don't get the one without the other. Which is not to say the work doesn't stand on its own. It does, very much so. No doubt there are many people who have read the occasional Ellison story and found it...well, however they found it. Anything, I imagine, but trivial. If they then go on to become fans of the stories, eventually they will become aware of the person, mainly by virtue of the extensive introductions Harlan writes to just about everything he does, secondarily by the stories told by those who know, or think they know, something about him, either through personal experience or by word of mouth. He's fascinating to watch. Sometimes it's like watching a tornado form. Harlan was born in 1934, which makes him 75 now. This seems incredible to me, sobering even. He will always seem to me to be about 40, even though I have seen him now for years with white hair and other attributes of age. The voice has gotten a bit rougher, but he's just as sharp as ever. I have been in his actual presence on two occasions. In 1986 he showed up in Atlanta at the world SF convention that year and I have a couple of autographed books as a result. He dominated a good part of one day for us. The second time was in 1999 or so, at a small convention called ReaderCon in Massachussetts, where he was guest of honor. On that occasion I had lunch with him and few others and that lunch remains memorable, because I got to see the man when he isn't On. That is, it was before the convention began and he was, so to speak, "off duty" and was more relaxed, less hyperbolic. And it was a great pleasure. It is easy to see why people are drawn to him. He is something of a contradiction.
Wow. I am so wishing I could hop a plane to Australia right now - and not just to visit Hank. Check out these photos of the light show currently on display in Sydney. What a beautiful artistic expression!
This is another in a series of posts by a few of us who enjoy photographing critters we find in our houses and yards. This shaggy little guy (he was about 3/8" long) was posing on a screen on my back porch. I don't claim to know enough about spiders to tell you anything about him (Click on the photo for more detail):
