"With!"

theres a giant burning orb in the sky and it can burn your flesh, it can give you diseases, it can kill you, looking directly at it causes physical pain, and we all think this is okay. we like this orb.  we like to go outside and lie around on our backs when this orb is in the sky. children draw cute pictures of this levitating death orb with a smiley face on it. what is wrong with us

Mars. In true colour.

Just so you know, a lot of images of Mars which you’ll see have been manipulated. A lot of them have boosted contrast and saturation. So if you’ve ever wondered – images like this one are what Mars actually looks like.

So I recently got ebooks of the new revised versions of the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane because I loved the originals so much growing up and I wanted to reread them and see the changes (especially A Wizard Alone) and I was terribly unhappy to discover that the revised editions aren’t available in print in the US probably won’t be for years. But I’ve always wanted to learn book binding, so I’m just going to print out the ebook and attempt to make my own print copy. To that end I spent all day today rapturously fantasizing about end papers and book jackets. This started as an attempt at designing my own endpapers, but it may be a bit much for that actually…

At least once Nita makes it to college she won’t have to keep asking her dad or counselor to cover for her when she has to miss school. If one of my students emailed me saying they were going to miss class because they had to stop the universe from tearing itself apart I’d be like ‘cheers I’ll drink to that bro’

Titan aka the Mermaid Moon

It was our destiny to walk in the light of other stars.

The Wizards' Oath changes from novel to novel in the Young Wizards series. Do you think you'll ever have a final version of it, or do you see the Oath continuing to grow and change for as long as the series continues?

There won’t ever be a “final” version, no. Whenever the series ends (or its author does), there will always be an understanding that there would always have been versions of the Oath we’d simply never see (or have time to see).

It’s not so much an issue of the Oath itself changing. At the start of a wizardly career, it’s offered to each probationer in the form that will best express to them what their responsibility to the Universe, the One and the Powers that Be is going to look like, at least at the outset. It tends to be simple and clear to start with: people need to be certain about what they’re signing up for. But afterwards, Oaths can change and become more complex as their users change, and as their understandings of that responsibility grow.

There are versions of the Oath that have become very popular across cultures, across regions of a world, or sometimes even planet-wide or further, depending on the species. But everyone understands that each wizard has the right to restate the Oath for himself/herself/itself/whatevergenderself so that it best expresses that responsibility to minimize the growth / effects of entropy, including the most basic strictures: don’t end life if you can avoid it, don’t handle finite resources thoughtlessly, don’t interfere in working systems unless the system itself is under significant threat, don’t change things without permission / fix what’s not broken (a dual simplification/restatement of the Troptic Stipulation: see Tom’s discussion of it and other aspects of the Oath here).

But outside of that, there’s room for considerable elaboration. Some wizards over time evolve personal recensions of the Oath that are quite long. In fact mention is made in future-canon of a species somewhere a long way off whose entire wizardly practice consists in recitation of the Oath in one of its most involved and complex forms. They spend their whole lives, these wizards, in an ecstasy of expression that we’re not remotely equipped to understand… continually reminding the Universe how it’s meant to be cared for. They don’t actually do anything — or so it would seem to us at first (or second or tenth) glance. But our perception of the never-ending intervention that is their lives is necessarily limited by the (all-too-)human perception that to matter, you have to be doing stuff. As their species reckons things, they are the most recklessly active and adventurous wizards extant. And who are we to judge them as being otherwise? 

The above is just one of many worlds or other kinds of places (I think this gets mentioned in AWoM somewhere) where, in this mode or others, the Oath appears in forms that would make no sense whatsoever to a human. Yet these still fruitfully express the relationships of the species in question with the Powers and with the Universe they’re helping to take care of. And even when using what we consider one of the conventional local wordings, inside a human wizard’s head — over the course of their practice — images and concepts get attached to the mere words that are evocative of the interventions you’ve participated in, the lives you’ve saved, the friends you’ve lost, the causes you’ve won. In fact you could probably make a case that no matter how many times you repeat the words, even if they’re the same words, it is impossible for you ever to speak the same Oath twice. You are not the wizard you were a year ago, or three, or ten: or an hour ago, or five minutes back. You are in constant change, as is the Universe you serve (since you’re stuck inside Time together). Your work in that Universe changes you further, and your constant commitment and re-commitment — as itself manifested in the Oath — changes you further still. It’s all flux, from a wizard’s first breath to the last: and that’s as it should be.

So, no… no “final” versions of the Oath: not until the last quartz molecule stops vibrating. By which time, it’ll no longer be any problem of mine. :)

Blue

Success! India’s First Mars Probe Is In Orbit And Working

“India has managed to do what few other nations have accomplished: putting a satellite into orbit around another planet — and it did so a lot cheaper than the competition.

The $70 million Mangalyaan, or “Mars craft” in Hindi, began circling Mars after a 24-minute engine burn to slow it down enough to be captured by the Red Planet’s gravity.”

Read more from NPR.

Ocean Ramsey and her team encountered this 20 ft Great White Shark near the island of Oahu, Hawaii. It is believed to be the biggest ever recorded