Here’s a link to the first photos from my mission to the sun, written about here.
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Photo Memory of the Week
Posted: 2025 Feb 27
"I am smiling."
Blog Memory of the Week
Quote of the Week
The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (paragraph breaks added)
Source: Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
Music of the Week
Poetry of the Week
Never Again Would Birds' Song be The Same
- Robert FrostHe would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.Posted: 2025 Feb 27
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As I grow older, my emphasis seems to be shifting from “What do I know?” to “What difference does it make?” This applies particularly to religion; I have a friend who insists that Jesus is God, or God is Jesus, and I ask, “What difference does it make?” If it doesn’t affect his relationship with the cashier at the grocery store, it’s meaningless. I ask the same question of the NASA solar mission (even though I admit to being fascinated by such things as the sun getting hotter as you move away from it) but I wonder what difference that knowledge will make to us humans on this earth. Will it change the way I live? Will it change the way I interact with you, say, or with my grandson? I’m not saying that NASA shouldn’t have done it, but I’d like them to spell out how this new (and unspecified) knowledge that they expect to gather might make a difference.
Jim T
Jim T – I don’t know whether NASA could put forward a compelling case for this mission. I think in general it’s hard to argue for basic research on practical grounds – at least, on specific and practical grounds. My impression is that they often don’t know what will come of a line of enquiry, but they’re pretty sure that something will.