SCIENCE … I’ve come to love science … Measurement was never my thing as a child. And as an adult I loved diving into experience’s flow and swimming with the current. Or against it. Feeling its subjective tingle on my skin. But as I age, I find so many curious stories like mica flecked in dull stone when I read the science magazines. Science News. Nature. Scientific American. There’s poetry in that prose. The wildest imaginings revealed in the latest theories. Catalogues of obtuse facts. Experimental hypotheses that tantalize … But, unlike religion, which trapped me early in their cassocks of true belief, I don’t believe everything that purports to be “science.” Nor does the scientific method encourage such blind acquiescence. Science teaches us to doubt. To criticize. To argue. If a story can’t stand scrutiny, then if ’s unlikely to measure up to fact … Like I found it unbelievable that Scientific American – one of my go-to science advisers — chose “Safer Nuclear Reactors” as #8 in its end-of-the-year Top Ten Emerging Technologies. “Accident-tolerant fuels.” “More efficient.” “Cost competitive.” “Other safety measures.” “A dozen U.S. legislators recently proposed measures to restart licensing for Yucca Mountain” … It’s a familiar litany of booster claims and pro-industry spin. None of it deals with our inability to safeguard radioactive waste for even a fraction of its half-life. Nor the catastrophic black swan impacts of nuclear gone wrong, as it has several times already in our lifetimes. So, no, I don’t think Nuclear is one of my topten emerging technologies. Unless we’re talking about technologies that could lead to species extinction. Our species.
ORION RISING …One of the things I love about Norwood are its dark skies. It even won statewide designation as such recently. And rightly so. I walk outside in the evenings into my orchard of pie-cherry trees and watch Orion rising from the eastern horizon — Sirius, the dog star, hot on his heels … When the kids were younger, we’d grab sleeping bags to go sleep out on the trampoline. We’d watch as the great wheel of the Milky Way stretched north and south, from Lone Cone to the Uncompahgre Plateau, almost imperceptibly making its night roll across the sky.
Art Goodtimes writes from Norwood, Colo.
THE TALKING GOURD
R21/Borisov
ice cube from beyond’s
approach to the sun’s
trailing mystery & dust
— Don Robert
The Robert [Cholo] Report
(pron: Roh- bear Re-por)
therobertreport.net
