Hilton Head Island: incomprehensible excess; finished with Connemara; the virtues of poitin; the ruined maid; cleared

Above is the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day from June 24.  Here is the explanation:

What if we could see back to the beginning of the universe?  We could see galaxies forming.  But what did galaxies look like back then?  These questions took a step forward recently with the release of the analysis of a James Webb Space Telescope image that included the most distant object yet discovered.  Most galaxies formed at about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, but some formed earlier.  Pictured in the inset box is JADES-GS-z14-0, a faint smudge of a galaxy that formed only 300 million years after the universe started.  In technical terms, the galaxy lies at the record redshift of z=14.32, and so existed when the universe was only one fiftieth of its present age.  Practically all of the objects in the featured photograph are galaxies.

The underlining is mine.

It is now thought the universe is 13.7 billion years old, so the light captured recently by the James Webb Telescope was emitted more than 13 billion years ago.  

I noted the inhuman scale of ‘only 300 million years’.  Nothing really.

And that practically all the objects in the photo are galaxies.  

There are differing opinions as to how many stars are in a galaxy.  Estimates of those in our Milky Way vary from 100 billion to 200 billion.  Quite a variance.  Though both numbers are beyond our comprehension.  As are the number of stars in the photograph which covers only a tiny fraction of the universe.

You may think you know what is going on.  I don’t.

As it happened this morning I read in CLASSICAL CHINESE POETRY ‘The Question of Heaven’ written about three centuries before Christ by a poet whose name is variously translated into English as, among others, Chu Yuan.

The poem is too long to publish here completely and I have not found a satisfactory translation online, so here is only the beginning.

We have been asking those questions a long time and must still, perhaps forever, live with uncertainty.

As I have said here before, all I think I know is that consciousness resists unconsciousness and DNA seems to impose an imperative that it be transmitted endlessly into the future.

There is no meaning there.

Of DNA being transmitted, I became an adult coincidentally with the use of the birth control pill.  A most fortunate coincidence.  That was sixty years ago and there has not yet been discovered an effective birth control for men other than vasectomy.  An article I recently read suggests an unusual method of rubbing a gel on one’s shoulders may change that.  I know.  I too thought ‘What?’

Here is the link:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mens-health/male-birth-control-gel-results-promising-rcna153349

A second ‘What?’ came to me on reading that reducing sperm count to one million sperm per one milliliter of semen is considered effective at preventing birth.  Now you may have observed that nature or the elan vital or whatever you want to call it does not proceed economically.  It proceeds by throwing a lot against the wall with some tiny proportion sticking, but even by that inefficient standard this is ridiculous.  The article states that normal sperm count is 15 to 200 million per milliliter of semen.  Unless I have this wrong, it only takes one.  Talk about wretched excess,

This morning I finished the third and last volume of Tim Anderson’s incomparable Connemara trilogy almost with regret.  Actually there is regret, but it is tempered by my having his two books on the Aran Islands, where he lived and wrote before he moved to Connemara on the mainland, still to read.  

From photographs Tim Robinson was built like me.  A lean and physical man who biked and walked all over the lands of which he wrote.  He said that he learned Connemara through the soles of his boots.

He must have been an engaging man for he was an outsider, an Englishman in a part of the world that has reason not to care for the English, and an unbeliever among people with so deep and divisive religious beliefs that they often killed one another for them.

In one of the books he mentions that he and his wife, Mairead, had obtained pills from a physician friend that they intended to use to die on their own terms when faced will final illness.  I was sorry to learn that it did not happen that way.  COVID caught him off guard and he died at age 85 in a London hospital probably with a ventilator stuck down his throat.

Near the end of the trilogy Tim Robinson quotes a song about the virtues of poitin, the local illegally distilled moonshine:

What a fine thing is poitin in this land,

It would pay the rent and the poor-law tax.

It would cure the night-time cough,

And straighten the bent old man.

Slainte.

I am now reading a book of some of Thomas Hardy’’s poems.  Hardy is among my favorite writers.  Among those I read this morning was one of his most famous, ‘The Darkling Thrush’, a fine poem, but you probably read that one in school.  Here is one you probably didn’t read in school.

On Tuesday I had a routine follow-up visit with Dr. Culpepper, the surgeon who repaired me.  We both pronounced ourselves very satisfied with the results.  I am told that my repair is better than factory specs.  Not his exact words.  I asked if the bulge at the surgical site is permanent and was told that it will soften and reduce some with time.  I asked when I can go swimming and was told ‘Now.’   However I haven’t yet despite having a choice of four swimming pools.  Maybe tomorrow.

I biked to GANNET yesterday morning at 7:30 and touched up the starboard rub rail.

Like most of this country the marsh is hot with heat index numbers day after day over 100F.  Our temperatures and humidity are both often above 90.  Outside physical activity must be performed early in the morning.  I will go sailing when we get back to only normal summer heat.