“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” Sylvia Plath

This is an image created from the  NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. It is of a spiral galaxy know as IC 5332 and it is about 30 million light years away in the constellation Sculptor. The detail is obtained by Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). It is a both a camera and a spectrograph on the telescope that sees light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Being able to “see” in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum with JWST allows astronomers to see the gaseous bone like structures of IC5332. This galaxy has been imaged before by Hubble, but the new images from JWST contain so many new details that they look almost completely different. See the image below from Hubble. If you would like to learn more please see these links: https://esawebb.org/images/potm2209a/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC_5332

Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST and PHANGS-HST Teams

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” Hunter S. Thompson

This is an image of the star known as Wolf-Rayet 124. The Wolf-Rayet stars are a heterogeneous set of stars with interesting spectra. They have broad emission lines of ionized helium and highly ionized nitrogen or carbon. The surface temperature with WR stars are very hot, in the range of 20,000K to 210,000K. These stars are named for the astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet. They discovered three of these stars in the constellation Cygnus, in 1867 at the Paris Observatory. This image was created using two instruments on the JWST, the MIRI and the Near-infrared Camera or (NIRCam). The white colored star shapes are diffraction spikes from the NIRCam. They are caused by the physical structure of the telescope itself. If you would like to learn more please see these links: https://esawebb.org/images/weic2307a/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf%E2%80%93Rayet_star

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

“Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we SEE the universe as having been designed just for us?” Michael Shermer

Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team.  Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt

This is an image of the “Phantom Galaxy” or M74. It was created by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. It is about 32 million light years from earth in the constellation Pisces. The camera used on Webb was the MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument). It has also been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. See the image below. M74 is a large spiral galaxy with well defined spiral arms. Due to it large size and it’s face-on orientation to earth it is a popular object for advanced amateur and professional astronomers to study. The name “phantom” comes from its faint surface brightness and can be difficult to spot in the night sky – hence the nickname phantom. This galaxy has been studied extensively due to the areas of bright star formation.

To learn more please see these links: https://esawebb.org/images/potm2208a/ and https://esahubble.org/images/potw2235a/ and Messier 74 – Wikipedia

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Kurt Vonnegut

HEY!! I AM LOOKING AT YOU!! THAT’S WHO!!

If you are reading this then you have continued to survive Covid 19 so far and so have I!! Yea again for both of us!!

As I started to write this blog post, the number of deaths and reported Covid cases has continued a slow decline. And that my friends is a very good thing. Of course there is one caveat to this trend. There is not a lot of “official reporting” here in the United States or in the rest of the world on Covid cases. So you have too look at the numbers with a healthy grain of salt so to speak. As the New York Times recently published:

“After more than three years of daily reporting of coronavirus data in the United States, the NYT is ending its Covid data gathering operation. This change was spurred by the declining availability of virus data from state and local health officials.”

Even the John Hopkins site has shut down for now. I usually post numbers in this section but not this time because I can’t get a good estimate of what is going on in the United States or the rest of the world for the most part. At the time of publishing this blog, there was a new variant taking hold in India, XBB.1.16. Unfortunately, at this time, there is not much more information to pass along.

Pretty interesting and not too surprising when you think about it. Giving accurate figures on the Corona virus, while not always good for the economy, it does help people to make informed decisions when it comes to their health and welfare. Remember, not everyone has your best interest in mind when “money” or “economics” comes into play.

If you are interested in more information from the remaining reliable sources please check out these links. I have included the CDC waste water reporting section. It gives the best estimate if Covid is increasing in your area: https://www.youtube.com/c/OsterholmUpdateCOVID19 and https://www.youtube.com/c/VincentRacaniello and https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/wastewater-surveillance/index.html

March was another good month for getting outdoors. The wind and weather patterns still held as in the previous month which made for great air quality. The temperatures were about average for this time of year and for the first part of the month there was not much snow or moisture. But by the end of the month, and two storms later, we were closer to the monthly average.

There is some concern among the weather people that we should prepare for a hotter summer again, as the La Nina pattern seems to be shifting over to an El Nino. The last two summers were some of the hottest on record and they occurred during a strong La Nina pattern. And this is a little troubling as La Nina weather tends to be much colder compared to the El Nino pattern. This could mean much hotter temperatures than what we saw in the last two years. And it might be a little bit wetter. This sounds good, but think of it this way with climate change: “Heat produces moisture, moisture produces storms, and heat and moisture combine to produce even more severe storms.”

So buckle up butter cup, we might be in for a wild ride this summer.

It was another great month for reading and I would like to share a few book recommendations.

The first book I would like to review and recommend is called “Hacking the Code of Life: How Gene Editing Will Rewrite Our Futures” by Nessa Carey.  I first heard about Nessa Carey while watching a YouTube video from the Royal Institution.  She was giving a lecture on Epigenetics.  The 40 minute video is from 2015 but is still relevant today.  If you interested check out this link: https://youtu.be/9DAcJSAM_BA

So after seeing her lecture, I thought she might have a book out there and sure enough she has several.  The field of genetics has changed in recent years with the advent of CRISPR and the amount of information that is now known about genetics and virology, so I got her most recent book, which is this one.  It was published in 2019 and is a great review of where we are at with genetics. 

I found her writing style much like her lecture on epigenetics.  Concise, understandable and to the point.  And in the process of explaining the science, she covers some of the moral, ethical and societal issues to give the reader a much boarder understanding of how genetic engineering will and has affected their lives.  This is a great book for those without a science or medical background.  

