A sea of stars at last were born.
Gradually they fired and formed
out of clouds of dust and gas,
each a mighty sparkly mass.
     from Once Upon a Star: A Poetic Journey Through Space
                                            written by James Carter
                                        illustrated by Mar Hernández
                        Doubleday Books for Young Readers, 2018

    Astrophysicists, Rocket Scientists, Cosmologists, Brain Surgeons, Quantum Physicists. They are probably the most intelligent humans on our Earth. They use math to describe the world around us.
    Sociolinguists, anthropologists, archeologists, fiction writers, poets. They are also among the most intelligent humans on our Earth. They use history and their imaginations to describe the world around us.
    Whether studying our brains’ inner workings, discovering the way a star is born, or using words to paint images that leap from one human brain to another, there is something magical about science and poetry for me. 
    Science and Poetry I think, are not communicative in the mathematical sense. Poetry is probably not Science, but Science probably *is* Poetry. Science is complex. So is Poetry. Scientists seek to understand and explain the world around us. Poets do too. Science condenses its explanations into elegant equations. Poets condense language into beautiful, unusual phrases to present their explanations.
    Poetry communicates in sound and metaphor. It’s a poet’s job to provide her readers novel juxtapositions, surprising combinations, unusual pairings of sounds or images or sounds and images that help us all see the world as fresh, possible, miraculous. 
    One of the best examples for me is William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. His first four lines
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
          ask us as readers to fill in the blanks. What, do we suppose, he meant? Of course, the answer is metaphor. How else can we extrapolate from each tiny grain of sand our vast, glorious, whole Earth? What else but a wildflower can describe heaven, something we can only imagine as perfect, surprising, robust, exquisite? Can we hold infinity in our hands? I think we can, and do, when we are so caught up in a moment that Time has no linear meaning. Can Blake’s idea of Eternity last only an hour? I think so. It happens when we rush from one do-list item to the next and the next only to have left-over items for tomorrow and the tomorrow after, and after all the way to Eternity.
    Blake has given us a way to make meaning of our complicated world in only four lines. He uses common objects: sand; flowers; our own hands; and time itself to encourage us to make our own meanings. He uses metaphor to encourage us to stretch into the unknown.
    Science waltzes, arabesques, glides toward Poetry in its descriptions of String Theory and Quantum Theory and the Theory of Everything. They are usually expressed as complicated math formulas, story problems written out in numbers and mathematical symbols. 
    Using words for now, quantum physics, simply stated, is the study of matter at its most basic level. The theory is really many theories including quantum mechanics and quantum field theories. Scientists attempt to explain how a photon becomes electrical current, why Einstein’s special theory of relativity works, and how Schrödinger’s cat can be alive and dead at the same time. And gravity, that does not fall into any quantum category. But when I let go of my pen, it always drops. Always. Drops.
    The concepts involved in quantum everything are huge, but the particles, photons, quarks, leptons it describes are all subatomic. They’re the smallest pieces of matter that scientists can describe. They’re invisible. Microscopes are useless. Particle detectors show scientists that they do exist. They know because the subatomic matter affects the material around it.
    String theory also tries to find the smallest speck of matter. The theory describes the tiniest pieces of significance. The teeny strings that stretch, bend, wiggle, twist and sometimes do more than one action at a time vibrate together to explain the music of our universe.
    The theory of everything tries to explain, in one brilliant mathematical statement, how and why neutrinos, particles, photons, quarks and leptons dance. How and when these one-dimensional objects attract and repel each other. And why? And is our seemingly endless universe made of grains, tinier than sand?
    Philosophers, ethicists, moralists, and religious leaders of all stripes are some of the most intelligent people on our Earth. They use history, literature, science, music, and imagination to help us frame questions whose answers help us understand ourselves and each other. 
    Could the Theory of Everything have anything to do with G?d however we understand that concept?
    All is one. Now is all there is. Unity.

