A brief note. Remember when I told you about free to you research databases? Remember when some other librarians told you about a certain company negotiating for exclusive access to certain popular magazines, choking out other aggregators?  Well, now these two things have something in common. Ebsco.

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This came in the mail.

This is an ad for someone's online homework service (I am not saying who). The important part, that you might not be able to read, says:

"Make Learning Part of the Grade"

I think I can interpret this logo in two different ways. Both of these interpretations are not too helpful.

Isn't that what a grade is supposed to be?

Maybe you already know that I am not a big fan of grades (grades and obedience, the point of grades). So really, what is the purpose of grades? I think of a couple of things, but most people should be able to agree that they somehow (magically) evaluate what a student has learned. Right? So, in this sense, isn't learning already a part of the grade?

Grades as a motivation for learning

The other interpretation is that they are saying - give grade credit for learning. I think that is just plain silly. Using grades as motivation is moving in the wrong direction. Oh, I know what you are saying: if you don't grade it, they won't do it. I can't think of a good analogy for why this is a bad idea. Oh well.

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The recent trend towards earlier UK springs and summers has been accelerating, according to a study published today (9 February 2010) in the scientific journal Global Change Biology.

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Welcome to your Monday morning weather update in which I'll attempt to sum up the immediate past, present and future of weather on the bayou. Below find a look ahead a look at a possible freeze, and an extended outlook...

A recent issue of Nature had a special section on "Building a Cell". Here is the editors' introduction. Just scan it, don't worry about comprehension, and then I'll have something to say:

The living cell is a self-organizing, self-replicating, environmentally responsive machine of staggering complexity. The instructions for this complexity are contained within the cell's genetic code, but how this information is accessed, read and interpreted is influenced by development and differentiation.

To divide, a cell needs to create a second set of its genetic material to donate to the daughter cell. The review by Bloom and Joglekar examines how duplicated chromosomes are divided accurately between mother and daughter cells and packaged by proteins, mainly histones, in the nucleus. This packaging regulates gene expression, and Ho and Crabtree discuss how this occurs during development and differentiation. In eukaryotes, protein-coding genes are transcribed into precursor messenger RNAs that contain non-coding regions. As described by Nilsen and Graveley, these non-coding regions must be removed before the RNA can be translated into protein, in a process known as alternative splicing.

The shape, movement and positioning of organelles within the cell depend on dynamic, polymeric cytoskeletal proteins. Fletcher and Mullins analyze the principles that allow these proteins to produce and respond to mechanical forces, as well as to establish order in the cytoplasm over long distances. In a process called endocytosis, portions of the cell membrane are internalized into the cytoplasm. This enables the cell to capture material from the extracellular environment and to respond to cues detected by externally oriented receptors. Scita and Di Fiore discuss the integral role of the endocytic system in the cell's signaling network.

The articles that follow this introduction describe our current understanding of what goes on in every one of the mostly invisibly small 10 trillion cells of our bodies.

Now I know I've written about this before, but I keep coming back to it: The unceasing hive of activity that is our body, every cell like a hugely complex petrochemical factory on full blast, none of which requires the slightest conscious attention from me. Breath. Heartbeat. Digestion. Scratching an itch. The healing of wounds. The maintenance of memories. Dreams. It all happens by autopilot. This huge colony of multiplying, replenishing, differentiated cells which is me. And in it and on it flickering that thing which is self-awareness, the thing I think of as the "real" me, which exists only by the grace of all this other unconscious biochemical activity.

Yes, it all happens without our thinking about it. But it's worth thinking about. It's easy enough to see why our ancestors imagined an immaterial "me" that came into the world full-blown at birth and goes on living after death. They had no clue of the frenetic machinery of life, the buzz of self-sustenance that goes on in every cell of our bodies, the tiny furnaces of the lungs, the throbbing pistons of the heart, the ever-ready mousetraps of the immune system, the recycling plant of the gut. And there, at the top of the spine -- the flame on the wick -- a scintillating ball of neurons, firing, recharging, firing, like the constantly regenerative pixels of a television screen that give the illusion of continuity.

And when it all stops, the self goes off like a light.

A new collection of the physicist's essays tackles everything from the nature of the universe to the politics of the Middle East

Light left over from the birth of the universe has revealed another secret: a subtle hint of ancient helium

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Your gadgets are finally about to become truly wireless - as long as you don't mind lasers criss-crossing your living room

In what may be the final night launch of a space shuttle, Endeavour made a picturesque launch against a black Florida sky Monday morning. The launch came after mission managers' concerns about the weather dissipated as did a low-level cloud...

The latest version of the cosmic microwave background reveals some hidden surprises – what can you see lurking in the big bang's afterglow?

I spend a shameful amount of time each day watching the hummingbirds and bananaquits forage at our feeders. The bananaquits can't quite fit their beaks into the hummingbird feeder, with its sugar water, so we put granulated sugar out for them. Still, they feel proprietary about the sugar water and do their best to keep the hummingbirds away. Unsuccessfully, of course. The hummingbirds dart and snitch with a velocity the bananaquits can't match. Beating hearts with feathers.

Lovely thing, the feather! An oar for the air. Featherlight. The association with flight is irresistible. But flight may have been an afterthought. It is now generally agreed that birds descended directly from dinosaurs, and feathers appear to have been a dinosaur feature before birds ever left the ground.

If not for flight, then why did feathers evolve? For insulation, perhaps. Or maybe camouflage. Or -- it is Valentine week, after all -- maybe to attract a mate.

In a recent Nature Online, paleontologists from the University of Bristol in the UK and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing offer the first evidence for coloration in dinosaurs -- fossilized evidence of pigmented feathers in a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx. And here they are, in an illustration borrowed from Science, two Sinosauropteryx, with white and chestnut striped tails, doing a mating dance.

Why not more striking colors? Why not a Valentine red, for instance? Natural selection works with what it's got, cobbling together new things from bits and pieces of the old. You like my chestnut striped tail, I'll see if I can make it flashier. You have a taste for sugar, I'll bring you candy.

