Gleanings of the Week Ending July 14, 2012

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article:

Way out in a barren Chilean desert, the biggest telescope ever made is taking shape - Photos from the construction of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array

High-Tech Tools Give Researchers New View Of Yellowstone Thermal Features - Thermal maps of popular areas within the park

Electricity Storage - Wow - there are a lot of new ways out there and the idea of ‘storage’ of electricity implies a more robust infrastructure for reliable power than we have now

12 stats that matter to digital publishing - the number of people reading electronically rather than from paper is growing….and what/how they read is changing too

Heron Cam 2012 Highlights - All 5 have fledged from the Sapsucker Woods nest!

Scientific History and the Lessons for Today's Emerging Ideas -  A look back at what was happening in the 1890-1910 time period…lots of theories…some are threads to current theories, others are on the trash heap

Bridges for Animals - All around the world…this is an idea being tried to reduce road kill on highways

The 10 most pristine places on earth - none are in the US

Yama no sachi - A Japanese book from 1765. Read it on the Internet Archive. Use page down (or up) to browse through the book. It has illustrations of flowers, insects, and animals. My favorites are the peony (at right) and the poppy.

Drought leads to declaration of natural disaster in 26 US states - That’s more than half the states!

Quote of the Day - 1/18/2012

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Freedom is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. - Viktor E. Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning

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The quote today was written by a concentration camp survivor. The book was originally published in the 1950s. It provides historical examples from that time period but the conclusions are still very relevant today.

Here are some tangents my thoughts took:

  • The connotation for freedom is overwhelmingly positive, whereas anarchy is scary. Is it because we associate responsibleness with freedom but not with anarchy?
  • Law and regulations bound freedoms in modern society. Aren’t they in place to define responsible behavior? What if the bounds themselves seem arbitrary? What if they trend toward benefiting the few at the expense of the many?
  • Do we assume that everyone has a similar understanding of responsible behavior and - therefore - there is no need to overtly talk about it as much as we talk about our desire for freedom?

 

Quote of the Day - 1/15/2012

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You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. - CS Lewis

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I resonate with this quote…particularly on a cold winter’s day. My ‘cup’ is an insulated mug and quite large…but I still get up to refill it periodically. The book is a big fat one I bought used. I have a shelf of them that I am working my way through slowly since the majority of my reading is now done electronically (Kindle Fire or PC ). Still - the feel of a book…turning the pages…knowing there are more good ones near at hand - it’s something to look forward to and then savor. The location has changed over the years until now my favorite “cup of tea with book” times are spent in front of an east facing window in a comfy rocker.

Favorite activities are sometimes transitory during our lives but not this one - or at least that is true for me and, I suspect, CS Lewis. How about for you? 

Quote of the Day 1/12/2012

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“Calories don’t count if they’re connected to a celebration. Everyone knows this.” - Janet Evanovich, Hard Eight

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Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels are fun reads (or listens…Hard Eight keep me alert, and sometimes laughing, as I drove long hours on my recent road trip). While being entertained by these books, sometimes there is a sentence that just stands out - one that resonates with your own sometimes convoluted logic. The quote today is one of those points of resonance for me.

Great food is a key component to every celebration for me and my family. From November to mid-January there seems to be something to celebrate: birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, wedding anniversaries, the New Year. Every year I brace myself to gain a little weight during the holidays but I don’t ever follow through to forego any of the treats. My rationalization is exactly “Calories don’t count if they’re connected to a celebration.”

Logically I know that they do count - so maybe my philosophy is really “Don’t worry about calories connected to a celebration” which could lead to carefully defining “celebration” and thereby escaping the holidays without added weight (note to self  - think about next November).

Books of the Week: Mignon Eberhart mid-20th Century Mystery Novels

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Mignon G. Eberhart wrote mysteries from 1920s to the 1980s. The reason I like them is not so much for the mystery (they are passable…not fabulous) but rather for the snippet of time and place each one represents:

 

  • Escape the Night - California in the 1940s during World War II
  • Fair Warning - 1930s - the relationship of men and women after the roaring 20s and before World War II
  • Family Affair - 1980s when US embassies are being overrun
  • Five Passengers from Lisbon - 1940s right after the end of World War II on a hospital ship crossing the Atlantic between Lisbon and Buenos Aires
  • Run Scared - political candidate potential impacted by his wife’s actions in the 1960s
  • Wolf in Man's Clothing – young men going off to war in the early part of World War II in the 1940s

 

Most of these are out of print to they are to be found among the used books. I’ve provided links to Amazon. Escape the Night and Five Passengers from Lisbon can be obtained from the Internet Archive. They are also available from Paperback Swap.