I’m reading His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking, 2022). From the enslaved life his ancestors escaped, to the wealth they built and enjoyed until it was snatched from them, George Floyd’s family story is one of potential denied, dreams stolen, resilience broken. He had the potential to beat the odds, but the odds beat him. Only through his death did Mr. Floyd, “Big George,” achieve his dream to touch the world. It is a story of the universal told through the specific life of one person. The book is a wake up call to action. 
                                         -—be curious! (and think big)​

    [Arthur] went to his lunchbox and put on his glasses. In gym, Arthur made ten baskets. Francine made four.
    That afternoon Arthur didn’t need Francine to read the problems on the board.
                                               from Arthur’s Eyes
                         written and illustrated by Marc Brown
                                                 Little, Brown, 1979

    I didn’t start wearing glasses until I graduated from high school, but I needed them much earlier. Mom took us to regular checkups with our family doctor, but the “extra” stuff kinda mostly went by the wayside.
    My glasses made a huge difference. 
    When I was growing up, I loved to read. The only way to read way back then was to hold a book and turn the pages. Now, I can read on my phone. It’s backlit so I don’t bother my husband or new kitten who might be trying to sleep next to me. I can enlarge the size of the font so it’s easier to see. I can load lots of books on my phone instead of packing them all. Makes traveling to visit my kids and grandkids much easier (and lighter).
    Before I went away to college, I was diagnosed with myopia, nearsightedness. I could see things close up better than I could those things in the distance. When I was growing up, the medical community believed myopia and hyperopia (near and farsightedness) were both the result of genetics.
    Not long ago, I heard a story on NPR that the World Health Organization (WHO) projects in just six years, 2030, almost one half of the world’s population will be nearsighted. 
    Here in the United States, in 1971, about 1 in 4 people were diagnosed with myopia. Forty-six years later, 2017, the rate was a little under one half, 42%, and many of those diagnoses are in children. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggests the rate of digital eyestrain, a cause of myopia, has already reached between 50 and 60% in kids.
    Dr. Maria Liu, an associate professor of clinical optometry at The University of California, Berkeley, has been suggesting for about the last ten years that screen time can be a cause of nearsightedness, especially in children. Now, while still not mainstream, doctors like her are considering the real and long-lasting effects of all those hours in front of a screen. Whether for a ZOOM meeting, a class reading assignment, a solitaire game or ten, or researching and typing out a weekly blog, all that screen time really matters. And it matters most to kids.
    New research from ophthalmologists shows that our eyes continue to change as we age. When we spend more time focusing on near objects, our eyeballs elongate to sharpen the clarity of those nearby objects (on screens, mostly). This elongation increases nearsightedness. Our eyes do not bend the incoming light as they  should. It makes sense that spending lots of time doing close work might affect a person’s vision. 
    According to the National Institutes of Health  (NIH), digital eye strain is “characterized by dry eyes, itching, foreign body sensation, watering, blurring of vision, and headache.”
     In the same NIH article, “Dr. Liu explained that the best way to protect children against early onset myopia is to limit screen time and get them playing outside as much as possible. ‘They need to play with real toys,’ Liu said. ‘They need to engage in real outdoor life.’”
    While there is certainly no harm done to children by sending them outside, except of course, if danger is present or inclement weather conditions prevent a positive experience, a school of thought reported in the Review of Myopia Management by Prof. Caroline Klaver, suggests the 20-20-2 rule. After 20 minutes of close work, children should gaze at objects in the distance for at least 20 seconds, and they should be outside intermittently for at least 2 hours per day. 
    And while the 20-20-2 rule is especially helpful for children whose eyesight continues to develop until about age six, it is important for adults, too, whose eyesight is still malleable.
    Marc Brown ends Arthur’s story with a short scene that includes Francine. 
    The next morning Arthur was very surprised when he saw Francine.
    “They’re my movie star glasses,” said Francine.
    “But there isn’t any glass in them,” said Arthur.
    “It doesn’t matter. They help me concentrate and make me look beautiful,” said Francine.
    I’m not sure there is a placebo effect regarding wearing glasses, but my optometrist assured me he can keep correcting my (slowly) progressing myopia with glasses. The hard part is finding the frames that will make me look beautiful.
     
