The sun provides light, warmth and life for us on Earth, but it’s also a star—a massive ball of thermonuclear and electromagnetic fury—and it would do us all well to never forget that…
Think of [a solar flare] like a bag of mousetraps: one snaps shut and jostles the bag, making others snap over and again, rapidly discharging their stored energy in a single explosive event.
Now imagine each one of these mousetraps is the equivalent of, oh, say a few hundred million thermonuclear bombs, and you will start to get the idea of how the sweatiest sci-fi apocalypse doesn’t even come close to the power of a solar flare…
Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are also ridiculously powerful solar phenomena. If solar flares are like tornadoes—local but intense—CMEs are like far larger hurricanes. They don’t emit much visible light, but they blast upwards of a billion tons of hydrogen into space, sometimes at speeds of several thousand kilometers per second.
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And, you know, the point of the piece is that you really don’t want to be home when a big one comes calling.
For the most part, the retractions haven’t propagated; work that relied on Sato’s is still up: “His work has had a wide impact: researchers found that 27 of Sato’s retracted RCTs had been cited by 88 systematic reviews and clinical guidelines, some of which had informed Japan’s recommended treatments for osteoporosis.”
Who can be surprised – even if you’ve only read this l’il ol blog – that an all-male concentration of moral primitives issues in so much enemy abuse that our country is about to sanction the group? These fanatics think it’s fine to spit on Christians, and women wearing skirts a quarter inch shorter than godly, and women who forget to sit in the back of the bus etc etc. They riot when slightly perturbed, set cars aflame when slightly more perturbed, and ignore court rulings against them that come from a nation whose existence they deny. They reject science and refuse to vaccinate their children. It’s hilarious that Israel thinks establishing a lord of the flies fighting faction will result in anything other than war crimes.
And oh yes. Right. Religious people are so much more ethical than non-religious.
And UD knows every inch of hers, especially the system of paths she created through her forest.
Early this morning, gazing out her back windows at the path closest to her house, she saw a largish unmoving object on it. Her binoculars revealed this.
It’s a stock photo. UD wouldn’t know how to photograph an animal at that distance.
Her fox was bigger than this one, and seemed half-awake, calmly watching me as I watched it. I’d never seen a fox this close, and certainly not one comfortable enough to bed down so nearby.
I had all the usual thoughts… It’s beautiful. Is it rabid? Is it wounded? When will it leave? I can’t let the dog out. Will I have to call animal control?
And then I Googled. Turns out this is not an unusual event – foxes are nocturnal and will sometimes bed down close to people in daylight. And I mean – our garden is packed with rabbits and voles, etc. Why wouldn’t you want to be around that?
I serve with some real scumbags! Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties. Bob Good endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime.
A whole new desert for Arizona, as California fast-tracks Arizona’s women’s health care providers to practice in that state instead of in the land of no abortions.
This passage, from André Gide’s novel, The Countefeiters, struck me when I encountered it as a Northwestern undergrad, and has stayed with me all these years. Of course I recognized this comical, poignant form of dissembling from real life, but I suspect this passage, on the fourth page of the book, was my first encounter with a lucid prose description of it. The ways we defend against the exposure of our strongest and most authentic passions intrigued and intrigue me; forms of emotional self-defense intrigued and intrigue me.
And why do we defend? Because precisely the places we feel the most are the places we can be hurt the most.
And also – see Adam Phillips – it disturbs us to think of ourselves as capable of volcanic affect; most of us cultivate what Stephen Dedalus called “the refrigerating apparatus,” and Isaac Rosenfeld “formo-frigidism.” We be cool.
We are too much for ourselves – in our hungers and our desires, in our griefs and our commitments, in our loves and our hates – because we are unable to include so much of what we feel in the picture we have of ourselves. The whole idea of ourselves as excessive exposes how determined we are to have the wrong picture of what we are like, of how fanatically ignorant we are about ourselves.