Cobbling together whatever works, and look! The feathers on my forelimbs help me glide as I lope along the ground, escaping a predator. And look! I take to the air.

The founder of the Transition Towns movement explains why he is optimistic that we can survive peak oil and minimise climate change

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I have just finished reading Andrea Levy's Little Island, a novel that won or was shortlisted for many prizes in 2004 -- and which was dramatized on the BBC this past December. Levy was born in Britain to Jamaican parents in 1956. She lives and works in London today. Her novel explores racism in Jamaica, Britain and India during and just after the Second World War, through the lives of two women and two men, black and white, Jamaican and British.

My children, and especially my grandchildren, would scarcely recognize the world she describes. To me, it is intensely familiar. I came of age at the time of her novel, in a thoroughly segregated Chattanooga, Tennessee. Jim Crow ruled. Public toilets, water fountains, lunch counters, restaurants, movie theaters, parks and recreation facilities were separated by race, and woe betide the person who crossed the line.

All that is gone now. Gone in Chattanooga. Gone in Britain. Gone in these Caribbean islands. Which is not to say that latent racism doesn't still exist. But on the whole things have changed enough that we can read Levy's novel and wonder that we were once beholden to so much hate.

What was the nature of the transformation? Did human nature change? Did a fear of the other inbred by millions of years of evolution suddenly vanish? Or was fear of the other suppressed by a cultural upwelling of an innate altruism?

Maybe it wasn't biological at all? Maybe both the racism and its amelioration are driven by cultural imperatives? Maybe we truly discover our better angels as we evolve culturally?

Since I was raised in a racist culture (although not by racist parents) and now count myself without prejudice (I hope), it would seem that self-reflection might provide something of an answer.

I suspect that both fear of the other and solidarity within a group are deeply embedded in our cultural traditions and maybe our DNA. In which case, it is a broadening of "us" that has diminished the "other", probably driven by technology -- radio, television, movies, air travel, the internet.

Then too, I suspect the growing promise of empirical knowledge over faith-based knowledge -- seeing what is there to see, not what we want to see or have been taught to see -- has lessened our beholdenness to the past and to our genes.

The latest data from the Pacific northwest indicates that the biggest waves are getting bigger

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Made an omelet last evening. Four eggs cracked into a bowl. Chopped crisp bacon. Tomatoes and chives from the porch. Grated cheese.

Those eggs! Jumbo. Perfect shells, eggshell white. Golden yolks. Twelve ovoids nestled in their styrofoam box. All the way from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Forget for the moment the miracle of refrigerated transportation that connects those thousands of caged layers in Pennsylvania to our little island a thousand miles away. Try to put out of your mind the chickens that laid the eggs -- plop, plop, one a day, like clockwork, day in day out, chickens that spend their short lives turning chicken feed (containing, no doubt, spent chickens) into delicious globes of nutrients. Forget the factory in Gettysburg and focus on the internal production line, devised by nature and fine tuned by human ingenuity.

Begin with that pinhead-sized dot of white we see attached to the yolk, the germ cell that contains the hen's DNA, one of the several thousand germ cells she is born with in her single ovary. The germ starts growing the yolk, the ball of nutrients that would feed the embryonic chick if there were one. The rest of the egg comes along once the ovary releases the yolk into the oviduct. Down it goes, gathering layers along the way, a biological assembly line -- white, membranes, water, shell, cuticle and color. Plop!

Forget all that if you can -- the external and internal assembly lines. Think instead of Julia Child cracking an egg into a white enamel bowl. Meringue. Mayonnaise. Custard. Smooth sauces. Flavor, substance and nutrition to breads, soups, pastas and cakes. Omelets. Or, what the heck. A fried egg sandwich. A hard boiled egg in a lunch box.

No wonder so many ancient thinkers in so many cultures imagined the cosmos as an egg. A construction of concentric shells. That a clucking, flapping, dirt-pecking chicken could come out of a package that begins as an undifferentiated blob was a fertile metaphor for existence itself.

So bon appetit! You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And as you are wolfing it down, meditate on the mystery of why there is anything at all.

Online services are using the easy availability of location data to tweak the information that users are seeing

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Do you lie at wake at night worrying that you might have missed the latest words of wisdom on Sciencebase? Are you concerned that a new post might have published that you desperately wanted to comment on and now it’s too late? Well…fear not. There are so many ways to connect with Sciencebase and sibling sites Sciencetext Tech Talk and the SciScoop Science Forum that you really can rest easy.

On Facebook – become a Sciencebase fan and you get to read the headlines from SB, ST, SC and more as they appear. You can also comment right there and then without having to hop back and forth between sites.

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Check out the Sciencebase Tizmo page for a snapshot of the whole Sciencebase family of sites and the Gizapage for related social networks.

Oh, by the way, if you visit Sciencebase from one of the social networking, social media, social bookmarking (call them what you will), the RSS feed or another subscribed/bookmarked route, you shouldn’t see the block of ads at the top of each post. So, there’s another reason to get connected with Sciencebase.

Thanks to Brad Sams at Neowin for the inspiration for the opening par.

How to get your fill of Sciencebase goodness is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

The agency wants to do away with its own rockets and buy tickets to space on commercial taxis – here are the first five projects it is supporting in this effort

What happened in the aeons between the first whiff of the gas from bacteria and air we could breathe? A frozen globe and stinking oceans, for starters

My SpectroscopyNOW column is now live. This week self-perception, trapping and using carbon dioxide, cosmic coronene, mopping up radioactive caesium, photosynthesis and magic spectral lines:

Red lenses – US scientists have used MRI to show that apparently the less you use your brain’s frontal lobes, the more you perceive your behaviour through rose-tinted spectacles. They publish details in the February issue of the journal NeuroImage.

Carbon dioxide trap and drop – The reduction of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to a useful chemical industry feedstock material, carbon monoxide, can be catalysed by a ruthenium-substituted polyoxometalate according to a new study. The work holds the promise of our developing a carbon-neutral energy platform.

