Winter Continues…

My greeting of Spring 2008 back in mid-January now seems a bit premature, although note that I did qualify my statements by saying, “We still have plenty of opportunity for winter weather but…”.  Since then we have had the coldest, snowiest, and wintry mixiest weather of the winter.  We could we see some improvement in March…

When the sun comes out one can be lulled into thinking that it is beautiful weather…but it is only a beautiful scene.

Signature in the Snow

So much is hidden from us.  Lives lived out of our sight.  Survival in the nature relies on stealth and hiding. 

So it is a gift when we come upon a sign left behind during the night or at least when we weren’t looking.  This morning it was the signature of a large bird signed in the snow with wing and tail feathers.  I suspected a barred owl or red-tailed hawk but admit that it could have been a lowly crow.  These signatures are usually accompanied by a spot of blood and a little fluff or fur but I didn’t see any of those this time.  There were some tracks nearby that I ignored at the time which might have been left by the predator or the prey…I was too mesmerized by this beautiful pattern in the snow to look at them.

I found an old Joni Mitchell album yesterday

I found an old Joni Mitchell album yesterday that I didn’t know I had.  I think my son bought it in a pile of records from somewhere years ago.  I didn’t listen to Joni Mitchell much when I was young but I really like her music now.  As I listened to this newly discovered album, I started to get choked up; Music does that to me sometimes.

Her songs are about wealth, love, dreams, disappointment, and people you meet along the way…stories of the human condition.  As I listened, I thought about how they came out of a simpler time.  Upon a little reflection I realized, though, that today’s world isn’t really that much different from the world of 30 to 40 years ago.

• We had an unpopular war back then.  There were atrocities.
• I lost my first job after graduate school when the company was bought out and the new owner closed the plant.
• We had a President sick with the arrogance of power too.
• There were greedy corporations and the military-industrial complex.
• The “Church” had problems.  We just didn’t know about them yet.
• We had an energy crisis in 1973. 
• There were drugs and alcohol.
• We knew about environmental problems back then too.

It is the same broken world.  There are just more of us breaking it now.  We still have the possibilities of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation that Christ showed to us 2000 years ago.  Why are those so difficult?  What would a Christian response after 9/11 have looked like?  What would the world be like today if we had chosen it?  What if it was our shared goal in this world for everyone to have enough, but not too much?

Music of the Spheres — Part II

A little over two weeks ago, I wrote about the Music of the Spheres and the then upcoming Solar Eclipse.  That event took place at the New Moon near its ascending node where it passed through the ecliptic plane from south to north.  Tonight, the Full Moon, half way around its orbit from that event, passes through the ecliptic from north to south, at its descending node.  The result tonight is a very beautiful, copper colored lunar eclipse.  It is clear and cold in Ohio tonight.  During mid eclipse the stars were bright against the blue-black sky.

Eclipses, particularly the lunar variety, always instill some sense of ancient mystery in me.  This celestial dance, choreographed by gravity, mass, and momentum, beyond any human control or influence, plays out as it has time after time, in complete silence, since the beginning.  As I stood there in the cold quiet of the evening, watching the moon move along its orbit and into the shadow of the earth, I couldn’t help but feel a connection to people in the distant past who also watched the moon turn red. 

Homo sapiens as Invasive Species

I am not a “tree hugger” but I am an environmentalist.  I am a proponent of responsible and mindful living. 

So what is the owner of this once beautiful hillside doing?  He is selling it for fill so that commercial buildings can be built in the floodplain…

Our economy, our lifestyle, is built on decisions like this…

Have you ever seen the film Koyaanisqatsi?

Ice on the pond

This evening as I walked the dog down by the pond I noticed new textures on the ice on the pond.  It was cold last night…0 deg F, and didn’t get much above 15 deg today.  The ice was clear and smooth in places, covered with intricate crystals in others, and in one spot, water had flowed onto it and frozen.

Ice is cool in more ways than one…

Bread

I have been baking one or two loaves of bread a week since the first of the year.  I have discovered, like many others have, that this simple act has changed the way I think about food…and about life.  Mixing the simple ingredients…flour, salt, yeast, and water.  Waiting for the yeast to work.  Holding the raw dough in your own hands.  Committing it to the heat of the oven.  The aroma of baking bread.  Slicing through the crunchy, chestnut colored crust.  The sharing of bread at the table.

