"On this date, a thin waning crescent Moon (about 6% illuminated) formed a striking conjunction with Venus and the bright star Regulus in the constellation Leo..."

"... visible in the eastern sky about 40-60 minutes before sunrise for most observers in the Northern Hemisphere. Venus shines at a magnitude of -3.9, making it appear as a dazzling white point of light—far brighter than any star and easily mistaken for a 'dot' close to the Moon's position. This alignment was a highlight of the month's pre-dawn sky, with the trio creating a beautiful triangle-like grouping low on the horizon. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere or a more northerly latitude, the view might have been slightly different, but Venus was the standout object globally."

That's Grok, responding to my question: "What was that white dot next to the moon this morning?

Here's my photo, from 6:12 a.m.:

I fake-raged at Grok: "What do you mean easily mistaken for a 'dot'?! It is a dot. To call it a dot is only to describe how it looks, not to claim it has any particular substance inconsistent with a planet. I assumed it was Venus, but I don't like to say what I don't know, so I said what I did know. It IS a dot! I don't like being told I've made a mistake when I'm actually taking pains to be super-accurate."

Grok abjectly apologized and claimed not to have meant to say I'd made a mistake. Own it, Grok.

ADDED: Grok seemed to want to prove itself by helping me, so I asked what was my genuine next question, a veer away from astronomy and into the topic of writing:

I've got 9 TikToks for you tonight — all things I liked. I invite you to appreciate them too.

1. The crochet genius.

2. A Kardashian Christmas.

3. The joy of Neptune.

4. The importance of routine during the long polar night.

5. The importance of layers when dressing for winter.

6. Let a girl show you how to approach a girl.

7. Celine Dion explains her rare disease — stiff person syndrome.

8. He gets AI to write a folk song about his dog dying.

9. AI envisions the cast of "The Office" as babies.

"What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it traces China’s tumultuous recent history through the eyes of its most renowned twentieth-century poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei, now equally renowned in the global art world."

"It guides us from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist era in the 1930s, through Mao Zedong’s revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, and on to the 'reform era' of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and Xi Jinping’s current Leninist restoration, explaining how, as Ai Weiwei writes, 'the whirlpool that swallowed up my father upended my life too, leaving a mark on me that I carry to this day.'... It does not take many pages of this memoir to leave one feeling drowned in toxic revolutionary brine. But even as readers will be repelled by the relentless savagery of China’s capricious revolution, they will be uplifted by this father-and-son story of humanism stubbornly asserted against it. Ai Weiwei reminds us that freedom is part of being human in the modern world: 'Although China grows more powerful, its moral decay simply spreads anxiety and uncertainty in the world.'" 

Writes Orville Schell, "The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei/Ai Weiwei’s memoir is a father-and-son story of devotion to free expression and resistance to state pressure" (NYRB). 

The book — which I finished reading yesterday — is "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows." 

I should add — on the subject of fathers — that Ai Weiwei has his own son, and, in the text, that little boy flows from his grandfather and father. I highlighted this:

"Could dark matter make Earth 'hairy'?"

"Dark matter could form 'hairs' around planets, like Earth, according to NASA. The invisible, mysterious matter – which is thought to make up about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe – forms long “fine-grained streams” of particles.... These hairy filaments could help scientists unlock more insights into the mystery of dark matter. 'If we could pinpoint the location of the root of these hairs, we could potentially send a probe there and get a bonanza of data about dark matter'...."

"Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad."

A poem — in Poetry Magazine — called "Pluto Shits on the Universe."

Via Metafilter.

The first link goes to the text of the poem, but you can listen/watch here.



And here's news of the New Horizon fly-by.

Purchase of the day.

From the March 28, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Blue Ocean Relief MOVA World Globe

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want, pay nothing extra, and make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And gosh darn it – we can't see your name.

The Althouse Amazon portal: Mesmerizing as always – and now without unsightly cords or wires!