Cosmic coronene’s phantom spectral bands – Anomalies in the spectra of an aromatic molecule called coronene could have implications for our understanding of astrochemistry and for making nanotech devices from graphene.

A metal sponge for cleaning up nuclear waste – An inorganic material with an open framework can selectively trap caesium ions, including its 137 isotope, one of the most significant radioactive isotopes left behind after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor fire. Caesium-137 is one of the main residual sources of lethal radiation in the nuclear industry.

Narrow view of photosynthesis – Fluorescence line-narrowing and resonance Raman properties of various chlorophyll molecules have been measured in organic solvents. The work sheds new light on one of life’s most important biochemical processes – photosynthesis – and might one day allow scientists to take another step closer to emulating the reactions to trap solar energy

The long and the long of it – A novel NMR technique has measured the largest distance between two atomic nuclei using NMR, demonstrating that tritium magic angle spinning NMR could be a promising tool for structural applications in the biological and material sciences.

Making carbon dioxide useful is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

We grew up with Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer. His 1958 book Things Fall Apart was the perceived epitome of African literature, and a promise of a bright cultural future for that continent. Since that time, some bright things have happened -- notably, the end of apartheid in South Africa. But we have also witnessed chaos and atrocity in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and elsewhere.

Now Achebe has published a collection of essays called (whimsically and ironically) the Education of a British Protected Child, reviewed in last Sunday's NYT Book Review. Apparently, the overarching theme is the colonial legacy in Africa.

According to the reviewer, Achebe's voice, as always, is moderate, eschewing extremes of radicalism or reaction. He occupies what he calls "the middle ground," what he defines as "the home of doubt and indecision, of make-believe, of playfulness, of the unpredictable, of irony."

I suppose there are those who would chastise Achebe for his moderation, who would call him wishy-washy, and urge him to thunderous wrath in the face of manifest injustice. Yet, there he sits, with his sweet, ironic smile, his critical faculties intact and held on a gentle rein.

In a world so fraught with sloganeering from left and right, with anger, self-righteousness and true belief, I am happy to resort to Achebe's place of measured doubt and playfulness, of humor and irony. There is truth in the middle ground, but it comes wrapped in hesitation, humility, tolerance, and (let us hope) grace.

There is a line of dialogue in another novel I read back in 1958. The narrator asks the eponymous Mr. Blue: "Isn't the golden mean the secret of something or other?" "Yes," replies Blue, "mediocrity." At the time, I was ready to agree with Blue, to opt for a muscular religion and politics, to avoid the namby-pamby gray. No more. I'll leave the doctrines of infallibility and placard-wielding indignations to those who have the stomach for them -- and play with Achebe in the artful middle.

Whenever anyone asks me to recommend a good book on biology, I always suggest Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature. In a little over 100 pages, Ursula presents the most lucid and concise survey of the subject I have ever read. Biology, pure and simple.

Of course, there is another part of the book, the "Reflections" at the end of each chapter, where she puts what she has said into the context of religious naturalism. If you are just interested in biology, you can skip that. But I wouldn't. It's the icing on the cake.

Ursula is a first-rate microbiologist. We've had a sometime e-mail relationship (and one lovely breakfast in Harvard Square). The Sacred Depths of Nature is a demonstration that one can be religious without believing in miracles or the existence of a personal God.

Ursula worships with a traditional Presbyterian congregation, singing in the choir, reciting the liturgy and the prayers. I would find it difficult to do that. On those celebratory occasions when I attend a Catholic Mass, I remain silent and sit out Communion. It seems to me that if one recites the Creed, the words should mean what the universal church assumes them to mean. Anything else strikes me as disingenuous.

But I respect Ursula's ability to revel in all forms of traditional religion.

I love traditional religions. Whenever I wander into distinctive churches or mosques or temples, or visit museums of religious art, or hear performances of sacred music, I am enthralled by the beauty and solemnity and power they offer. Once we have our feelings about Nature in place, then I believe hat we can also find important ways to call ourselves Jews, or Muslims, or Taoists, or Hopi, or Hindus, or Christians, or Buddhists. Or some of each. The words in the traditional texts may sound different to us than they did to their authors, but they continue to resonate with our religious selves. We know what they are intended to mean.

Goodenough knows that awe and gratitude in the face of mystery are part of human nature. "Hosannah!" she exclaims; "Not in the highest, but right here, right now, this." Her little book is a splendid manifesto for religious naturalism, and a useful antidote to the stridency of a Dawkins or Hitchens. She exemplifies what William James said about religion: "There must be something solemn, serious and tender about any attitude that we denote religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse."

In the American news this morning you will read about Punxsutawney Phil, the famous Pennsylvania groundhog that will or will not see his shadow when he emerges from his burrow today. If he does, we are in for six more weeks of winter. If it doesn't, we can put away the parkas and welcome spring.

The fat woodchuck is part of a web of solar lore with roots in prehistory. Phil presides at the year's first "cross quarter" day. The fuss that attends his emergence from his burrow is connected to the Sun by more than a shadow.

The story begins 4 1/2 billion years ago in the chaos of the pre-solar nebula from which the solar system was born.

In a corner of the Milky Way Galaxy, a vast cloud of dust and gas began to contract under the influence of gravity. As the cloud got smaller, it spun faster, as an ice skater spins faster as he draws his arms close to his body. As the cloud spun faster, it flattened out, like a mass of spinning pizza dough.

This whirling pancake of dust and gas became our solar system. Most of the material was pulled to the center to form the Sun. Other whirling eddies within the cloud were collected by gravity to become planets. There was considerable chaos within the cloud. When the third planet from the sun settled into place, its spin axis had a tilt of 23 1/2 degrees to the plane of the pancake.

It was the luck of the draw. It might have been 30 degrees. It might have been zero.

If it were zero, no Punxsutawney Phil.

