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William Orville Douglas (1898 – 1980) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States for 36 years from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views and as a strong defender of the First Amendment. Born in Maine, Minnesota, Douglas moved west with his family to California and then to Yakima, Washington after the death of his father. He chaired  the Securities and Exchange Commission before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is the longest-serving justice in history to date.

Quote Source: Douglas delivered this message in a talk to the Authors Guild Council in New York on December 3, 1951. He received the 1951 Lauterbach Award for his defense of civil liberties at the event, according to the American Library Association. 

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How were these unusual Martian spherules created? Thousands of unusual gray spherules made of iron and rock and dubbed blueberries were found embedded in and surrounding rocks near the landing site of the robot Opportunity rover on Mars in 2004. To help investigate their origin, Opportunity found a surface dubbed the Berry Bowl with an indentation that was rich in the Martian orbs. The Berry Bowl is pictured here, imaged during rover's 48th Martian day. The average size of a Martian blueberry rock is only about 4 millimeters across. By analyzing a circular patch in the rock surface to the left of the densest patch of spherules, Opportunity obtained data showing that the underlying rock has a much different composition than the hematite rich blueberries. This information contributes to the growing consensus that these small, strange, gray orbs were slowly deposited from a bath of dirty water. APOD Turns 30!: Free Public Lecture in Cork, Ireland on Tuesday, June 24 at 7 pm

This stained glass window located in the Basilica of St. James and St. Agnes, a church in Nysa, Poland, depicts angels adoring the sacred host and wine during an epiclesis to the Holy Spirit, represented as a dove. Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi, which is observed as a religious celebration in much of Western Christianity and as a public holiday in various nations.

Pudelek (Marcin Szala), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

         Sufficient
Citron, pomegranate,
     Apricot, and peach,
  Flutter of apple-blows
     Whiter than the snow,
  Filling the silence
     With their leafy speech,
  Budding and blooming
     Down row after row.

Breaths of blown spices,
     Which the meadows yield,
  Blossoms broad-petaled,
     Starry buds and small;
  Gold of the hill-sides,
     Purple of the field,
  Waft to my nostrils
     Their fragrance, one and all.

Birds in the tree-tops,
     Birds that fill the air,
  Trilling, piping, singing,
     In their merry moods, —
  Gold wing and brown wing,
     Flitting here and here,
  To the coo and chirrup
     Of their downy broods.

What grace has summer
     Better that can suit?
  What gift can autumn
     Bring us more to please?
  Red of blown roses,
     Mellow tints of fruit,
  Never can be fairer,
     Sweeter than are these.

Ina Donna Coolbrith  (1841 – 1928) American poet, writer and librarian. She was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state. Born Josephine Donna Smith, she was the niece of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She left the Mormon community as a child to enter her teens in Los Angeles, California, where she began to publish poetry. She later made her home in San Francisco, where she formed the "Golden Gate Trinity". with writers Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard. Her poetry received positive notice from critics and established poets such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
This poem is in the public domain.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sure, that figure-8 shaped curve you get when you mark the position of the Sun in Earth's sky at the same time each day over one year is called an analemma. On the left, Earth's figure-8 analemma was traced by combining wide-angle digital images recorded during the year from December 2011 through December 2012. But the shape of an analemma depends on the eccentricity of a planet's orbit and the tilt of its axis of rotation, so analemma curves can look different for different worlds. Take Mars for example. The Red Planet's axial tilt is similar to Earth's, but its orbit around the same sun is more eccentric (less circular) than Earth's orbit. As seen from the Martian surface, the analemma traced in the right hand panel is shaped more like a tear drop. The Mars rover Opportunity captured the images used over the Martian year corresponding to Earth dates July 2006 to June 2008. Of course, each world's solstice dates still lie at the top and bottom of their different analemma curves. The last Mars northern summer solstice was May 29, 2025. Our fair planet's 2025 northern summer solstice is at June 21, 2:42 UTC.

Photo by Tunc Tezel

"In an ideal world, getting medical care should be straightforward: You work with your doctor to figure out what ails you, then your doctor recommends a treatment that addresses the problem",........"Increasingly, insurance companies are using AI algorithms to decide which healthcare treatments to cover....."These coverage algorithms are a total black box – companies refuse to reveal how they work, often claiming they are trade secrets". More

European Table Tennis Championships in the Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle as part of the European Championships 2022 in Munich: Timo Boll, Germany.

Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

dmonton, Alberta, Canada, planet Earth lies on the horizon. in this stack of panoramic composite images. In a monthly time series arranged vertically top to bottom the ambitious photographic project follows the annual north-south swing of sunrise points, from June solstice to December solstice and back again. It also follows the corresponding, but definitely harder to track, Full Moon rise. Of course, the north-south swing of moonrise runs opposite sunrise along the horizon. But these rising Full Moons also span a wider range on the horizon than the sunrises. That's because the well-planned project (as shown in this video) covers the period June 2024 to June 2025, centered on a major lunar standstill. Major lunar standstills represent extremes in the north-south range of moonrise driven by the 18.6 year precession period of the lunar orbit.

Photo by Luca Vanzella