Our body is a cup, floating on the ocean

          The mind is an ocean... and so many worlds

          are rolling there, mysterious, dimly seen!

          And our bodies? Our body is a cup, floating

          on the ocean; soon it will fill, and sink...

          Not even one bubble will show where it went down.

          The spirit is so near that you can't see it!

          But reach for it... don't be a jar

          Full of water, whose rim is always dry.

          Don't be the rider who gallops all night

          And never sees the horse that is beneath him.

           —  The jar with a dry rim by Rumi, translated by Robert Bly

or, as Brian Koberlein puts it:

We borrow our existence from the cosmos. We flow on until, like spirals of water, we fade back into the calm.

Image: Two Years At Sea

Kraken mare

At 400,000 km², Kraken Mare is believed to be the largest sea in Titan's north polar region. The maximum depth appears to be 160 meters. Shallow capillary waves 1.5 centimeters high moving at 0.7 meters per second have been detected.

— Wikipedia

"Childhood is a branch of cartography"

It was clear that the children perceived a drastically different landscape from [the adults] Deb and Caroline. They travelled simultaneously in physical, imagined and wholly speculative worlds. With the children as her guides, Deb began to see the park as a 'place of possibility', in which 'the ordinary and the fantastic' — immiscible to adult eyes — melded into a single alloy. No longer constituted by municipal zonings and boundaries, it was instead a limitless universe, wormholes and Möbian, constantly replenished in its novelty. No map of it could ever be complete for new stories seethed up from its soil, and its surfaces could dive way at any moment. The hollows of its trees were routes to other planets, its sub terrane flowed with streams of silver, and its woods were threaded through with filaments of magical force. Within it children could shape-shift into bird, leaf, fish or water.

— from Childish in Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane (2015).

"Childhood is a branch of cartography" comes from Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood by Michael Chabon

Image: NicolayR

On First Looking into J1407b

The ring system of J1407b is nearly 120 million kilometres in diameter, or more than two hundred times as large as the rings of Saturn (report).

Images: Matthew Kenworthy/Leiden and Ron Miller.

How would the rings look in UV?

"We are all alike in our infinite ignorance"

There is nothing infallible about “direct experience”...Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created by our brains using sketchy and flawed sensory clues, given substance only by fallible expectations, explanations, and interpretations.

from Why it's good to be wrong David Deutsch.

See also Deutsch on Why wondering is vital.


Image: detail of Monkey orchid by David Evans

Hearing things

The cochlea is a biological system that effectively decomposes a sound into its constituent frequency components. It converts instantaneous changes in air pressure into components that stimulate the hair-like filaments along the inner ear’s basilar membrane, which aids in translating sound vibrations into electrical signals. The activated filaments produce electrochemical signals that are transmitted to the auditory cortex. The individual components of an individual sound are re-integrated and perceived as a singular event—in part by nature of their harmonicity (that is, their constituent components are related in integer ratios), and, in part, by their temporal synchronicity, which integrates many components into a perceived individual event.

from Jonathan Berger on the necessity of musical hallucinations

Image from here

The chief thing

“Wonder?” said R F Langley...“Yes. Oh yes. it’s the chief thing, isn’t it? The thing I value. Joy, Wordsworth might have called it.” He goes on to paraphrase a section from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. “You’re wrapped up in your own affairs, you’re screwed up by your own subjective feelings, and you know that you’re colouring the world with your own thoughts and resentments, and you see a kestrel outside the window, hovering and … ‘The world becomes all kestrel’ … it takes your selfishness away, removes your self. And that’s really what this wonder might be.” It’s a truism that the stories we tell about nature are stories about ourselves, but still those stories are full of singular moments out in the world, when wild things look at us and we look back, mute and astonished.

— Helen Macdonald, who says:

It took me half a lifetime to understand that each encounter with the natural world pleats together all the things you’ve read and heard, and adds to them, making something more of the bird or leaf or landscape in front of you, so that the older you get the more meaningful these things become.