As the Earth revolves in its annual orbit, sometimes the northern hemisphere is tipped towards the Sun, sometimes away. In the first instance, the Sun's rays fall more directly upon the surface and heat it efficiently: our northern summer. In the latter case, the sun's rays shine obliquely and spread their energy more diffusely: winter.

If there had been no tilt, there would be no seasons. Climate, yes -- poles cold, equator hot -- but no seasonal variation. But there was a tilt, and the waxing and waning of the Sun's warmth and light was the central fact of life for our ancestors.

The bonfires of St. John's Eve, June 23rd, which are still lit in some parts of Europe, celebrate the Sun's ascension to its highest point in northern skies. Likewise, the winter solstice, when the Sun stood lowest, was marked with feasts of light to ensure the Sun's return. These ancient rites linger in the Christian feast of Christmas and the Jewish Hanukkah.

The equinoxes, when the Sun is halfway between its extremes of strength and weakness, were celebrated too. The spring equinox retains a place in our calendar through its connection with the Christian feast of Easter, or alternately, as the Ides of March or St. Patrick's Day. Celebrations of the fall equinox have slipped from prominence.

The cross-quarter days, midway between the solstices and equinoxes, are less familiar, but they too figured in ancient rites, and also lurk in our traditions.

The first cross-quarter day should mathematically fall about Feb. 4th or 5th. This became Candlemas Day, Feb. 2nd, in the Christian calendar. An old European rhyme asserts:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Come winter, have another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Go, winter, and come not again.

Some Europeans looked for the shadow of the hedgehog on Candlemas. German immigrants brought the tradition to Pennsylvania and substituted the American woodchuck.

Punxsutawney Phil bears a weight of tradition on his fat, furry shoulders. His contrived appearance may seem inconsequential, a bit of local fun for the folks of Punxsutawney, but it is good that the old traditions live on in secular form to remind us of our common humanity on the tilted third planet from the sun.

(By the way, we celebrate the second cross-quarter day as May Day. The third cross-quarter day, which falls on or about August 7th, was perhaps remembered in the Christian calendar as Lammas, or "loaf-mass," a harvest feast, but it has vanished from our attention. The fourth cross-quarter day remains prominently with us as Halloween.)

It has become something of a habit here to comment on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), usually to call attention to something not mentioned in the caption. A few days ago it was Kemble's Cascade, an unusual (and accidental) alignment of about twenty stars in the constellation Camelopardalis (the Giraffe), now high in the northern sky in the evening. (Click to enlarge.)

First, note that none of the stars in this view are likely to be seen with the naked eye. There are no stars in the constellation brighter than the 4th magnitude, which means from a typical light-polluted location Camelopardalis is a big blank part of the sky.

But look what a telescope can see in this view which covers about 4 degrees of the sky -- about 8 times the width of the full Moon. What a delicious serving of stars!

The size of the dots on the photograph have nothing to do with the relative size of the stars; at the distance of the stars they are all effectively points of light. Rather, the size of the dots indicates the relative apparent brightness of the stars; how much light soaked into the film while the shutter was open (think of water dripping onto a paper towel). And keep in mind that the apparent brightness of a star is not necessarily an indication of its distance; the intrinsic brightness of stars varies greatly.

But -- it's the colors of the stars that strike me here. Reddish-orange. Yellow. White. Blue. Like a cascade of jewels, or the rainbow of colors in a waterfall's mist.

The celebrated 19th-century British observer William Henry Smyth professed to see stars the color of sardonyx, damson and smalt, which suggests either especially perceptive vision or a vivid imagination. He listed a dozen shades of white, including pearly, lucid, creamy, silvery, and just plain whitely white. Smyth could have had a career as one of those folks who make up names on paint chips.

Smyth's almost exact contemporary, the Russian-German astronomer Wilhelm Struve, used Latin labels to classify star colors: egregie albae, albaesubflavae, aureae, rubrae, caeruleae, virides, purpureae, and even olivaceasubrubicunda, which translates as something like pinkish-olive. I'm not sure I've ever seen a pinkish-olive star, but maybe you can pick one out in the photograph. By the way, the brightest (double) star in the little cluster at left is named for Struve.

The color of stars tells us how hot they are -- red is cool, blue-white is hot. Match up the color of the star to the color of a filament in a clear light bulb and they'll be the same temperature.

Usually we think of stars as uniformly white, but that's because the human eye is not sensitive to color in dim light -- and maybe because we just don't look closely enough. Anyway, as I look at this photograph, I think of lines from Yeats poem "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven":

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.

As now I do.

Anne returns to grace our blog with a Sunday illumination. Please click to enlarge, and then again if you wish.

Today at 1600 GMT a company called Steron will demonstrate in Dublin, Ireland, a device called Orbo that produces -- so they claim -- more energy than it uses. That is, the energy-out/energy-in ratio is greater than unity.

Spunky little Orbo is proclaimed to be the long-sought perpetual motion machine, the answer to all of humankind's energy needs.

I know about the demo because I have a friend in Ireland who keeps me posted. He's a big fan of free energy, and we have a long-standing bet about Orbo. If Steron's claim turns out to be true, I owe him a beer. Heck, I'll buy him all the beer in the pub.

I know nothing about Orbo except that it works with magnets. Certainly, I could find out a lot more by going on the web, starting, I suppose, with Wikipedia. But I can't be bothered. The bet stands, sight unseen and word unheard.

Does that make me close-minded, as my friend claims?

Well, let's put it this way. The search for perpetual motion machines is as old as machines themselves, so far unsuccessful. The idea violates the laws of physics as we know them. If Orbo is greater than unity it will be the greatest breakthrough in science since science, not what you'd expect to come out of a virtually unknown outfit in Dublin with nothing to show for past success except a website making extravagant claims. All the other bells ring too. This is just not the way science works.

So I think my bet is safe.

Could I be wrong? Of course I could be wrong. Who would have thought, for example, that a 747 could get off the ground, much less fly across the ocean in hours, or that a softball-sized lump of "dirt" could blow up a city?

