Notes From A Bear's Journey

     To be fair, I've written about the sun on several occasions , and perhaps it is because of the cold winter pecking away at different parts of the country that one is so happy when this "near" star breaks through the clouds and allows us to feel a bit of its heat (as one of my earlier posts said, in quoting theoretical physicist Christophe Gelfard:  If mankind could, one way or another, harvest all the energy the Sun radiates in one second, it would be enough to sustain the entire world's energy-needs for about half a billion years ).  Two new satellites ( one already there ) will give us deeper insights into this life-giving source of power; but another question recently emerged and that was, why is our sun so round, as in perhaps the roundest star in our solar system (our own planet Earth is more of a slightly squashed shape).  Said the LRB blog , our sun is: ... too round; a rapidly rotating gaseous body should be flattened and yet our star is the m...

     This idea of "order" began by my reading of an article on judicial law in the UK (from the London Review of Books ), a piece which spoke of the laws against assisted suicide: .. .the law continues to inhibit the entitlement of a sane individual to draw a line under a life that may well have been fulfilling and worthwhile but has now become unbearable, by threatening to prosecute and jail anyone who –regardless of motive– gives them the help they need to end it.   Not only this; if the helper –a spouse, say– would have inherited the deceased person’s estate, the law may step in to disinherit them.  Whether it actually does so depends on the applicability of forfeiture legislation, which itself defers to what it recognises as a principle of public policy –that is to say, a principle developed and applied by the courts– that denies a wrongdoer the fruits of his or her own crime ‘in certain circumstances’, as the statute reticently puts it.  What thes...

    Returning to the recent post on insects and other things that may be "bugging" you,  I neglected to mention the feature story in  National Geographic  titled "Where Have All the Insects Gone?"  The article said in part:  If humans were to suddenly disappear, biologist Edward O. Wilson has famously observed, the Earth would “regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago.”  But “if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”   It is, therefore, shocking --and alarming-- that in most places scientists have looked recently, they’ve found that insect numbers are falling...Researchers working in a protected forest in New Hampshire found that the number of beetles there had fallen by more than 80 percent since the mid-1970s, while the bugs’ diversity --the number of different kinds-- had dropped by nearly 40 percent...A recent study of North American birds found that their numbe...