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Camano Island, WA

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

It's stars versus dust in the Carina Nebula and the stars are winning. More precisely, the energetic light and winds from massive newly formed stars are evaporating and dispersing the dusty stellar nurseries in which they formed. Located in the Carina Nebula and known informally as Mystic Mountain, these pillar's appearance is dominated by the dark dust even though it is composed mostly of clear hydrogen gas. Dust pillars such as these are actually much thinner than air and only appear as mountains due to relatively small amounts of opaque interstellar dust. About 7,500 light-years distant, the featured image was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and highlights an interior region of Carina which spans about three light years. Within a few million years, the stars will likely win out completely and the entire dust mountain will evaporate.

I waited on
In the late autumn moonlight,
A train droning out of thought—

The mind on moonlight
And on trains.

Blind as a thread of water
Stirring through a cold like dust,
Lonely beyond all silence

And humming this to children,
The nostalgic listeners in sleep,

Because no guardian
Strides through distance upon distance,
His eyes a web of sleep.

Yvor Winters, (1900 - 1968), was an American poet, literary critic and professor. Winters was the author of many books. He married the poet and novelist Janet Lewis in 1926. He was awarded the 1961 Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems. Read more

“The Moonlight” was published in Secession no. 7 (Winter, 1924).This poem is in the public domain.

André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869 - 1951)  French author known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works. He authored more than fifty books and he was the winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy and became a prolific writer at an early age. He published his first novel, "The Notebooks of André Walter" (French: Les Cahiers d'André Walter), at the age of twenty-one.

When night arrived,
the Sun slid
into the sea.
I was looking
for you, as
you looked for me.
It was then
I noticed you,
all decked out,
with a new Beau.

A line up
of walkers,
with wheels,
at the dining area,
are awaiting,
the evening meal.
Unlike Pavlov's dog,
no bells,
but attendants,
will knock on
their door, saying,
"Dinner".

Red was the Fox,
scurrying on the ground,
trying to escape from
pursuit by a hound.
The Fox, was sly
as a fox can be,
thought," I can hide,
you'll never find me,
under a log."
Hidden, up tight,
the Fox stayed hidden,
to avoid having to fight.
After the hound passed by,
he came out of hiding,
for as a Fox, he was sly.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Why does this galaxy have a ring of bright blue stars? Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). A popular target for Earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of view spans about 7,000 light-years across M94's central region. The featured close-up highlights the galaxy's compact, bright nucleus, prominent inner dust lanes, and the remarkable bluish ring of young massive stars. The ring stars are all likely less than 10 million years old, indicating that M94 is a starburst galaxy that is experiencing an epoch of rapid star formation from inspiraling gas. The circular ripple of blue stars is likely a wave propagating outward, having been triggered by the gravity and rotation of a oval matter distributions. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can better explore details of its starburst ring.

I missed the season.
A season now gone.
T'was supposed to be Spring,
but it passed us by,
with little rain,
except for the tears cried.

Saratoga Passage. WA

"Proteins are the building blocks of life, chains of amino acids that can twist and bend into a mind-boggling variety of shapes. Last year, DeepMind AI cracked a 50-year-old problem of protein folding and published the protein structures for 20 species – including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans. Now, it's Alphafold AI has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200M proteins.... .. AI is paving the way for the development of new medicines or technologies to tackle global challenges such as famine or pollution" Read more
Image Credit: DeepMind

It makes me worry,
when it does appear.
A Medic One vehicle,
appears in my rear-view mirror.
The siren wasn't working.
flashing lights were near,
so I stepped on the gas
to get the heck out of here.