But some things just don't bear wasting time thinking about. Perpetual motion machines. Antigravity shields. Teleportation. The Fountain of Youth. Better to get on with the joys of living. Like knocking back a cold pint in a pub with my Orbo-fixated friend. And, what the hell, I'll pay for the beers no matter what the outcome of today's demonstration.

I stood on the terrace, newly tiled and damp with dew, and held my breath, sucked in a deep draught of air and held it, knowing that any second the fiery Sun would lift over the horizon. And there! On schedule. To the second. As if someone opened the circular door of a furnace.

And the wind whispered hosannahs. The clouds paused processing in their gorgeous vestments. Geckos ceased their skitterings and genuflected. I let out my breath in a long slow prayer: Introibo ad altare Dei.

Teilhard de Chardin called one of his essays "The Mass on the World." Sunrise is my daily Mass.

I think of an image of Mary Oliver, in a poem called Morning in a New Land:

I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing hs eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

A good friend tells me via e-mail that she is reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I read the book for a second time two years ago, in the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It's one of those novels I had to read twice -- once in middle age (I would not have had the patience in youth) and once in settled maturity. In middle age, it was all about Anna, and passion, and doubt. In old age -- for me at least -- it's about Levin, settled, happily married, enjoying as much intellectual peace as might be possible in this big, sprawling epic of a world.

The book ends with Levin on the terrace of his house under a starry sky. Away on the horizon a storm has gathered and lightning flashes. He meditates on his Christian faith and its ethical imperatives, and on the vast and seemingly indifferent universe of nebulas and distances spread out before his eyes. He thinks about how it is that the stars appear to move, when in fact it is the Earth that turns under the sky. And he thinks too about how a moral imperative is apparently part of the human condition, as much so for the Jew, the Muslim, the Confucian, the Buddhist -- and, one must suppose, the secular agnostic -- as for the Christian. The accident of Christian faith make as little difference to the moral trajectory of his life as does the question of whether it is the stars or the Earth that turns.

In the last words of the novel, Levin muses: "There will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand the mystery of existence, and I shall still go on attending to the mystery; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more intrinsically meaningful or meaningless than it was before, but it still has the positive meaning of goodness which I have the power to put into it."

Snowflake Bentley is in the news. The BBC website reports that ten of Bentley's more than 5,000 snowflake microphotographs are going on sale at an auction in New York. You may know of Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley as the Vermont farmer who a century ago dedicated his life to recording the exquisite beauty of snowflakes with a microscope and a bellows camera, standing in the cold for hours at a time. Just before he died of pneumonia he published a handsome volume of hundreds of images, no two alike. I've long owned the Dover edition of that book, still in print.

Page after page of snowflakes. Each one an utterly symetrical six-pointed jewel. Ephemeral! Beauty that forms in the air on a core of dust -- a microscopic mineral heart -- and melts away in a flash. But not before Bentley captured an image on film.

There are two stories here that have always intriqued me, and I have written about them before. First, of course, is the human story -- a story of a passionate curiosity, a farmer obsessed by beauty. This is the story told in Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Mary Azarian lovely children's book. The second story is why. Why the symmetry?

The basic hexagonal form of a water crystal is easy enough; that has to do with the shape of a water molecule, an atom of oxygen with two hydrogen atoms hanging off at just the angle that causes them to link up in a hexagonal fashion. (Think of you and a bunch of your friends standing with your arms stretched out with an angle of 120 degrees between them. Now you link up by holding hands. Six of you will naturally fall into a hexagon.) The angle between the arms of the water molecule is explained by quantum physics.

But what about the perfect six-fold symmetry of a snowflake? As a snowflake grows, adding water molecules essentially at random, how does one point know what is going on at another point? On the scale of molecules, the faces of the growing crystal are light-years apart. That is to say, how does a water molecule attaching itself to a flake at the tip of one point, know what's happening 10 million molecules away -- by my rough calculation -- on the other side of the flake? If you go to the internet you will find theories to explain the symmetry -- forced "tiling", sensitive vibrations, that sort of thing -- but I've yet to see anything that is convincing.

Snowflakes aren't the only place in nature where we find symmetry that staggers the imagination. Think of the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb. Or the arms of a starfish. Or the perfect little fingers and toes of a developing human foetus. Why does the stuff of the universe arrange itself into spiral galaxies, planetary ellipses, double-helix DNA, five-petaled flowers, the rainbow's arc? Why?

Why does nature love mathematics?

Standing at the door of his barn with his bulky apparatus, Wilson Bentley was engaged in philosophy of the most profound sort.

"Mysteries are not necessarily miracles," said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. That was two hundred years ago and it is still a lesson we have a hard time learning.

Mysteries surround us on every side, the inevitable consequence of being a finite creature in a possibly infinite universe. For a long time, mystery was subsumed as the province of the gods. Every mysterious event had a miraculous cause. The ways of the gods might be inscrutable, but they had some purpose in the divine mind.

Slowly, mysterious events were shown to have a recurrent causes -- comets followed calculable paths, specific diseases were associated with specific germs, earthquakes occurred along geologic faults. We call this the history of science. And eventually, something rather remarkable dawned in the human mind: a recognition of our own ignorance.

Ignorance may be the most important discovery in the intellectual history of our species. As Goethe suggested, mysteries are not miracles; they are riddles to be solved. We chip away at our ignorance. Mysteries are illumined by the light of reason. And with every "miracle" made commonplace, more mysteries are revealed.

You can see numerous ice balls that have formed in Lake Michigan and along the shore in the Chicago Tribune video below. Wind, wave motion and a temperature just below freezing likely contributed to the creation of the ice spheres. There are some photographs of the ice balls here. Also, some much larger ice balls were discovered off the swedish coastline earlier this year.



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There is a U. S. Christian missionary society that for years has flown its members back and forth to Haiti in a DC3 that stops here in Exuma to refuel. Once, a dozen years or so ago, the plane crashed in a driving rain storm into a hillside near our house. We arrived at the scene just as the passengers, all of whom survived, made their out of the bush to the road. "God was with us," they exclaimed.