I listened to the book as an audiobook but it would work in any format.  You can probably find it at your local book store or on Amazon.  Here is the Amazon link:   https://a.co/d/f1WQFNJ  

The next book I would like to review and recommend is called “The Last Days of the Dinosaurs” by Riley Black.  First let me start off saying that Riley is a talented science writer that has been featured in publications like WIRED, National Geographic and Scientific American, etc.…   And besides this book, she has several more to her name.  If you’re interested she has a web site that will give you much more information on what she does and who she is: http://rileyblack.net/

I first heard about her when I was looking for the book by Steve Brusatte called the “The Rise and Reign of Mammals.”  This is another great book that picks up where Riley’s ends. 

I had been taught that the end of the dinosaurs was due to an asteroid strike in the present day area known as the Yucatan but I had no idea what this really meant.   I mean you kind of get a picture in your mind about what a 7 mile wide asteroid could do in damage. But it is hard to think of it abstractly.  If you saw the Netflix movie “Don’t Look Up,” then you might begin to understand what I mean.  Unfortunately in the movie, you never get to see what exactly happens after the strike, play by play. 

I wanted to know, what were the environmental conditions that occurred across the world that led to a massive die off of more than half of every know creature on the earth at the time.  And this is where the book shines in my opinion.  Each chapter is about a different time frame after the impact and what you would expect to see and experience as an animal living at that time.  And as a way to make it more personnel, Riley further enhances the chapters by creating short stories around the animals that experienced the event.  This makes for a great read.  It takes what could be a “little dull scientifically” for the non-scientist and humanizes it a bit.

I listened to this book as an audio book but it would work well in any format.  You can probably find the book at your local book store or at Amazon.  Here is the Amazon link: https://a.co/d/dF67RO9

The next book I would like to review and highly recommend is the book called “The Climate Book” by Greta Thunberg.  If you ever needed a book to show you where we are in the cycle of human caused climate change, this is the book.  And the reason why, it’s not just Greta that is sounding the alarm.  While she has written parts of the book, it is really the collection of essays from other individuals that make all the difference.  Prior to this book, I had read several other ones on climate change from different authors, and what I usually got was a singular perspective from said author.  This in and of itself is not a bad thing and is what you would expect.   In her book, she has taken the idea of “don’t believe me,” well here are a hundred other individuals from almost every walk of scientific and cultural life saying the same thing.  Climate change is real and if we keep putting it off, meaning a total decarbonizing of our global economy, the worse it is going to be.

Be warned, this book is not about hope.  Greta and the other 100 contributors give you the science, the facts and it is not pretty or hopeful where we are right now.  It is not about electric cars, or that “always in the future” promise of fusion power.  It is about how, we need to totally revamp our way of life, especially in the modern industrialized world, if we want to solve this crisis before it kills us all.  This is a call to action, to do what you can on an individual basis.  This book will change you, if you let it.  Ok, ok enough of the soap box. 

I got the book as an audio book but it might work better in traditional format.  This would make it a lot easier to refer back to certain chapters.  You should be able to find this book at your local book store or on Amazon.  Here is the Amazon link:  https://a.co/d/hYtfMVa           

The last book I would like to review and give a very high recommendation to is called “The Deluge” by Stephen Markley.  This is a fictional story starting in 2013 and ending in 2040 and it is in simplest terms, a terrifying example of where the world is heading by the mid-2030s.   

When you tell people about “climate change” how do you give them a visceral, tangible feeling of what it really means to have 2 degrees Celsius of warming?  Think about it a moment? Hard to do.  Hard to make it real for them.  Well, this is what Mr. Markley so expertly has done in his novel.  And it is terrifying. 

The book starts off introducing the cast of characters.  Giving them each a seemingly unrelated story arch but eventually intertwining them into the main story plot.  There is a lot of character development and this might turn a few readers off.  For me it was a way of making them more real and relatable.  And in the end, making the book so much more freighting, because it could easily be our future. 

This is a big book and it will take some time to get through it, but oh so worth it.  If you really want to give yourself a scare, read “The Climate Book” by Greta Thunberg at the same time.  If not for the different story styles and how information is presented, you might lose track of which book is which. Even though it is a fictional novel, Stephen like Greta is giving us a wakeup call.      

I got the book as an audio book (40+ hours) but it would work in any format.  You can find this book at your local bookstore or on Amazon:   https://a.co/d/hqlCY59   

No new “sellable” art work again for this month but I have been working on what I call “sketchbook” practice pieces. Some are abstract and some are more specific. I have still been working on a few rooster faces, but I have also done a few other subjects – all just for fun and practice. The drawings are done by free hand pencil sketching first and then pen and ink are added last. These were all done in the month of March.

I had fun doing them and I hope you enjoyed seeing them. Hopefully I will have a new piece or two by the the end of April and ready for sale.

More on my art work can be found at my Etsy site: https://www.etsy.com/shop/strugglingprotoplasm/edit?ref=seller-platform-mcnav

In support of Prochoice and Separation of Church and State, I will donate 10% of any sales to Planned Parenthood or the Freedom From Religion Foundation, but only if you wish me too. If not, I will be more than happy to keep money! Lol

Well I have come to the end of another blog post. Yea! And I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.

So take care my friends and if you have not gotten vaccinated or boosted, even if you have had Covid, then get it done. It would be a damn shame if you were to die or suffer significant disability with this virus when vaccines are readily available in this country. So until next time Adios!!

“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” Carl Sagan

“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.” Yuval Noah Harari

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous…, leading to the most amazing views.” Edward Abbey