"My grandfather, as usual, opened the paper, The Times, and in it he read that a new planet had been discovered."

"He wondered what it should be called. We all wondered... And then I said, 'Why not call it Pluto?' And the whole thing stemmed from that."

Venetia Phair was 11 then. Dead, now, at 90.

Biden's "I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do" rant ends with by a plea for a Democratic leader with oratorical powers.

We were watching a brief clip yesterday, but here's the longer version, courtesy of Hot Air. Watch the whole thing. A man named Frank asks a question about law school credentials that sets Biden off. Biden spews a list of claimed achievements — some of which turn out to be false — and — this is I want to focus on — concludes with a windy oration about how what this country needs is a Democrat with great powers of oration.

I'm picturing the young Barack Obama, watching this on C-SPAN and a light bulb goes on over his head:



Here's the text of that last part:

It seems to me if you can speak, you're at a liability in the Democratic Party anymore. It seems to me you've all become heartless technocrats. It seems to me that you forget that what happens is we've never as a party, we have never as a party moved this nation by 14-point position papers and 9-point programs.

It seems that when we got involved in the civil rights movement, Frank, nobody asked Martin Luther King what his legislative agenda was. He marched to change attitudes. When the women's movement started, it had not moved with a constitutional amendment. They marched to change attitudes.

And this party better understand full well that it's about time that we change our attitude and we begin to change the attitudes of Americans about what their responsibilities are to the poor, about what their responsibilities are to other people, and about what our responsibility in the world is, and that requires changing attitudes.

But Frank, I promise you'll see my 15-point plans and 19-point position papers and you'll be able to make a judgment when Gary Hart and I stand there — who knows more about foreign policy, Gary or me? — and when you see that Dick Gephardt and I stand there, you'll be able to make a judges about whether Dick Gephardt or I know more about economic policy.

But ultimately, Frank, this country needs a leader, and leaders change attitudes about people, and it's the ironic twist that in the wake of Ronald Reagan that the only one thing he knew how to do was the one thing that is now being... the currency of which is in fact now being devalued so much.

Maybe this was the moment when Barack Obama first envisioned his path to the presidency, first saw how he might be the one who could, like Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King, use the power of speech to change attitudes.

That C-SPAN clip was recorded on April 3, 1987, and in September of 1987, there was some conspicuous apologizing for the factual misstatements he made. The chronology works: Obama entered law school one year later, in the fall of 1988.

Here was Biden, prescribing what the party needed but crumpling when challenged about his law school — the solid but not prestigious Syracuse University College of Law. Obama then went to Harvard, a law school no one can dare disrespect, where he would pick up the credentials that would hush the Franks of this world.

In the fall of 1988, Obama saw the Democratic Party lose with a man who looked for all the world like the heartless technocrat Biden had warned us about:



Did Biden inspire Obama back in in 1987-88? Maybe Biden knew he did, and he was thinking about that — thinking about himself — when he enthused awkwardly about "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Now, Obama enfolds him, and everything comes full circle. The planets align. What was once so wrong is now all right.

ADDED: A commenter doubts that Obama would have seen this video back in 1987. Did people sit around watching C-SPAN back then? I remember the phenomenon of the "C-SPAN junkie" from the 80s. Don't you think Obama is the kind of person who'd have watched "The Road to the White House," that endless feed of presidential campaign events, which was already on in those days? Here's a NYT article by Andrew Rosenthal from October 1987:

C-SPAN's Spotlight Brings Quiet Corners of Campaigning Into View

Bruce Babbitt subscribed to it to help him learn how to look better on television. Tom Rath, adviser to Senator Bob Dole in New Hampshire, uses it to observe campaign rivals with a degree of intimacy unheard of in previous elections. And it played an important role in the disintegration of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s campaign.

The Washington-based Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network, once known primarily as ''the network that dares to be boring,'' has found new prominence and respect in the 1988 Presidential election season.