I don't want to disparage good people who take themselves to a poor country to help those less fortunate than themselves. The missionaries are certainly less selfish than me. But I couldn't help wonder: If God let them all survive the crash, why did he let the plane crash in the first place? I would be inclined to give the credit for survival not to an interposing divinity, but to that sturdy little DC3 that banged into the hillside and held together.

This incident comes back to mind because the society's replacement DC3 has been making more frequent trips to Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, part of a generous outpouring of support -- religious and secular -- for the Haitians. And everyone it seems, is talking about God. Pat Robertson's infamous attribution of God's wrath to a Haitian "pact to the devil." President Obama's "but for the grace of God, there go we." Haitian bishop Eric Toussaint's "What happened is the will of God." And any number of Haitian locals and visitors interviewed by the media who thanked God for their survival.

We are faced here with the problem of theodicy: If God is good, just, and all-powerful, why does he (he!) let bad things happen to good people? Why does he scourge some and favor others?

After millennia of struggling with this question, theologians are no closer to an answer than ever. The best they can do is ascribe inscrutable motives to the divinity; only God knows what he has in mind but it's surely all for the best. Writing in the New York Times, James Woods draws the logical conclusion: If God's actions are as capricious as nature, then he is effectively nonexistent.

Clearly, I'm not the only one who thinks that the most obvious solution for health care reform is for the House to pass the Senate bill: The New York Times just published an editorial arguing the same point:

The most promising path forward would be for House Democrats to pass the Senate bill as is and send it to the president for his signature. That would allow the administration and Congress to pivot immediately to job creation and other economic issues. The Senate bill is not perfect, but it would expand coverage to 94 percent of all citizens and legal residents by 2019, reduce the deficit for decades to come, and create pilot programs to move the medical system toward better care at lower costs.

The Times' editorial also notes the hypocrisy in the Massachusetts Senate election:

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It's been a rocky ride this year, getting heath care bills passed in the House and the Senate. It's been just over a month since the Senate passed its bill in a dramatic Christmas Eve vote (and much longer since the House passed its version), but the fate of health care reform still appears as uncertain as ever. In particular, a surprising political setback in Massachusetts has made the already difficult Senate an almost impossibly hostile environment for reform.

The most obvious solution is for the House to pass the Senate bill without hesitation; however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already said this is unlikely to happen. On the positive side, it looks like Democrats in the House and Senate may be close to brokering a deal allowing reform to pass. But, if this fails--and maybe even instead of pursuing this strategy--the House should do its best to pass the Senate bill.

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Mars is high in the sky in the evening, the only planet to grace the midnight sky. On January 29, it reaches opposition; that is, Mars is opposite the Sun in Earth's sky. That means we are as close to Mars as we'll get this time around (although not as close as at an average opposition). The Red Planet has a magnitude of -1.3, which makes it just a bit brighter than the brightest star in the sky (Sirius). As we glide past Mars in our respective orbits, the other planet appears briefly to move backwards against the background stars, making a little loop-the-loop in Cancer.

So there it sits, 62 million miles away, tantalizingly near and yet so far.

There have been over 40 missions directed at Mars, more or less evenly divided between the U. S. and the Soviet Union (now Russia), with one unsuccessful Japanese mission and a couple from Europe (a flyby and an orbiter). The Soviets had a long streak of bad luck; a dozen missions failed before they finally landed a craft on Mars. The U.S. has had three rover missions, including spunky Spirit and Opportunity, and is planning the best rover mission yet, the Mars Science Laboratory. NASA is also planning to mesh its Mars exploration program with that of the European Space Agency, with the long-range goal of sending a robotic mission to the surface of Mars that will return some Mars dust to earth.

But it doesn't appear likely that humans will go to Mars any time soon. Back when I was a young fellow, Wernher von Braun campaigned vigorously for a manned mission to Mars, in articles in Collier's magazine. He imagined it might happen in his lifetime. He died in 1977, by which time Viking 1 and 2 had landed on the Red Planet, but humans had got no farther than the Moon.

I won't live to see humans on Mars. My children won't either. My grandchildren? Well, maybe. It will happen, eventually. The Chinese may pull it off. In the meantime, I walk the beach at night with that bright beacon in Cancer, dreaming the dreams of the 1950s when V2 rockets and German space scientists made shaking hands with little green men on the little red planet seem a realistic possibility.

By now you are getting royally tired of Tudor England, and so am I. Derek Wilson's hefty history goes on and on, and I'm too busy tiling the terrace to make more expeditious progress. As I mentioned, the book's slant is political -- the contentious politics of Henry's court, and of Europe in general, including the tangled machinations of the papacy. Henry ruled from 1509 to 1547. It was a watershed time in Europe, what with the spread of printing, the Protestant Reformation, peasant revolts, contentions with Turks and Moors, and the ransacking of newly discovered Western continents. Religion and gold, and lots of ink.

And speaking of ink --

In all of the 580 pages of Wilson's book, there is no mention of two books published in 1543 that may have had as much to do with shaping the future of Western civilization as any lusty monarch or rambunctious priest. I'm thinking of Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body), and Nicholas Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres).

The microcosm and the macrocosm. Vesalius opened up the human body to empirical observation. He found a marvelous array of tissues and organs, and not a trace of the immortal soul or any seat thereof. Copernicus removed the Earth from the center of the universe and, in the absence of parallax, pushed the stars (and Empyrean) an essentially infinite distance away -- in effect removing any place an immortal soul might find repose. Both of which rendered superfluous all the interreligious squabbling -- Christian versus Christian, Christian versus Muslim, Christian versus New World "pagans" --that defined the era and caused such a tsunami of human suffering.

