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Poem in Art: "Where happy spirits, crown'd with circlets bright / Of starry beam, and gloriously bedight" - John Keats
As from the darkening gloom a silver dove
Upsoars, and darts into the eastern light,
On pinions that nought moves but pure delight,
So fled thy soul into the realms above,
Regions of peace and everlasting love;
Where happy spirits, crown'd with circlets bright
Of starry beam, and gloriously bedight,
Taste the high joy none but the blest can prove.
There thou or joinest the immortal quire
In melodies that even heaven fair
Fill with superior bliss, or, at desire,
Of the omnipotent Father, cleav'st the air
On holy message sent -- What pleasure's higher?
Wherefore does any grief our joy impair?
- John Keats
Homeless: lost penguins stranded on Brazilian beaches get lift home from air force
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In between the bronzed bodies in skimpy thongs soaking up the rays on Copacabana beach, a tiny black and white bundle of feathers struggles to emerge from the surf. Exhausted and emaciated, its bones poking through the blubber, the young penguin finally collapses on the sand. It has strayed thousands of miles from home, one of more than 1,000 penguins to have washed up on the Brazilian coast this year, some of which have died along the way.
They have come ashore further north than ever before, with some making landfall just 400 miles from the Equator. Brazilian coastguards have found themselves acting as penguin first-aiders, protecting them from an over-enthusiastic public whose first instinct is often to stick the birds in an ice bucket. Hundreds of penguins have been returned to their native territory in the south Atlantic ocean by an air force plane after being found along Brazil's coast.
"Blow, blow, thou winter wind / Thou art not so unkind / As man's ingratitude..." - William Shakespeare
Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As a friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Countdown begins for China’s first spacewalk: Shenzhou-7 spaceship launches into orbit with 3 Chinese astronauts
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After three decades of hoping, 10 years of training, and at least 12 hours preparing his spacesuit, Zhai Zhigang is expected to make history in just 20 minutes tomorrow as the first Chinese astronaut to do a space walk. The 42-year-old former fighter pilot will don a £2m, ten-layered Chinese-designed suit, weighing 120kg (265lb), to exit the Shenzhou VII module.
The Chinese Shenzhou VII spacecraft blasted off at 9:07 p.m. Thursday, carrying three Chinese astronauts into space on this country’s third manned space mission in five years. The Chinese government has spent billions of dollars in recent years building up a space program that it hopes will help China establish a space station by 2020 and eventually will put a man on the moon, accomplishments that would certainly bring the country international prestige.
Large Hadron Collider hibernates after wrong sort of big bang caused by hellion leak, to re-awaken in Spring'09
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Two weeks ago, the most powerful atom smasher to be built had been switched on to global acclaim and scientists were ready to begin experiments that could unlock many of the enduring mysteries of the Universe. They are going to have to wait a little longer. On Friday the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) created the wrong sort of big bang - a fault so serious that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced last night that the particle accelerator would have to be shut down until next spring for repairs.
Preliminary investigations into the incident, in which a huge quantity of helium leaked from the LHC’s cooling system, have suggested that it was caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of its superconducting magnets. The fault affected a part of the accelerator that is kept chilled to within 1.9C of absolute zero, and it will have to be warmed up to room temperature before the problem can be understood fully and resolved. It will take at least three to four weeks to warm the affected sector and then to open the damaged magnets for inspection, and then another month to re-chill them to their operating temperature. read more »
15 Sep 1795 "Lyrical Ballads" published by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth
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Coleridge first met William Wordsworth in 1795, when he traveled to the Dorset home where the poet lived with his sister Dorothy. He walked 50 miles to get there, and as he approached Wordsworth noticed that their over-excited visitor "did not keep to the high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field by which he cut off an angle." The two bonded instantly. When Wordsworth learned that Coleridge moved to Nether Stowey, he and Dorothy packed up and moved there too.
For a solid year between 1797 and 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge were in close, daily contact. They took long walks together and spent hours discussing poetry and literature. The two men were at the forefront of what is now known as the Romantic period. For Romantics, nature was the only source of real inspiration, the only place where men could truly connect to their deepest and most powerful emotions. In the rugged beauty of the Lake District, Wordsworth and Coleridge had nothing but inspiration. They began to talk of a new kind of poetry, one that relied on the reader's imagination and the honesty of simple language to evoke powerful feelings. They decided to write a collection of poetry together. Wordsworth's job was to write poems about everyday topics; Coleridge would tackle poems about "persons and characters supernatural" that were true enough to provoke in readers "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."
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Image courtesy wordsworthclassics.com
Biggest physics experiment in history underway: Large Hadron Collider passes operational test, fires first beam
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There was screaming and whistling in physics labs and auditoriums outside Geneva - and around the world - Wednesday, as scientists whooped it up out of sheer joy.