New Galactic Supercluster Map Shows Milky Way’s ‘Heavenly’ Home

Fridge thought fully like, twenty years later, when thinking about the concept in Young Wizards about how a wizard is picked to be offered wizardry and given an Ordeal because they're exactly the right person for a particular problem:

So Dairine, given the power of wizardry, decides to go find Darth Vader and kick his ass, right?

And there’s like some discussion about how, if she uses her raw wizardly power to ‘go find Darth Vader’ then she’s inevitably going to end up attracting the attention of the universe’s equivalent thereof.

Which okay I always just nodded along to the logic of, big bad guy=big bad guy.

But what my brain somehow failed to conceptualize, and this may have been obvious to some other people, is what happens to Darth Vader at the end of the movies

Namely. He gets redeemed, because someone is willing to reach out and help him along towards that.

She didn’t just summon the attention of the Lone Power by trying to manifest Darth Vader into the universe by sheer ten year old stubborness, she summoned SPECIFICALLY the version of the Lone Power where Reconfiguration was a built-in possibility.

What are white holes? Many people are familiar with black holes as a 3-D hole that alters time and space where not even light can escape. However, what is our knowledge on white holes? Well, as your might suspect, white holes are the exact opposite of black holes. They expel matter into space at intense speeds with immense energy. Some cosmologists believe that on the other side of a black hole is a white hole. An interesting point that can either excite or disappoint you is that white holes cannot be entered from the outside. This means that there may never be physical proof of a white hole and will only stay in theories and mathematics.

Nevertheless, there is a paper written in 2012 that argued that the Big Bang was a white hole itself. Unlike black holes, white holes cannot be observed continuously and can only be observed at the time of the event. It also connects a new class called y-ray bursts to white holes. If you would like to read this interesting paper check out http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.2776v2.pdf. Hopefully one day we can learn more about white holes and the mysteries they hold. The universe is fascinating and has secrets that are waiting to be unlocked the question is how much money are we willing to spend on the universe?

Take action today: http://www.penny4nasa.org/take-action/

Good News Network

Sighting of Many Blue Whales Around the Seychelles is First in Decades – 'Phenomenal'

It's the first time they've been seen in these warm seas since 1966, and it's a wonderful milestone in a long and perhaps successful recover

"The Seychelles has become a major tourist destination for beachgoing and scuba diving, but it’s not only humans that are beginning to flock to this island.

In what marine biologists have described as a “phenomenal finding,” a survey of whales around the territorial waters of this archipelagic nation revealed the presence of blue whales—over a dozen.

It’s the first time they’ve been seen in these warm seas since 1966, and it’s a wonderful milestone in a long and increasingly successful recovery for the world’s largest animal.

The Seychelles are located in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, and they were historically a stopover point for Soviet whalers en route to Antarctica. The years 1963 to 1966 were particularly difficult for whales here, and many were taken before the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling put an end to the practice of hunting baleen whales in 1973.

Since 1966, no dedicated investigation of whales in the Seychelles had been made until 2020, when a partnership of four universities conducted an acoustic survey over the period of two years.

They made five different sightings of groups of up to 10 animals.

“This was a phenomenal finding,” Jeremy Kiszka, a co-author of the paper from Florida International University, wrote in The Conversation. “We were prepared to not see any blue whales due to the high level of hunting that occurred fairly recently and absolutely no information was available since the last blue whale was killed in the region in 1964.” ...

The team behind the survey sent images taken of the whales’ dorsal sides to a database to see if any of them had been recorded before, and amid the reel, not a single one was a match with any other photographed whale.

This, the team suggests, means they have probably never been seen before, which for a species that big might seem strange, but along with there being only 5,000 to 15,000 on Earth, they migrate vast distances while diving deep, making recording their movements incredibly challenging.

The survey identified 23 whale species in total using hydroponic mics over 2 years with peak activity coming between December and April. This is a fascinating finding that suggests something about the seas around the Seychelles makes for excellent whale habitat."

-via Good News Network, April 30, 2024

hologram: Saturn’s rings, photographed by Cassini, 18th January 2007.

Images taken as Cassini moves from one side of the ring plane to the other, neatly showing how the rings look in reflected and transmitted light (brighter and darker, respectively).

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Animation: AgeOfDestruction.

YA Lit Meme: 5 Protagonists: 1/5

NITA CALLAHAN 

“My childhood? What about it?” Nita said, now becoming actively annoyed. Up until last year, her experience of her childhood was that it swung unpredictably but too routinely between painful and boring. Only recently had it improved. And while wizardry might occasionally be painful, at least it wasn’t ever dull. “Mom—you don’t understand. This isn’t something you can just turn off. You take the Wizard’s Oath for life.”

Meanwhile in the YW fandom…

(Subject of discussion: Nita and Kit’s hypothetical future wedding. Hat tip to the Slack chat for a lot of this. More to come.)

“How are they going to explain that one of the bridesmaids is a whale?”