Of course, folks at the time were rather more interested in theological disputation than in using their eyes to see what's what, which is why Vesalius and Copernicus don't even have walk-on parts in Wilson's book. In that, nothing has changed. We still squabble about our respective versions of immortality. If we do it for the most part less violently than in the reign of Henry VIII, it is more because of the long-range influence of empirical anatomy and astronomy than of Luther's ninety-five theses or the Council of Trent.

Thomas More wore a hair shirt under his velvet robes. No wonder he is a hero of conservative Catholics. What could be more Catholic than hair shirts and velvet? Better, I suppose, to wear a hair shirt under your velvet than velvet under your hair shirt. We have enough churchmen of every stripe who pretend to ascetic piety and dally in sensuality.

A lunatic tension between lust and asceticism seems to be one of the defining characteristics of Catholic Christianity, although heaven knows it's not confined to Catholics or even Christians. I blush to affirm than in my testosterone-fueled youth I put pebbles in my shoes and sand in my bed. I haven't a clue what I hoped to accomplish by such minor chastisements of the flesh, but ostensibly it had something to do with meriting an eternity of bliss. My asceticism was phony anyway; I put sand only on one side of the sheets and slept on the other. And the pebbles were tiny.

Lust, of course, is never phony. It's a biological given. The biologist Lynn Margulis, who co-wrote a book on the subject, puts it in the context of physics: "We represent, as sexual beings, the cosmos becoming aware of its own tendency to create and destroy. Sex is the beginning and end of that metacycle of carbon chemistry we recognize as an "I"...In experiencing sexual temptation or pleasure, we enact a cosmic breakdown more primordial than life itself, one mandated in the very meaning of the Second Law of Thermodynamics."

Oh dear, what would Thomas More have made of that? His lusty monarch as a living, breathing embodiment of the inexorable Second Law. And sainted Thomas with his hair shirt trying to keep it all in check.

And while we're at it, now is the time to order the perfect gift for your sweetie on Valentine's Day.

A passage from Derek Wilson's history of the court of Henry VIII:

Humanism was a different organism from scholasticism, the system of study hitherto prevailing in the schools. They shared common DNA elements but with crucial variations. Study of Scripture, the Fathers and classical authors were the fundamental genetic elements in all classrooms but, whereas the old schoolmen based their teaching around age-hallowed commentaries and convoluted disputation over doctrinal minutiae, the reformers insisted on going back to the original texts so that students could discover for themselves a civilized and pious pattern of living untrammeled by traditional interpretations and barren logic-chopping.

Those early years of the 16th century were indeed a time of intellectual ferment in the universities -- new learning versus old. Both groups professed to want the same things: equipping men (not women) for the good life in this world and salvation in the next. At issue was method: primary classical texts, including Scripture, versus medieval commentaries. We know the outcome: the Reformation and Scientific Revolution.

The Council of Trent and the Galileo affair kept the Roman Church locked in a backwater of history, as the rest of the world moved toward modernity. I mentioned here a week or two ago the 1907 encyclical of Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, still defending the old order and scholasticism five hundred years after Erasmus set the pots of modernity boiling at Cambridge and Oxford. These issues interest me because I lived through something of a replay at a crucial time in my intellectual development.

I was a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame in 1955 when Monsignor John Tracy Ellis set our pot a-boiling with a speech and essay titled "American Catholics and the Intellectual Life." He asked: Where were American Catholic Rhodes scholars, scientists, and intellectual lights? He blamed the universities and seminaries for a "self-imposed ghetto mentality" -- in effect, a slavish adherence to traditional commentaries and barren logic-chopping. His essay was a spark in what was called -- briefly and grandly -- the "Catholic intellectual renaissance."

As I experienced the "renaissance," it was all a bit of a muddle. On the one hand there was something called neo-scholasticism, which was no more attractive to some of us than the logic-chopping scholasticism it replaced -- Thomas Aquinas gussied up in dull modern duds. We were supposed to be excited by Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and the whole Sheed and Ward (Catholic publishers) neo-scholastic stable, but frankly it all seemed like gobbledygook to me. I had fallen in love with the clarity I found in my science courses, and, as for the Catholic renaissance, it was an altogether different strain that attracted me. What did Thomas Merton, Teilhard de Chardin, Sigrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos (among many others) have in common? I don't know, but it wasn't logic-chopping. I loved their journeys into a sensuous darkness, which made a happy (and sometimes soul-stirring) counterbalance to the logical purity of my studies in mathematics and physics. Oh, it was Catholic all right, but more to the point, it was visceral, elemental, intuitive.

Anyway, it's all gone now. Students in Catholic institutions of higher learning today have likely never heard of Thomas Merton or Sigrid Undset, and certainly not of Jacques Maritain or Etienne Gilson. Some 1950s Catholics drifted into a Buckleyesque Catholic conservatism; others drifted right out of the Church into a firmly liberal agnosticism -- in other words, pretty much the same thing that happened when Erasmus showed up at Cambridge early in the reign of Henry VIII.

Or how about some tutty for a roll of cloud-soft toilet tissue?

The court of Henry VIII was catered to by merchants who did a brisk business in luxury items from the Levant and Orient. This commerce went through the trading centers of Italy until the Portuguese and Spanish consolidated their long-haul sea routes around the southern continents.

Derek Wilson lists some of the items sought after in English palaces: musk, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, sugar, nutmeg, aloes, dragon's teeth, agaric, ebony, cane, tutty, senna, colocynth, scammony, theriac, mithridate, camlet, silks, brocades, cloth of gold, grogram, rice and Parmesan cheese.

Some of these items are on our kitchen shelves. Even the poorest among us has a bit of sugar, and maybe a dash of Parmesan. I had to Google dragon's teeth, tutty, colocynth, scammony, theriac, mithridate, camlet and grogram, which suggests that tastes have changed (or we are less likely than Henry to have need of poison antidotes). On the other hand, we throw out glass bottles, aluminum foil, and paper that would have fetched a handsome price on the 16th-century market.

