It's a Beautiful World

It's that time when the sun starts to shine again, the flowers bloom, and the seeds we planted in winter begin to wake from their long slumber.  This is a good time, too, for us to stop and take a moment to revel in all of nature's beauty--to clear away the last vestiges of winter from our lives, open the windows, take a deep breath...and hope our allergies won't destroy us.

Seriously, though, this is a good time to evaluate where you are, consider those resolutions you made at the beginning of the year, and work on improving those areas where you might have slipped a little in the last few months.  After all, if nature gets to start over every spring, so should we!

With that in mind, I want to start us off by celebrating the cherry blossoms.

This year's national Cherry Blossom Festival began on March 20th and goes until this coming Sunday, April 13th.  The festival commemorates a gift of 3,000 trees given by Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo in 1912 to the city of Washington D. C.  There is a wonderful history to the festival, and in 2012 it celebrated its centennial.

One of my favorite details from the history is that in 1981 our country gifted back to Japan some saplings of the trees we were given in order to replace some that had been lost to flooding there.

Whatever our pasts may say of us, I think that the Cherry Blossom Festival is important for the simple truth that it shows us--the beauty that nature and humanity can possess.  And I believe that beauty is worth celebrating.

Next I want to show you a video from a renowned cinematographer known for his work with time-lapse photography and film.  He has captivated us with his work in such movies as E. T., Men in Black, and The Bourne Ultimatum.  But I think his latest TED talk shows some of the most interesting and exciting work that Louie Schwartzberg is doing today.


In an article posted yesterday on MSN, we got to find out about cosmic ray hits, as a bunch of UFOers had found an anomaly on one of the photos posted in NASA's JPL raw images database that appeared to show light shining upward from the Martian surface.

So what are cosmic ray hits?  (Secretly, I am tempted to think of them in music industry terms--Cosmic Ray HITS!, but...) apparently they're high-energy particles that originate from outside of our solar system that bombard things.  They can cause electronics issues and some chemical processes in our own planet's atmosphere.  And galactic cosmic rays are a hindrance to manned, interplanetary space missions--though I've no idea why, even after reading the Wikipedia entry.  I think it has something to do with radiation levels.

That said, it seems like NASA may be settling on light reflecting off a rock as a possible cause as well as a cosmic ray hit, or so The Register has posted in their update to their own Mars-light-speculation article.

And last, but not least, I'll leave you with a teaser for today.

According to Variety and several other news sources, Universal is set on doing a Battlestar Galactica movie.  They're intending to do a reimagining of the story, and have Jack Paglen on board for the screen writing (he did the screenwriting for Transcendence and is also working on Ridley Scott's Prometheus sequel for 20th Century Fox).  They've also got Glen Larson, the original series creator, on board to produce the film.

Let the speculation begin!