S'reee, upon the mention of the hen do: “is it customary for one to bring their own fowl?”

“The Penn gating team can deal Grand Central for a day, we have lives too… sometimes? Oh, who am I kidding, Rhiow and I are so overdue for a vacation. Hurry up and make this ‘wedding’ thing happen, please.” –Urruah, probably

“I think we’re going to have a bit more luck sneaking an undisguised Sker'ret past the Rodriguez grandparents than we would getting Helena to stand on Kit’s side.”

“If only I could stay in whaleshape during the ceremony – I could be your ‘something blue!’”

“'Ree, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re almost as big as the venue….”

"All Our Myriad Worlds Lie Whole"

I realize my blog is a bit scattered, and mostly fandom based, and probably no small amount of ridiculous, but I’m going to share a fandom-related story with you lovely followers. ^___^ What follows is a ramble-y account of my love affair with the Young Wizards Series.

I went to NYC for a choir trip during my senior year of high school (which was a lot longer ago than I feel like it should be…), and while we were there we visited a few museums…as one does on field trips, you know? Well, the highlight of our trip, for me, was definitely getting to weigh myself on all the planets, because of the scene in High Wizardry by Diane Duane. And, yes, I checked to make sure the ladies’ didn’t lead to Mars…I was disappointed to find just toilets, I’ll admit. (Just kidding! …well, mostly.)

It’s weird to realize the impact a book series can have on you, the ways in which the written word can influence you. But I’ve been reading the Young Wizards Series for so long now (and that’s a story in and of itself, which I’ll probably share at some point), that in many, many ways I feel as if the characters know me as well as I know them. I sometimes imagine that maybe, somewhere out there, there’s a universe where literary characters are all real, and are reading about our universe’s fantastical adventures. If the universe is infinite, and if there are an infinite number of universes, then who’s to say there isn’t a world like that, after all? Maybe in some place, Nita and Kit are reading about my Ordeal, or my little sister running off all over the universe (she does run off to Europe on occasion…the rest of the galaxy isn’t such a far stretch, at that…).

But back to my point. I stood there, my hand on the same asteroid that Kit and Nita discuss as having come such a long way, and for me the moment was beautifully surreal. I don’t think any of my classmates had such a profound experience as I did on that trip, because I finally had arrived at a place that I had been reading about since I first got into fantasy, and it was a real place, not something unattainable like The Leaky Cauldron, or a magical wardrobe to Narnia.

It was real, and I could touch it.

I think that’s the real power of words, right there; the real magic in our universe. That one person’s words can leave such a lasting impression on another human being isremarkableandpowerful, and has the same chance of being misused as the magic I so dearly love to read about. Because as surely as words can heal and inform and touch, they can just as surely be used to hurt and twist and maim.

And I think, maybe, much of my fascination with words and languages comes from Diane Duane’s books, too, as surely as my fascination with that asteroid came from her books.

I’ve been called childish and ridiculous—been told that no one can take me seriously. I’ve been bullied, and was pushed off swing sets when I was little, and I’ve been called all sorts of unpleasant names like “nerd” and “loser”, among others, and been told I read too much (as if there is such a thing!). Maybe these things are why I empathized so totally with Nita, that very first time I read So You Want to be a Wizard, but she kind of became something of a guiding light to me. At first it was just that Nita had a profound impact on me, as a character with whom I shared so much, but later, as I grew older and continued to reread the series, it became less Nita, and more the entire feel of the series. There is so much good in this series, so many “words to live by” and the characters are so unconsciously good that to the reader it becomes second nature, too. Kit and Nita are like two bright standard bearers in a world that seems progressively darker, that more and more places emphasis on characters who do bad things for the right reasons, instead of character who do good things because that is the right reason.

I don’t even know if I can still call the impact these books had on me “subtle” because I feel like I’ve embraced the philosophies of the characters with every fiber of my being.

I’m going into anthropology, probably with an emphasis on archaeology, which is all about understanding other peoples, and in some cases preserving those cultures which are rapidly losing themselves to “modernization”. Maybe this makes me silly, but whenever I think about what I’ll be doing later in my life, working to understand and write about cultures unlike my own, I can’t help but also hear the words of the Oath in the back of my mind. I live by those words. I think they are perfect, and important, and I still read them out loud every time I get to that page, because whether or not they can make me a wizard, they are still a promise that I made to myself when I was eleven, and I intend to keep that promise—magic or not.

This week’s recommended book has been brought to you by Dozmjir’s entire council of brethren. Not Dozmjir himself, just the council. “So You Want to Be a Wizard” by Diane Duane is the first book in the rather lengthy Young Wizards series. It reminds one at first of one of those light reading books meant to encourage reading in the reluctant. Yet it has a depth to it. Philosophy and religious discourse, magic, the power of friendships, and even the nature of fear and despair. These books are quite heavy for the age group they are marketed for, and yet somehow it is that very quality which makes them so interesting.