    When I found my lost book club list, I had to  move George Floyd’s biography down a week. This week I’m reading The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb (Anchor Books, 2022). It’s a mystery whose main character, Ray, is an extremely talented young, black violinist. His rising star is stopped in its track when his priceless Stradivarius was stolen just before a crucial audition. Slocumb’s debut explores family relations, racism, and the importance of self-determination. Lyrical writing evokes Ray’s love of classical music. This one’s hard to put down. 
                                -—Be curious! (and play outside)

    Paulo smiled. “I’m proud of you four!” he said. “You clearly understand the real spirit of the sport. Teamwork and loyalty are more important than any victory!”
                    from Thea Stilton and the Race for the Gold 
                    written by Elisabetta Maria Dami (writing as Geronimo
                                      Stilton and Thea Stilton)
                    illustrated by Ryan Jampole
                    Scholastic, 2020
   
    Like much of what we encounter in our environments (external and internal), fire is both beneficial and destructive. It could have been 1,000,000 years ago when an individual homo Erectus, or someone who was part of a family group or clan figured out how to control fire. And in the case of fire, control is everything.
    Several versions of the Phoenix myth exist in many different cultures. In the Greek tale, she is a bird of paradise. She’s majestic, brilliant, and dignified. She lives for 1,000 years, then, sets herself on fire only to be reborn fully-formed from her own ashes. The Phoenix is a powerful symbol of the regenerative property of life, especially useful in the Spring. 
    And it’s a great name for a city born in the hot, desert sand.
    The Ancient Greeks used controlled fires in a variety of ways. They cooked their food, made metallurgic artistry possible, protected people from their enemies, and kept themselves warm. 
    Fire was and is a symbol of hearth and home.
    Ancient Greek mythology is rife with references to fire. Hephaestus, god of blacksmiths and fire, was the only god who was not beautiful. He was lame, perhaps from his fall from Mount Olympus into Hades when Zeus, his own father, banished him. Hephaestus was honored, though, for his great artistry and architectural achievements, forged in fire.
    Hestia was also one of the original Olympians. She tended the hearth on Mount Olympus. A  fire burned continuously on the altar of her sanctuary during the Olympic Games.
    This morning, (4/16/24) at 10:30 a.m. local time (4:30 a.m. here in Ohio), the flame lighting ceremony will take place in Olympia, Greece, on the exact spot where the flame was lit in Ancient Greece.
    The Olympic flame will be lit in front of the ruins of Hera’s temple. Using a Skaphia, a parabolic dish with precise measurements that concentrate the sun’s rays, an actor playing the part of the high priestess, will light the Olympic flame. It’s placed in an urn and taken to the ancient stadium where it’s handed, along with an olive branch, to a torchbearer.
    The flame is taken to the site of the International Olympic Academy and passed to a second torchbearer, who represents the hosting country of the Olympic Games. This year it’s France.
    All in all, 600 torchbearers will carry the flame an average of 200 meters each throughout Greece on an 11-day relay, ending in Athens on Friday April 26, where a handover ceremony will take place.
    Live coverage of the whole ceremony will begin fifteen minutes before the flame is lit and end when it is received by the third torchbearer who continues the 3,100 mile relay to Athens. Click Olympicscom. to watch, then click the relay button for the replay. (It’s about an hour and a half, but you can fast forward, if you want to.)
    The Olympic flame will spend the night at the French Embassy in Athens, then board the Belem, a three-masted ship that was first launched in 1896, the first year of the modern Games. It will arrive in Marseille, France on May 8, amid great fanfare.     
    When the torch is lit, the Official Games begin. 
    For almost twelve centuries, the Olympic Games were *the* highpoint on the Ancient Greek calendar. Most Olympians were soldiers, but any free male was allowed to compete. Women were forbidden not only from competing. They were not even allowed to attend the Games. The men competed in the nude, but that’s probably not why women were banned. 
    The Ancient Olympics Game page of olympics.com states “[a]t their height in the fifth century BCE, athletes competed in running, jumping and throwing events plus boxing, wrestling, pankration (an unarmed combat sport which was sometimes played till the death), and chariot racing. 
    The Games were far from gentlemanly. Corporal punishment was the penalty for a false start on the track. 
    The Games took place every four years from 776 BCE (Before the Common Era) to 393 CE (Common Era). The first known Olympic Games were played to honor Zeus. Although the Games continued for over 1,000 years,  by 27 BCE, Rome’s conquest of the Greek city-states was complete. Roman influence continued to grow and in 393 CE, Emperor Theodosius I banned the Games in an effort to promote Christianity. He called the Games paganistic.     
    It took 1,500 years until Olympic Games were played again. Pierre de Coubertin, a young French baron, had the idea to revive the Games. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was formed and the first modern Games were planned for Summer 1896. 
    King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 countries to the international competition. Thirteen nations competed in 43 events. All the competitors were men. 
    By 1924, over 3,000 athletes, including women! represented 44 nations. In the Summer Olympics in 2024 in Paris, 10,500 athletes will represent 206 countries in 329 events in 32 different sports.
    The Games will begin July 26 and conclude August 11. Until then, I’ll dust off my sneakers, make a walking plan for this Spring, and start moving!

