Magazine Posts

Why must I live today
when my love, my life
has gone astray?
I am missing my wife
as she used to be,
when we were all happy
and were always free
to share our memories
of what life was to be,
based upon all we knew,
the love of you and me.

A painful but true Russian joke tweeted by Garry Kasparov earlier this year:  http://twitter.com/Kasparov63

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Where do stars form? One place, star forming regions known as "EGGs", are being uncovered at the end of this giant pillar of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (M16). Short for evaporating gaseous globules, EGGs are dense regions of mostly molecular hydrogen gas that fragment and gravitationally collapse to form stars. Light from the hottest and brightest of these new stars heats the end of the pillar and causes further evaporation of gas and dust -- revealing yet more EGGs and more young stars. This featured picture was created from exposures spanning over 30 hours with the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, and digitally processed with modern software by experienced volunteers in Argentina. Newborn stars will gradually destroy their birth pillars over the next 100,000 years or so -- if a supernova doesn't destroy them first.

Pi Day π (pi) is observed on March 14 (3/14 in the month/day format) since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant digits of π. Pi (π) Day has become an international holiday, celebrated live and online all around the world. 

What is π anyway? Divide any circle’s circumference by its diameter; the answer (whether for a plate or a planet) is always approximately 3.14, a number represented with the Greek letter π. Mathematicians have been calculating π’s digits with more and more accuracy and have discover they go on literally forever, with no pattern.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Why would the sky glow like a giant repeating rainbow? Airglow. Now air glows all of the time, but it is usually hard to see. A disturbance however -- like an approaching storm -- may cause noticeable rippling in the Earth's atmosphere. These gravity waves are oscillations in air analogous to those created when a rock is thrown in calm water. Red airglow likely originates from OH molecules about 87-kilometers high, excited by ultraviolet light from the Sun, while orange and green airglow is likely caused by sodium and oxygen atoms slightly higher up. While driving near Keluke Lake in Qinghai Provence in China a few years ago, the photographer originally noticed mainly the impressive central band of the Milky Way Galaxy. Stopping to photograph it, surprisingly, the resulting sensitive camera image showed airglow bands to be quite prominent and span the entire sky. The featured image has been digitally enhanced to make the colors more vibrant.

Photo by Xiaohan Wang

The electrical chatter of our working memories reflects our uncertainty about their contents. Neuroscientific studies suggest that when we call up a memory to use it, our uncertainty about its accuracy is part of the recollection. Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Northern winter constellations and a long arc of the Milky Way are setting in this night skyscape looking toward the Pacific Ocean from Point Reyes on planet Earth's California coast. Sirius, alpha star of Canis Major, is prominent below the starry arc toward the left. Orion's yellowish Betelgeuse, Aldebaran in Taurus, and the blue tinted Pleiades star cluster also find themselves between Milky Way and northwestern horizon near the center of the scene. The nebulae visible in the series of exposures used to construct this panoramic view were captured in early March, but are just too faint to be seen with the unaided eye. On that northern night their expansive glow includes the reddish semi-circle of Barnard's Loop in Orion and NGC 1499 above and right of the Pleiades, also known as the California Nebula.

Photo by Dan Zafra

The most difficult part
in my life today,
is living apart,
when she asks me to stay.

Words written now
transform into glass,
no matter the lies,
the truth won't pass.

Inflation is high,
blame corporate greed,
as company profits rose,
with cost to all, in need.
Go back in history now,
time to manage the seed,
for raising prices hurts
the consumer. Yes, indeed.

Photo shared by Heather Cox Richardson from  Letters from an American

Shoot from the hip,
not the way to
write a new poem,
for the words are
rough as an
unpolished stone.
Words should flow
like water on glass
without hesitation
for you must know
it matters not about
you, it is more for
ending the show.

Forever is my love for you.
It doesn't matter what you do.
Just be there. I will too
as I think again of only you.