Our companions

Umbrella Bird 

 "Acrosoma arcuatum"

Date 1863 (publication of first edition)

Scanned from The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates, University of California Press version, published 1962.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Naturalist_on_the_River_Amazons

These images are in the public domain because its copyright has expired. This applies to Australia, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.The United States public domain tag indicates why this work is in the public domain in the United States. Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the rule of the shorter term. Côte d'Ivoire has a general copyright term of 99 years and Honduras has 75 years, but they do implement the rule of the shorter term.

Picasso needed redemption, too

Picasso was a "control freak", and he loved the benefits of fame and wealth. He was a free spirit in his art and morality. However, his manner of behaving had its consequences in his personal life. As with his mistresses and the children from them, there was much tragedy and heartbreak among his wives and children, extending down to his grandchildren.

This element of the artist's life comes out in a discussion the BBC's Zeinab Badawi had with the artist's friend and biographer John Richardson, and grandson Bernard Ruiz Picasso. Richardson says Picasso was wonderful to his friends but very controlling within the family. "He liked his women to be submissive, and when he had finished with them he took it out on their children," a BBC trailer on the discussion reports.

It goes on: "Bernard tells Zeinab that although he was fond of his grandfather, he realises that Picasso sometimes had strange reactions to members of his family." The contradictions in the great artist's life come out also in the series uploaded on YouTube.

A free spirit, yes, but as a flawed man, a slave to his own whims and drives.

To Wonder At

Though I follow closely what is reported about the wonders of what lies beyond this planet, the immensity of the universe continues to amaze me. In the past week I had to express a mental “Wow!” at a BBC story about the four galaxy clusters that go by the combined name of Pandora. The element of reporter Jason Palmer’s story that amazed me was not the almost incomprehensible concept of dark matter that was point of the account, but the size of everything. Palmer says: “Galaxy clusters are the largest structures we know of in the Universe, comprising hundreds of galaxies and trillions of stars - along with huge amounts of hot gas - and dark matter.”

The image of the Pandora cluster shows haphazardly scattered galaxies,

hot gas (false-coloured red)  and dark matter (blue) - BBC

To put that “trillions of stars” into perspective I went to one of the NASA websites NASA websites, which has these details about our own Milky Way: “The Milky Way is a gravitationally bound collection of roughly a hundred billion stars. Our sun is one of these stars and is located roughly 24,000 light years from the center of our Milky Way.”  That brought me up against another massive number – a  light-year is thedistance light travels in one year -  at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, or about six trillion miles: 6,000,000,000,000 miles.  That translates into approximately 10 trillion kilometers, or 300,000 kilometers a second.

COBE image of the Milky Way (Courtesy of Ned Wright), from the NASA website

NASA says the Milky Way galaxy has three major components:

    “A thin disk consisting of young and intermediate age stars - this disk also contains gas and is actively forming new stars. Dust in the disk makes it appear orange in the picture. Dust absorbs blue light more than red light and thus makes stars appear reddish. Our galaxy has spiral arms in its disk - these spiral arms are regions of active star formation.

   " A bar of older stars (white in the COBE picture).

   " An extended dark halo whose composition is unknown. Since the matter in the halo does not consist of luminous stars, it does not show up in the COBE image. The existence of the dark halo is inferred from its gravitational pull on the visible matter.”

The wonder of it all! However some people don’t bother to try to grasp this immensity, and others say “It’s big, but so what?” There’s more, too. I can’t see how all this is simply inevitable based on the belief that because gravity existed the Big Bang had to occur as a natural consequence.  How is it that a law of gravity should be proposed as an uncaused phenomenon when all our knowledge and experience is that there must a cause for everything ­- except God. 

The key idea is: "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing." What an astounding jump in logic! The issue is kept in perspective by the results of a poll at The Guardian in Britain shown at the end of its article on Professor Hawking's latest book. 

 

My mini-Gospel

Jesus said, “No one can be the slave of two masters; they will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn. You cannot be the slave both of God and of money.” (Matthew 6:24)

“That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing! Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? Can you, for all your worrying, add one single inch to your span of life? And why worry about clothing? Think of the flowers growing in the fields; they never have to work or spin; yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed as one of these. Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field, will he not much more look after you? So do not worry: do not say, ‘What are we to eat? What are we to drink?’ Your heavenly Father knows you need them all.” (Matthew 6:25-34)

“Ask, and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For the one who asks always receives; the one who searches always finds; the one who knocks will always have the door opened to them. Know your Father in heaven will give good things to those who ask him!” (Mathew 7:7-11)

“So you should pray like this:

 Our Father in heaven,

 may you be held holy,

 your kingdom come,

 your will be done

 on earth as in heaven.

 Give us today our daily bread.

 And forgive us our sins,

 as we forgive those who sin against us.

 Give us strength when we face tests,

 and rescue us from the forces of evil.”

 (Matthew 6:7-13)

Adapted

Jerusalem Bible London 1966