Seth is poking at a box that needs to be carried down to the recycle bin. Teddy is lying stretched out on the floor as if he's a racehorse jumping a fence. Buddy is chewing toe jam between his toes, stretching out his paw so that I can see space between all four toes. Nick is asleep in his room after I read two chapters to him from the second book in the Percy Jackson series. Please don't ask me the title. I'm not going in there and risk waking him up again. He had a hard time falling asleep and I blame the action in the book. We're on Chapter 18 and I so want to read to the end to see if they can save Thalia's tree at Camp Half-Blood. The cats like being in the room while I read and I swear, Seth stays until Nick is asleep to show his love for the boy.
Mike is reading 'The Week,' the only magazine we subscribe to. It's a good magazine, summarizing political and world events. My favorite pages are the book recommendations and the science page. Oh, I like reading about the foibles of some celebrity and another section called 'Only in America' in which people get sued or expelled from school for the strangest reasons. But my favorite page, by far, is the science page.
This week there's a blurb about solar flares. Apparently, we had some nearly invisible drama, causing airlines to reroute away from the poles. They say that we're headed for an eleven year period in which we'll 'see' more activity. The visible part was in the aurora borealis, which I'll admit that I've only seen once in my life and it was beautiful. The flares will interfere with data transmission, long distance power lines, and communication satellites. As if my iPhone doesn't hang up on my friends often enough. It's going to be doing it a lot more in the next eleven years. I wonder just what solar flares do to long distance power lines? Will they buzz more loudly when you walk under them? Will the variations in the magnetic field cause surges and sags in the power to our homes? See, I actually remember some small things from engineering school way back in the eighties, like the way a motor works because of the electricity created in the copper windings by the magnetic field. We called it the 'right-hand screw rule' that if a magnetic field wrapped around an electric line in the direction of the fingers of your right fist, then the electricity would flow in the direction of your thumb. So if your power lines are being whipped by magnetic particles from a solar flare, how much would that affect the electricity flowing through it? Interesting.
Stuff like that makes me feel small. To know that an arc of magnetic particles whipped the Earth all the way from the sun at a speed of four million miles per hour reminds me of how transitory my life actually is. In that movie 'Horton Hears a Who,' many people relate to the elephant's big world, but being whipped by the sun makes me feel like one of little who's on that tiny dandelion puff. We are, after all, that fragile.
Remember when we first discovered black holes and imagined them traveling freely through space gobbling up everything in their paths? You didn't? Well I did. There are still movies of that ilk, such as 'The Fifth Element.' Now, from reading 'The Week,' I know that there's a black hole at the center of every galaxy and that there's a network of invisible stuff out in the space between the galaxies. I forget the term for that invisible stuff, but space having a structure, even with black holes at the center of every galaxy, makes me feel better. We live on a tiny puff, but we aren't just randomly being thrown around by a kangaroo. Well, maybe we are.
Do you remember how I was down on Nick and Mike yelling at the television while they played a particularly difficult section of one of their video games? I have to admit that I argue with the science page of 'The Week.' For example, they have published a number of blurbs about how excited scientists are about finding evidence that there are more planets than we previously knew existed that lie in that narrow band in which water can exits in liquid form. These scientists believe that proves that there might be intelligent life out in space. I just can't believe how narrow the vision of these scientists are. Do they really think that other life is limited to being formed in water? Wow! For all we know, there could be intelligent life in any band of a solar system or in the conglomeration of galaxies as a whole, but we don't have the wherewithal to recognize it as life because we're so focused on finding water puddled on a tiny planet. Granted, water does make our planet particularly pretty in photographs, but I have a feeling that's similar to the way a baby thinks his mother is beautiful. Our species may just be tuned to blues and greens.
So, all you who's out there, snuggle your who-children into their beds. Pet your who-kitties and watch your who-dogs dream of the race. The kangaroo may have us in her paws and we just might be headed to oblivion. In the meantime, it will be one lovely and amazing ride.
Thank you for listening, jb
Mike is reading 'The Week,' the only magazine we subscribe to. It's a good magazine, summarizing political and world events. My favorite pages are the book recommendations and the science page. Oh, I like reading about the foibles of some celebrity and another section called 'Only in America' in which people get sued or expelled from school for the strangest reasons. But my favorite page, by far, is the science page.
This week there's a blurb about solar flares. Apparently, we had some nearly invisible drama, causing airlines to reroute away from the poles. They say that we're headed for an eleven year period in which we'll 'see' more activity. The visible part was in the aurora borealis, which I'll admit that I've only seen once in my life and it was beautiful. The flares will interfere with data transmission, long distance power lines, and communication satellites. As if my iPhone doesn't hang up on my friends often enough. It's going to be doing it a lot more in the next eleven years. I wonder just what solar flares do to long distance power lines? Will they buzz more loudly when you walk under them? Will the variations in the magnetic field cause surges and sags in the power to our homes? See, I actually remember some small things from engineering school way back in the eighties, like the way a motor works because of the electricity created in the copper windings by the magnetic field. We called it the 'right-hand screw rule' that if a magnetic field wrapped around an electric line in the direction of the fingers of your right fist, then the electricity would flow in the direction of your thumb. So if your power lines are being whipped by magnetic particles from a solar flare, how much would that affect the electricity flowing through it? Interesting.
Stuff like that makes me feel small. To know that an arc of magnetic particles whipped the Earth all the way from the sun at a speed of four million miles per hour reminds me of how transitory my life actually is. In that movie 'Horton Hears a Who,' many people relate to the elephant's big world, but being whipped by the sun makes me feel like one of little who's on that tiny dandelion puff. We are, after all, that fragile.
Remember when we first discovered black holes and imagined them traveling freely through space gobbling up everything in their paths? You didn't? Well I did. There are still movies of that ilk, such as 'The Fifth Element.' Now, from reading 'The Week,' I know that there's a black hole at the center of every galaxy and that there's a network of invisible stuff out in the space between the galaxies. I forget the term for that invisible stuff, but space having a structure, even with black holes at the center of every galaxy, makes me feel better. We live on a tiny puff, but we aren't just randomly being thrown around by a kangaroo. Well, maybe we are.
Do you remember how I was down on Nick and Mike yelling at the television while they played a particularly difficult section of one of their video games? I have to admit that I argue with the science page of 'The Week.' For example, they have published a number of blurbs about how excited scientists are about finding evidence that there are more planets than we previously knew existed that lie in that narrow band in which water can exits in liquid form. These scientists believe that proves that there might be intelligent life out in space. I just can't believe how narrow the vision of these scientists are. Do they really think that other life is limited to being formed in water? Wow! For all we know, there could be intelligent life in any band of a solar system or in the conglomeration of galaxies as a whole, but we don't have the wherewithal to recognize it as life because we're so focused on finding water puddled on a tiny planet. Granted, water does make our planet particularly pretty in photographs, but I have a feeling that's similar to the way a baby thinks his mother is beautiful. Our species may just be tuned to blues and greens.
So, all you who's out there, snuggle your who-children into their beds. Pet your who-kitties and watch your who-dogs dream of the race. The kangaroo may have us in her paws and we just might be headed to oblivion. In the meantime, it will be one lovely and amazing ride.
Thank you for listening, jb
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