by chance..........................

'Chance' is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.

-Wendell Berry,  While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University, The Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row

This day in history........................

   November 1, 1952:  The world's first hydrogen bomb was exploded in a test on some unfortunate atoll in the Pacific Ocean.  The difference, for those who care, between an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb may be found here.

Talking superclusters..............

Astronomers now believe that superclusters (galaxies with 1,000 to 10,000 TRILLION stars) lurk on the other side of the Milky Way (the galaxy we call home) from us.  We are just now finding them as we are just now figuring out how to see through our galaxy.   These newly discovered superclusters have been hiding behind this:

Just for context, a supercluster may contain "hundreds or thousands" of galaxies.  Reminds me of my favorite part of Animal House:



And do we still think WE are the central focus of the Universe?


thanks

Why rest on the seventh day.......................?

................Because this Universe building thing must have been very hard work.  Thinking in a next life it might be fun to be an astronomer.  There is soooo much we just don't know.


According to Joshua Sokol at New Scientist, the megastructure discovered by a team from the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics is composed of 830 separate galaxies and has a mass 10,000 times greater than the Milky Way. To put the scale of this structure into perspective, we orbit one single star, the Sun. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has over 200 billion stars, just like our Sun, in it alone with an unknown amount of planets orbiting them.

Now, multiply that insane thought by 10,000 and you have the BOSS Great Wall. To our limited scope, it is effectively infinite.

-More of the story is here

thanks gerard

He would've made such an interesting President....

thanks gerard