I just picked up His Name is George Floyd by Robert Samuels (Viking, 2022) from my library. It’s a Pulitzer Prize winner and a finalist for National Book Award. I’m sure it will be informative, well-researched, and probably bring to the front of my brain all the difficult emotions we all felt on May 25, 2020. I’ll let you know.
                                    —- Be curious! (and prepared)

    “Space junk is junk in space, like in orbit around the earth. Pieces that break off of satellites, or the Space Station, or rocket boosters. Nuts, bolts, astronauts’ gloves.”
    “Can any of it crash to Earth?”
            …
    “I don’t know,” I say honestly.
                                               from Every Soul a Star 
                                                written by Wendy Mass 
                     Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2008

     They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but what about space debris (junk, to you and me)? According to the European Space Agency (ESA) quoted in The Naples Daily News, there is less than a 1 in 100 billion chance that an individual human being will get hit…[in] any given year.
    Space science, and NASA in particular, are full of acronyms and I just learned a new one: LEO. It stands for Low Earth Orbit. It has become an orbital space junkyard, literally. Millions of pieces of flying space junk are orbiting our Earth at up to 18,000 miles per hour. That’s faster than a speeding bullet, almost seven times faster.  
    Thousands of rockets and satellites used for television and radio transmission, internet access, and military operations surround us. And according to NASA, between 10 and 20 more are launched each year. At the end of their useful lives, the satellites continue to orbit. But they are useless, dead. Eventually, gravity will bring most of them back to Earth where they usually burn up as they plunge through our atmosphere. But not always. Sometimes they remain in space like the more than 34,000 objects slightly larger than a softball that are orbiting right now. That doesn’t sound like much but the total weight tops 9,000 metric tons (roughly, the weight of 10 American Bison or 10 full-grown Polar Bears). 
    The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, a department of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) tracks between 200 and 400 objects every year. About an object a day enters Earth’s atmosphere. Every day. Most (they estimate about 70%) will fall into the ocean or in a sparsely populated region. And most of them do, so it’s a numbers game, essentially. 
    But don’t tell that to Alejandro Otero. He lives in Naples, Florida, and claims that last month (March, 2024) a 2-pound chunk of a lithium-ion battery crashed through his roof and two floors of his home, missing his young son by only one room.
    About three years ago (January, 2021) astronauts aboard the International Space Station tossed a pallet of used batteries overboard to free up some room. Ars Technica reported that NASA had given the go-ahead after they determined the batteries would “harmlessly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.” 
    This “harmless object” is in NASA’s hands now. The Naples Daily News reported on April 3, 2024, that NASA will analyze it at the Kennedy Space Center “to determine its origin.” 
    We’ll have to wait for their results.    
    In an article for the Natural History Museum (UK), we’re reassured that the greatest danger posed by all this space junk is not its risk to space exploration. It’s not even the chance of damage to humans on Earth, or our buildings, or our natural areas. Its greatest danger is collision with other satellites already in orbit. All satellites including the ISS, where human earthlings actually live, need to perform avoidance maneuvers to avoid being potentially damaged or destroyed due to a hit. Even the tiniest bit of debris, traveling at its extraordinarily high speed, can crack the windows on the ISS. Here's an article with an illustration of what all that junk looks like. 
