I woke this morning with the image of different shaped glasses in my head, stemmed glasses, fancy globes for special drinks....
This weekend, I used all my glasses, glasses not used in years. Chris brought Dom Perignon, so that brought out the champagne glasses and I had discovered Ernest Hemingway's recipe for daiquiris, which are not sweet it turns out, and that required a squat open glass we decided, and there was red wine and white, so it is not surprising I woke from a dream of the globe of a glass.
In addition, because the flower mart is so vast, I lost a sense of scale, so the lilies I bought for the table are so huge that I set them on the fireplace hearth where they not only scent the whole house, but they cover up the whole fireplace opening which is a big one from the days of unlimited heat and welcomed drafts. Because of the vast expanse of the flowers, I am with openness, huge globes, vistas seen in glass and petal, and stamens and pistils that reach and are full and ripping with pollen.......
I am influenced by this richness and I also lean back toward simplicity. The last piece of chocolate decadence went into the trash this morning. It is time for open globes and ease...
I am entranced with this article this morning, the birth of a supernova seen and the knowledge shared among scientists. Collaboration Ho, and open globes.........
In at the Birth of Death
From the human perspective, the universe is not a very sudden place. What is going on in the heavens has been going on for a good long time. The sudden events — like the death of a star in an explosion called a supernova — are usually detected well after they begin, and, of course, millions of years after they actually occurred, given the great distances their light has to travel.
Until this year, no astronomer had ever seen a supernova explode. That is because it only begins to emit visible light — the thing astronomers have historically been good at detecting — some time after the explosion has begun. To catch a supernova at the moment of detonation, you have to be looking in exactly the right part of the sky and looking for X-rays, which burst outward and then fade rapidly in the first instants of a supernova’s life.
That is exactly what happened in January to Alicia Soderberg, an astronomer at Princeton University. She and a colleague were using a NASA satellite capable of detecting X-ray transmissions to study an already existing supernova in the spiral galaxy called NGC 2770, which lies some 88 million light years from Earth in the faint constellation Lynx. At 9:33 a.m. on Jan. 9, they noticed a vivid X-ray burst in another part of the galaxy — the newborn supernova now called SN2008D. What followed that day is one of the special glories of science. Dr. Soderberg put out the astronomical equivalent of an all-points bulletin, and telescopes everywhere were trained on SN2008D. When the paper describing the results of these observations was published in Nature recently, it had 42 authors, plus Dr. Soderberg, an extraordinary sharing of knowledge.