We still import our treasures from the East: flat-screen televisions, iPods, frozen fish, rubber ducks, drinking water. And if we don't recognize tutty and scammony, the biggest reverse surprise among Henry's contemporaries would no doubt be all of the items we pump from the ground -- a vast reservoir of cheap fuel and plastic. We may never run out of mithridate, but when the oil is gone it's gone.

I've been reading Derek Wilson's In the Lion's Court: Power, Ambition, and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII. Dense and smart. Not focussed , as usual, on the six wives, but on the six Thomases -- Wolsey, More, Cromwell, Cranmer, Howard and Wriothesley. Very political.

But here on page 199 Wilson says:

Incipient revolt was something sixteenth-century governments always took seriously -- and never more so than in 1525. This was a crisis time and had long been prophesied as such. Astrologers pointed out that, in the autumn of 1524, all the planets would be aligned in Pisces and that this could only be a portent of great disaster. Right on cue in the closing weeks of the year the first rumblings of what would become the Peasants' War were heard.

Hmm, I thought, that can't be right. In autumn, the Sun is in the opposite part of the sky from Pisces, and Venus and Mercury are never far from the Sun. So off I go to the Starry Night software on my computer, to see just what was going on in the sky in 1524. Jupiter and Saturn were indeed dawdling in Pisces in the autumn, but the other three naked-eye planets were gallivanting in other parts of the sky. Run the calendar back to February of that same year, however, and -- wow! -- a really tight gathering of all five planets in Pisces. This is clearly what the astrologers had in mind. Not only that, had they only known, Neptune joined the crowd.

Alas, this spectacular alignment -- within 15 degrees -- would not have provided a visual spectacle since the Sun was smack dab in the middle of the gathering and the planets would be smothered in its light.

Poor Henry. Not only did he have to contend with the not always consistent advice of his six Thomases, the various contradictory urgings from Pope and royal allies, and his earnestly felt responsibilities to an inscrutable God, he had also to worry about the hithers and yons of the planets whose comings and goings exerted their terrestrial influence -- agitating an already fraught disquiet of peasants. Mr. Obama at least can put the stars out of mind. My Starry Night software confirms nicely that nothing terrestrial disturbs the planets' wanderings -- and presumably vice versa.

There are days here when the sea is as calm and flat as bottle glass, an apparently infinite expanse of turquoise stretching to the place where sea meets sky, where sky-gods touch the earth. I sit in a beach chair with my feet in the gently lapping surf and imagine that day 518 years ago when the white sails of three ships appeared on the horizon to the bewildered gaze of the gentle Lucayan people who inhabited these isles. Sails like the wings of birds, sea-birds, white and glorious. God-birds, dreamed of perhaps, but never met, and now they came, drawing closer, folding their wings, kind and benevolent.

And there are other days, rarer to be sure, when the wind blows up from the north, and the waves crash on the shore, glittering like burnished steel, cutting like the edge of a sword, roiling out of a horizon obscured by rain, pounding, wrathful, wonderful and frightening.

Twenty-five years after the arrival of those white-winged gods from the east, not a single Lucayan was left in the Bahamas. The only natural resource of value to Spain's Christian Majesties was slaves, a docile people who were shipped to die in the gold mines of Hispaniola or the pearl fisheries of Venezuela. The islands were left desolate.

I stand on the rocks above the pounding, spray-swept beach, the tide angrily swirling at my feet, and I think of lines of a poem by Grace Schulman, a poem about a crashing surf:

Speed, thunder, surprise. The jarring thump
of low bass drums, the dancers leap and bow,

the gospel singer's growl, the pause, the shout,
dodging the beat, notes jammed with syllables,

the hums, mumbles, and cries, the choruses,
cymbals that gleam in sudden white-gold light.

Sky gods, out of the east, folding their wings on a calm sea -- and then the clash and clatter, the scrape of steel and stench of powder, the terrible exterminating gloria Deo. And now --

How all that matters is to stand fast
on the ridge that's left, and hear the music.

Dr. Arthur Lerner-Lam, a seismologist at Columbia University, showed Chris Wragge some of the geographical zones most at risk of a killer earthquake. The hot spots include the Northern Caribbean, California, the Ring of Fire in the Central and South America region and Greece, Middle East and China. Take a look:



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I don't want to be a new Moon bore. I know I've written about new-Moon-chasing a dozen times. But last evening's crescent was especially beautiful. It's on my mind.

What makes a young Moon beautiful first of all is seeing it, the younger the better. Any Moon younger than 30 hours is deliciously thin, and tricky to see in the waning daylight unless you have a crisp, clear western horizon. Catching a 24-hour-old Moon before it sets is spine-tingling.

Last evening's Moon was an easy 38 hours old. But youth is not the only thing that makes a new Moon beautiful. There's also the sky -- its color, its clarity, the disposition of clouds, the presence of planets such as last evening's Jupiter -- and how many glasses of wine one has had to drink. Standing half-naked on a tropic isle helps too. And so it was that even a 38-hour-old Moon was breathtakingly lovely. An silver eyelash. The paring of a nail. A wisp of thistledown afloat on the breeze.

There was the time, before clocks and calendars and "top-of-the-hour" television, when folks divided up their lives by the cycles of Sun and Moon. The solar seasons are marked by the solstices and equinoxes; the year began when the shadow of a vertical stick at noon is longest. But that's not something that is obvious to the casual observer. "Solstice" means "Sun-stands"; the length of the shadow doesn't change much from day to day around the solstices. And besides, what fun is there standing in the sun looking at a stick? But the Moon! the month! -- ah, now that's different. We know when the month begins -- when the most keen-eyed among us catches that slip of moonglow in the western sky. Which is why the cycles of the Moon figure so prominently in the world's past and present calendars, such as that of Muslims, who begin their New Year at sunset on the day when the appropriate new Moon becomes visible, or the Jewish New Year, that begins at sunset with the new Moon closest to the autumn equinox.

And so do Muslims and Jews begin their religious observances. As for me, catching that wisp of lunar light with Earthshine gathered in its arms is liturgy enough.