This ancient food, one of the defining hallmarks of civilization, is now so taken for granted.  Just another food product, produced by machines in some distant factory, each loaf identical to the next, wrapped in a plastic bag with the expiration date on the closure tab, fully stocked on the shelves of the grocery store or quick stop.

I am grateful for the time I have had to slow down and bake bread for our table.  I am grateful too, for the connection that bread makes with our own humanity, across many cultures and generations. 

I am thankful for bread.

The Music of the Spheres

music of the spheres
n.
A perfectly harmonious music, inaudible on the earth, thought by Pythagoras and later classical and medieval philosophers to be produced by the movement of celestial bodies.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

I could hear the music of the spheres this week.  Early in the week Venus was high above Jupiter in the morning sky.  A few days later on Sunday morning, Venus was below Jupiter.  The rapid apparent motion was due to the relative positions of the Earth, Venus, and Jupiter in their orbits.  Sunday morning the waning crescent Moon was off to the west, moving eastward along its orbit toward its renewing rendezvous with the Sun.  This evening as I looked at the photograph I took and with thought of those orbits in my mind, I rotated the photograph until a line between Venus and Jupiter was approximately horizontal.  The orbits of these two planets are inclined only slightly (Venus 3.4 deg and Jupiter 1.3 deg) to the ecliptic plane, the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, so now the picture is oriented roughly to the ecliptic.  I sketched in a portion of Venus’ orbit as it passed by Jupiter.

This picture is looking generally in the direction we are moving around the Sun.  At dawn our meridian is like the hood ornament on an old car speeding along.  So right now Venus is out in front of us. 

With the horizon now tilted in the photograph, is it easier to imagine yourself on the surface of a huge ball instead of a flat Earth?

The Moon’s orbit is inclined a little more (5.1 deg) to the ecliptic.  This month is special in regard to the Moon’s orbit…it is “eclipse season”.  If you think of the Moon’s orbit as a circle inclined to the plane of the ecliptic you will notice that the circle intersects the plane at two points.  These points are called nodes, the ascending node where the Moon moves through the ecliptic from south to north and the descending node where it dives back from north to south.  These nodes are not stationary but precess around the earth.  Eclipse season occurs when the nodes precess around to a region near the line between the Earth and the Sun.  There will be an annular solar eclipse in just a few days on Feb 7th.  I have sketched in the Moon’s orbit pointing toward the Sun, somewhere to the left below the horizon.  You can see that the Moon is below the ecliptic so it will be at its ascending node on the 7th.

Can you hear that beautiful music?

The Skeptic’s Curve

I ran across this curve or something close to it on the internet a few years ago when I was looking for biodiversity information.  It was at the end of a report describing a computer model for fish populations in the North Atlantic if I remember right.  The authors were acknowledging that their model did not accurately predict fish populations but that it still had value in helping to understand the complex interaction of the many factors that control them.  Unfortunately, I lost the url so I can’t give credit to the author.  I like the illustration but with a slightly different interpretation.

The “Skeptic’s Curve” title is mine.  I think that a healthy sense of skepticism is good as long as it is not expressed in a mean, cruel, or negative way.  A lot of ideas have merit but almost none are perfect.  Even bad ideas can have some value, if only to identify a problem that needs a solution…but another one.

The curve is dynamic.  The shape shown is often a good starting point but as you think about most ideas, the curve usually skews one way or the other…sometimes sharply.  The first question I used to ask myself when I would come up with a novel, really creative solution to a problem at work was, “Ok.  If this is such a great idea, why don’t I see it implemented everywhere?”  There was usually a good reason but every once in a while I turned out a pretty good idea.  Our culture looks down on this kind of questioning, whether of your own idea or of someone else’s, as waffling, as not being a “team player”, as lacking in commitment, confidence, or loyalty, or as just plain weak.  Or the worst of all…”middle of the road”. 

 I think we are all better served by asking questions…the world is, after all, a pretty complex place.