C-SPAN still is not considered so influential on the course of the campaign as newspapers and the major networks. But some political operatives believe its blanket coverage has started to change the rules of campaigning, bringing television into areas once shielded from general view and exposing candidates to minute analysis by their opponents and the press....

The power of C-SPAN was dramatically illustrated last month toward the end of Mr. Biden's campaign. Nan Gibson, C-SPAN's press coordinator, says that after publication of newspaper articles about a speech in which the Senator had lifted the family history of a British politician, she received scores of calls from reporters interested in the network's tape of Mr. Biden's remarks.

The major networks' news programs televised the C-SPAN tape in their coverage of the story, and another C-SPAN tape contributed to a subsequent Newsweek article that told of how Mr. Biden, at a New Hampshire campaign event, had misstated his academic record.

''Reporters are using us as a video archive,'' Ms. Gibson said. ''They can't be everywhere at once, so they can watch from here.''...

The network ... has greatly expanded its campaign reporting, mostly through a weekly program, ''Road to the White House,'' on which C-SPAN's political editor, Carl M. Rutan, is host....

''C-SPAN brings everything that the candidates are doing into the people's living rooms,'' said Phil Roeder, executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party. ''It's the high-tech version of retail politics,'' the style of one-on-one personalized campaigning deemed mandatory for success in Iowa and New Hampshire.....

At small campaign events, C-SPAN crews attach a wireless microphone to the candidate's clothing and use a shotgun microphone to reach everyone else. The object, Mr. Rutan said, is to record every word the candidate says and every gesture he makes as he shakes hands, kisses babies and drinks coffee....

But the presence of C-SPAN cameras, political operatives said, also forces candidates to be more careful about such things as efforts to tailor their remarks for different parts of the country. Mr. Rutan, C-SPAN's political editor, said that after Mr. Biden's experience, campaign aides were more wary.

''In the past, candidates have been able to go where they want and maybe stretch the truth just a little bit,'' he said. ''Suddenly what they say in a small Iowa town is on the record, just as if they had said it at the National Press Club in Washington.''

In 1987, C-SPAN was teaching some crucial lessons about the future of political campaigning, lessons taught at Joe Biden's expense, and I'll bet Obama was watching, learning, and — for Joe Biden — empathizing.

12 planets.

They didn't want to hurt the feelings of Pluto-lovers, so they picked a definition for planet that would include Pluto, and, doing that, they let in 3 more rocks. The nonconformingly named 2003 UB313 (AKA Xena). Charon, which is a moon, which is annoying. And Ceres, ceresly. Wouldn't it have been pleasanter to just oust Pluto? Come on, scientists! If you want to make us feel good, make us feel good!

Looking for alien life on Earth.

Here's a NYT op-ed (about why we should search Earth, not Mars, to find alien life forms) that brings up a question I've been meaning to look for answer to for a long time: why isn't it inconsistent to believe that all the life we know on Earth traces back to a single cell and that other planets that have Earth-like conditions would give rise to life? It seems to me, that if Earth-like conditions get some life-creating cell started, that there should have been many such cells on Earth, starting many different evolutionary lines. Even if in the end, one line became so successful that it rendered the other lines extinct, wouldn't there have been a period in which multiple lines coexisted?

From the op-ed (by astrobiologist Paul Davis):

Genetic sequencing is used to position unknown microbes on the tree of life, but this technique employs known biochemistry. It wouldn't work for organisms on a different tree using different biochemical machinery. If such organisms exist, they would be eliminated from the analysis and ignored. Our planet could be seething with alien bugs without anyone suspecting it.

How could we go about identifying "life as we don't know it"? One idea is to look in exotic environments. The range of conditions in which life can thrive has been enormously extended in recent years, with the discovery of microbes dwelling near scalding volcanic vents, in radioactive pools and in pitch darkness far underground. Yet there will be limits beyond which our form of life cannot survive; for example, temperatures above about 270 degrees Fahrenheit. If anything is found living in even harsher environments, we could scrutinize its innards to see whether what makes it tick is so novel that it cannot have evolved from known life.