moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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WRITER'S LINKS
Absolute Write Paypal donation button:

Absolute Write is one of the leading sites for information on writing and publishing, especially the scam versions thereof. It has a broad, deep online community with an enormous message base going back years. Now it needs help. See the details and discussion here
Preditors and Editors
Everything you wanted to know about literary agents
On the getting of agents
Writer Beware
Miss Snark
Writer's Net

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(and my Wish List)

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Life in a Temperate Climate: Autumn  
From Little Blog In The Big Woods :
The Last Dance (Wed, 24th Sep, 2008)
littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/ 2008/ 09/ last-dance.html

The turn of the year
There's a special autumn event I look for every year. It doesn't have a name.

Actually, I've never met anyone else who has seen it, or heard of it. A fact that makes me think, and wonder if that should worry me. Us.

It's quite a spectacular thing, when it happens. Spectacular as it is, though, it goes unnoticed; partly because at the best, it can only last for a half an hour. No more. And it doesn't happen every year, either.

It used to happen most years, at least in part. Now it happens less. That worries me, too ...

Repeated from 17-Sep-2007 (ittlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/ 2007/ 09/ turn-of-year.html)

Labels: nature, writing

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 1:17 pm

 
PZ Myers: Darwin Year begins now  
Pharyngula The Darwin year begins…NOW!:

It was on 1 July 1858, 150 years ago today, that the idea of natural selection was first presented to the public in a joint reading of Darwin's and Wallace's papers at the Linnean Society of London

Some Darwin-related Links

Darwin Today - a joint initiative of Research Councils UK aimed at educating the public about evolution
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online; free, includes items not in public domain
Works by Charles Darwin at Project Gutenberg; public domain
Darwin Correspondence Project: Text and notes for most of his letters
The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Free LibriVox Audiobook
Digitized titles by Charles Darwin in Botanicus.org
Charles Darwin at the Open Directory Project
Works by or about Charles Darwin in libraries (WorldCat catalogue)
Institut Charles Darwin International
A Pictorial Biography of Charles Darwin
Twelve different portraits of Charles Darwin, National Portrait Gallery, U.K.
Mis-portrayal of Darwin as a Racist

Labels: anniversaries, history, links, nature, science

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 9:54 pm

 
A Century of Tunguska  
Monday, June 30, 2008 — One hundred years ago today, something exploded over Siberia

At a little after seven in the morning, settlers near the north end of Lake Baikal saw something bright appear in the sky, crossing to the northwest leaving a trail behind it. As it touched the horizon, it was transformed into a column of black smoke in which flames could be seen. Soon after, they felt a thump in the ground and heard a series of bangs that they compared to artillery in the distance. Other villagers to the west of them gave similar descriptions. Later scientific expeditions would locate the ground zero of the explosion in a remote area among the tributaries of the Podkamennaya (Stony or Lower) Tunguska River. Seismic stations around the world recorded the ground movement and set the time at precisely 07:17:11 AM.

(An excellent telling of the history in the 'Archy' blog)

Labels: anniversaries, astronomy, history, nature

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 9:55 pm

 
Boyer Lectures online  
I'm alerting y'all to the start of the 2007 Boyer Lectures. This series (the 48th) is called Restoring The Senses. It's available streaming, or as a podcast or transcript from www.abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures (don't be put off by the short excursion into philosophy/theology near the beginning). Their summary:

"Professor Graeme Clark, creator of the bionic ear, is ABC Radio National's Boyer lecturer for 2007. In this series of six lectures … Professor Clark draws on decades of experience as a clinician, surgeon and researcher to celebrate our senses. He also tells the compelling story of how the bionic ear was created, and provides an insight into the extraordinary future of bionics."

Archives, either as transcripts or audio recordings, back as far as 1997 are also available on the ABC site.

Labels: audio, biology, health, medicine, nature, science

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:09 am

 
Something so many of us have felt witnessing destruction around us  
... even now, years afterward, I feel pain inside as I pass such sites in my daily life. No brain, no pain, they say. Is this the penalty for memory?

Killing an Oak Tree

A Gratuitous Death

by BRUCE JACKSON

CounterPunch
January 25, 2003

My neighbor is killing his oak tree. It's taking a long time.

He's not doing it himself. It's too big a job for him to do by himself, even if he knew how to do it, which he doesn't ...
It's all those trees, one by one, and all those lakes and rivers, one by one. One by one by one by one. Greed and bad taste and stupidity. One by one by one by one...

www.counterpunch.org/ jackson01252003.html
Bruce Jackson's email address is bjackson@buffalo.edu

This article is also found on the Buffalo Reporter (buffaloreport.com/ 030122tree.html), which also published some reactions to it.

Labels: nature

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 5:51 pm