Contributor Posts

"At the turn of the 20th century, photographer Lewis Wickes Hine documented the working conditions of America’s children ... His images of soot-covered, cotton-picking, newspaper-lugging boys and girls are a big reason Congress went on to pass a series of child labor laws.... Today, the U.S. Department of Labor finds itself under fire for failing to enforce child labor laws, with reports emerging of an unaccounted underclass of child workers. ...  they tend to be Central American immigrants. But they, too, are performing hazardous jobs in America’s factories and fields. More at The Conversation ➜

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What if you could see out to the edge of the observable universe? You would see galaxies, galaxies, galaxies, and then, well, quasars, which are the bright centers of distant galaxies. To expand understanding of the very largest scales that humanity can see, a map of the galaxies and quasars found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey from 2000 to 2020 -- out to near the edge of the observable universe -- has been composed. Featured here, one wedge from this survey encompasses about 200,000 galaxies and quasars out beyond a look-back time of 12 billion years and cosmological redshift 5. Almost every dot in the nearby lower part of the illustration represents a galaxy, with redness indicating increasing redshift and distance. Similarly, almost every dot on the upper part represents a distant quasar, with blue-shaded dots being closer than red. Clearly shown among many discoveries, gravity between galaxies has caused the nearby universe to condense and become increasingly more filamentary than the distant universe. More Detailed Maps: Related to Today's APOD

Photo by B. Ménard & N. Shtarkman; Data: SDSS, Planck, JHU, Sloan, NASA, ESA

The day prior to ,
the night before,
was yesterday,
or the day
before yesterday.
Oh, the sorrow,
no tomorrow.

Emotions, gone crazy,
feeling mildly depressed.
A sadness I can't explain.

I hypothesize, it's my wife's
continuing fight with Alzheimer
disease. Not sure, there is no
conscious thought. It's
"the woe is me" syndrome. I
need to shake it off, as it is
a very unpleasant feeling.

Sitting in a bar, in Pendleton,
at the Silver Saddle Saloon,
when the door opens, and a man
rides a horse, into the room.

Now, a horse doesn't know how
to walk gently through a room
with tables and chairs, so
those items began to tumble,
all over the floor. The customers
scattered, to get away.

The horse kept on walking,
disappearing out the side door.
Patrons returned, set up the tables
and chairs, as if this were a regular
occurrence.
It was.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

It seemed like the sky exploded. The original idea was to photograph an aurora over a waterfall. After waiting for hours under opaque clouds, though, hope was running out. Others left. Then, unexpectedly, the clouds moved away. Suddenly, particles from a large solar magnetic storm were visible impacting the Earth's upper atmosphere with full effect. The night sky filled with colors and motion in a thrilling auroral display. Struggling to steady the camera from high Earthly winds, the 34 exposures that compose the featured image were taken. The resulting featured composite image shows the photogenic Godafoss (Goðafoss) waterfall in northern Iceland in front of a very active aurora in late February. The solar surface explosion that expelled the energetic particles occurred a few days before. Our Sun is showing an impressive amount of surface activity as it approaches solar maximum, indicating that more impressive auroras are likely to appear in Earth's northern and southern sky over the next few years.

Photo by Cari Letelier

Forlorn the land,
Forlorn my mind.
So much wasteland,
too much one kind.

Re-live the memories
of our yesterdays.
I can remember,
yours are gone away.

May your warts,
began to grow
until you're covered,
from head to toe.

When the Sun slowly rises
from the mountains in the East,
it is the magic time for,
man, child, or beast.

No other time in this life
will ever be the best,
except when the Sun sets,
in the Pacific Northwest.

Lifes challenges, as we go
through many doorways,
down those uncertain paths,
leads us to our future.
Remember you can always
change your path and directions.

Wander off
this path in life,
missing not your
lovely wife.

I miss her,
every day.
Hard to believe
she's gone away.

The mental aspect
of today,
her mind is gone,
her body stays.