    While no international laws control the amount or make-up of space junk, NASA developed the Orbital Debris Program in Houston at the Johnson Space Center in 1979. Scientists there are looking for ways to create less orbital debris while they track and remove the junk already orbiting. But it’s expensive. Some ideas involve magnets, some giant nets. 
    In a collaboration with a Japanese company, the US will launch a tiny biodegradable satellite. The wooden devise was built of magnolia wood. Experiments carried out on the ISS showed it is very stable and resistant to cracking. The point is to replace the metal being used now which contributes not only to the mass of space junk but also the chemical make up of our atmosphere that results from the burn caused during re-entry.
    In experiments aboard the ISS, the wood did not suffer disintegration. There’s no oxygen in space to cause the wood to burn, and there are no living creatures to cause it to rot.
    And even as LEO junk continues to orbit and continues to be a space hazard, we Earthlings have begun to leave litter, debris, trash, junk on the moon. And now we are exploring Mars. 
    Space junk is everyone’s problem and demands a solution that involves all players. Twenty countries currently have space programs. Some are more active than others, but all share the responsibility to at least keep the problem from getting worse.
    The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) has set up international guidelines, but, it is difficult and expensive to eliminate old spacecraft. Objects, especially the very small ones are hard to find and track and there is a huge amount of them. Then, there’s the issue of property rights. A country can’t dispose of a satellite or rocket that belongs to another country without their permission, even if it found and tracked.
    I’m not finished with this topic; I am still learning how big a problem it is. I'll try for another post in time for Earth Day, April 22.  
    Thanks for listening!

I’m re-reading Rebecca by Daphne DeMurier (first American edition: Doubleday Doran and Company, 1938). The book has sold almost 3,00,000 copies and has never gone out of print. It won the National Book Award in 1938.
    When a young, naïve employee visits Monte Carlo with her wealthy American employer, she is fascinated and charmed by Maxim de Winter, a wealthy English widower. They marry after a short courtship and move back to his home, Manderley. The narrator is unprepared for the social life she is thrust into and dominated by Maxim’s head housekeeper. It’s a Gothic mystery, a love story, and a young woman coming-of-age placed in a setting that feels alive, with characters that seem to live and breathe as they interact with each other. 
    Don’t miss this one.
    It doesn’t happen often, but the Hitchcock film starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier is as good as the book. It won the Oscar for best picture in 1941.
                                  Be curious! (and keep looking up)

Totality will only *last for a little over three minutes, and while that’s a pretty solid duration for an eclipse, it’s not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.
                                            from Every Soul a Star 
                                             written by Wendy Mass 
                  Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2008
                             *for me, two minutes and 32 seconds

