Caden Howlett

NASA Artemis

Elegant recent image from JWST. An edge-on view of protoplanetary disk IRAS 04302, located ~525 light years from Earth. There are planets actively forming within that light. A shaking thought that there are many trillion similar strewn throughout the known universe.

God dont lie.
No, said the judge. He does not.
And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.

—Judge Holden during his geology lesson in Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy.

“Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.”

--Virginia Woolf, 16 March 1926

I found these colonial (slides 1–2) and solitary (slide 3) rugose corals on a hike yesterday. They’re about 340 million years old. I read a cool article (slide 4) about how rugose corals were used to confirm that Earth’s rotation has slowed over time (i.e., a day on earth was shorter in the past).

Over geologic time scales, nanosecond changes unnoticeable in a human lifetime add up to months. In the 60s, this guy Dr. John Wells counted daily growth lines within annual bands (“annulations”) in Paleozoic corals. He found that there were about 400 daily bands per year during the Paleozoic. That is, 400 days per year.

I love my mom

This morning at 330am EST, the fully private Blue Ghost Mission successfully landed on the Moon. The lander carries a suite of NASA science and technology payloads including instruments aiming to test and demonstrate lunar subsurface drilling technology, regolith sample collection capabilities, radiation tolerant computing, and lunar dust mitigation methods.
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Image credit:

One yr today since L&S was published. Thanks to many for supporting. The book is available at link on my page.