    On August 21, 2017, the moon’s shadow blocked about 80% of the sun in my part of Ohio. This maximum coverage was reached at 2:33 pm, and I was watching. With my protective glasses in my pocket, I walked across the street where our local university’s astronomy department had set up telescopes. 
    An epically long line was growing by the moment, so I queued up. I knew I could just look up and see the phenomenon of my life, so, after several minutes in line, I asked the person next to me what we were waiting for. Special glasses, I was told.
    Well, imagine that! I was pre-prepared! I stepped out of line and headed for the telescopes. What looked to me like a grad student explained that the image in the telescope would appear upside down. I don’t remember why, but sure enough, it was true. I watched a dark crescent shape begin its journey, PacMan-like, across the sun’s surface. I did not stay at the telescope for the hour and a half it took to make its way toward the 80% obscuration and then the other hour and a half till the sun fully shone again. 
    I watched for a while. I lay back on the grass and had a magnificent view. Lots of people were there, but there was plenty of room for everyone.
    Granted, 80% is not even remotely close to totality, but I was pretty excited even at that partial eclipse.
    The next eclipse will be totally different for me, though. I’m lucky to live very close to the path of totality. I can travel just several miles to see the moon’s shadow obliterate the sun for two minutes and 32 seconds. 
    I tried to find out in my own over-simplified way what will happen one week from today, April 8, 2024.
    There are times when the moon, in its orbit around Earth, passes between Earth and the sun during Earth’s own orbit around the sun.
    When the moon, and Earth are in perfect alignment with the sun as they continue to travel around and around each other, an eclipse can occur. It is the shadow of the moon as it crosses between Earth and the sun that causes the sun to become eclipsed. From the Ancient Greek, ekleipsis, the sun is briefly blotted out.   
    This link will take you to a diagram drawn by NASA.
         https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/solar-eclipse-diagram/ 
    Here’s the rest of the explanation from Every Soul a Star quoted at the top of this post.
    “The only reason we can see an eclipse is because the moon and the sun happen to look the exact same size from earth. But really, the moon is 400 times smaller. It’s just that coincidentally, the sun is 400 times as far away as the moon, so they look the same size to us.”
    Wendy Mass continues, “[a]n eclipse can only happen when the moon is in the new moon phase, when we can’t see the sun reflecting off of it. So it’s like looking for something invisible.”
    The moon’s orbit around Earth causes it to sometimes come between the sun and Earth. As the moon travels around Earth, the sun lights up different portions of it. From Earth, it looks like the moon waxes and wanes, but really what we see is the sun shining on different parts of the moon's surface.             
    When the moon is between the sun and Earth, it seems like the moon has disappeared. It’s during this New Moon phase, when the moon is out there but we can’t see it, that the shadow cast by the sun onto the moon makes it seem invisible. Because the moon’s orbit around Earth is tilted relative to Earth’s orbit around the sun, the New Moon phase usually passes below or above the sun and its shadow misses Earth.
    It’s those few times when their perfect alignment causes a solar eclipse, and fewer times still, when the path of the eclipse passes directly over where I’ll be able to see its totality (for two minutes and 32 seconds).
    At the approach of totality, a few stunning, unforgettable displays might be observed.
    First, the partial eclipse, the sun will look like a crescent shape is moving over it.
    Next, you might be able to see Shadow Bands, quick-moving and faint, dark and light bands appear on sides of buildings and on the ground. They’re caused by the same turbulence of Earth’s upper atmosphere that makes stars twinkle.
    Bailey’s Beads become visible as the moon makes its final pass across the sun. Several points of light shine around the moon’s edges, showing the irregularities of the moon’s surface.. Look sharp, though. They are very short-lived. If you sneeze, you’ll miss them!
    They’ll begin to disappear until only a single bright spot is left. A tiny edge of the sun appears like a diamond behind the moon’s shadow. It glows just as the corona is beginning to come into view.
    When the diamond ring disappears, we’ll have achieved totality. It is safe to remove your safety glasses for the tiny amount of time the sun is covered by the moon’s shadow. Look around. Did different stars “come out”? Did birds stop singing? Did it drop a few degrees? 
    Then get those glasses on again as soon as the sun re-appears and watch the whole process in reverse!

In Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall (Atria Books, 2022), the author exposes the importance of an underground network of women, the Janes. Through intertwined narratives of three women in three different decades since the 1960s, the effect on women and their babies of adoption by coercion, the need for a woman be allowed to consult with her doctor regarding her own health, and society’s changing views of pregnancy and childbirth are examined. While Marshall has slighted some important aspects of women’s health, I was emotionally engaged with the characters and their stories. 
        -—Be curious! (and look for the silver ~or golden~ lining)