This One and Only Life

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see. ~ John Burroughs

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

Growth is painful. Change is painful.But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.

Mandy Hale (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

[thinksquad-deactivated20190405]

Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.

Epictetus (via thinksquad)

[forgottengenres]

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

Kurt Vonnegut (via thatlitsite)

[forgottengenres]

Science is magic that works.

Kurt Vonnegut (via thatlitsite)

[5feet12inches-deactivated201812]

'Don't Sneak': Dad's Unexpected Advice To His Gay Son In The '50s

NPR

In the 1950s in rural Washington, a teenage boy learned an important lesson about self-acceptance. Patrick Haggerty, now 70, didn’t know he was gay at the time, but says his father knew what direction he was headed.

The conversation started because as a teenager Haggerty decided to perform in a school assembly. On their way there,he started covering his face with glitter — to his brother’s horror. Haggerty says his brother dropped him off at school and then called their father.

"Dad, I think you better get up there," his brother said. "This is not going to look good."

Their father did come. Charles Edward Haggerty, a dairy farmer, showed up at the school in dirty farming jeans and boots. When Haggerty saw his dad in the halls, he hid.

"It wasn’t because of what I was wearing," Haggerty says. "It was because of what he was wearing."

After the assembly, in the car ride home, Haggerty’s father called him out on his attempt to hide.

"My father says to me, ‘I was walking down the hall this morning, and I saw a kid that looked a lot like you ducking around the hall to avoid his dad. But I know it wasn’t you, ‘cause you would never do that to your dad,’ " Haggerty recalls.

Haggerty squirmed in his seat and finally exclaimed, “Well, Dad, did you have to wear your cow-crap jeans to my assembly?”

"Look, everybody knows I’m a dairy farmer," his father replied. "This is who I am. Now, how ‘bout you? When you’re an adult, who are you gonna go out with at night?"

Then, he gave his son some advice:

"Now, I’m gonna tell you something today, and you might not know what to think of it now, but you’re gonna remember when you’re a full-grown man: Don’t sneak. Because if you sneak, like you did today, it means you think you’re doing the wrong thing. And if you run around spending your whole life thinking that you’re doing the wrong thing, then you’ll ruin your immortal soul."

"And out of all the things a father in 1959 could have told his gay son, my father tells me to be proud of myself and not sneak," Haggerty says.

"He knew where I was headed. And he knew that making me feel bad about it in any way was the wrong thing to do," he adds. "I had the patron saint of dads for sissies, and no, I didn’t know at the time, but I know it now."

[thenewenlightenmentage]

Major Galaxy Mergers Led to the Formation Early Supermassive Black Holes

At the center of most galaxies in the observable universe there’s a supermassive black hole (SMBH). How these black holes formed has been an open question. “The presence of such massive BHs at such early times, when the Universe was less than a billion years old, implies that they grew via either super-Eddington accretion, or nearly uninterrupted gas accretion near the Eddington limit” said Takamitsu Tanaka with the Max Plank Institute for Astrophysics. According to Tanaka, “major mergers of galaxies have long been associated with quasar activity.”

The objects in question are luminous quasars at a redshift z >∼ 6 or when the universe was roughly 900 Myr old (900 million years after the Big Bang). Tanaka reasons that these supermassive black holes accreted mass continuously at the Eddington limit or they went through periods of super-Eddington accretion. Continuous accretion at the Eddington limit doesn’t fit observations at lower redshifts like z >~ 2 where accretion occurs for 1 to 100 Myr. Cosmological redshift is a combination of Doppler, cosmological expansion and other effects. However, the cosmological redshift dominates over other effects once z > ~.01 or when the universe is 12.5 Gyr old. Distant objects can be used to study cosmic history because high redshift implies large distances. This also implies that when a given object emitted light, the universe was younger. The Eddington limit is the theoretical estimate for the maximum luminosity an object, like a star, can reach given a balance between the gravitational force acting inward and the force of radiation acting outward. According to Tanaka, “light exerts a force and so a significantly bright object can counter its own gravitational pull.” The luminosity of a quasar, for instance, could stop gas from falling in.

In a correspondence, Tanaka said that “for z > ~6 SMBHs to have grown to a billion solar masses in less than a billion years since the Big Bang, their time-averaged accretion rate must have been close to the Eddington limit, something like 60-80%.” He added that “they could achieve this if they are growing at the Eddington limit 80% of the time, or if they are growing at 80% of the Eddington limit 100% of the time, or something in between. That would mean that SMBHs were growing almost continuously. This sounds a little uncomfortable to many astronomers, because SMBHs grow only a small fraction of the time at lower redshifts, which is where we’ve built up most of our knowledge about quasars and SMBHs.”

Galaxy mergers can explain the growth of SMBHs in the early universe. If a major merger—that is a merger between two objects of comparable mass, like the impending merger between the Milky Way and M31—triggers a quasar or the growth of an SMBH in our local universe or at z < 1, when the black hole is done feeding, another merger doesn’t occur for billions of years. The feeding period is much shorter than the time between mergers and thus, SMBH growth is rare in the local universe. This same scenario had different results in the early universe or at z > 10 since the period between mergers is comparable to or even shorter than the feeding time. Black holes could have been fed continuously. This agrees with the galaxy merger rate, which is held to have been higher in the early universe.

Tanaka proposes an ansatz “that for the most part, the evolution of galaxies and their SMBHs are governed by how massive they are. Galaxies had already grown to be very massive by z > 6, and in the process their central black holes had grown very massive.” He suggests the possibility that SMBHs and galaxies formed and evolved without the need for rare mechanisms like super-Eddington accretion. SMBHs grew due to frequent mergers between galaxies and feeding times that were mostly uninterrupted.

Edited on June 21, 2014: The original article used doppler shift and redshift interchangeably. This wasn’t accurate. Also, the symbol ~ doesn’t equal 650 Myr. The symbol ~ can be read as around, which is a looser variation of approximately equal to. The original article also included some information related to a paper that wasn’t relevant to Tanaka’s paper. Vegetti’s paper focuses on clusters in the local universe.

Journal Reference: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3023

More information can be found online:

http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/ESSAYS/Blandford/blandford.html

http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Hewett/Hewett7.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/collision-rate.html

[becomingminimalist]

[vstr]

Watch it. Now. 

[stumblin-bumblin]

Perfection

[thisoneandonlylife]

I did this or a week.  It took 3 days until I didn't feel naked without my phone.  By the end of the week, I didn't miss social media as much as I thought I would.  But then I plugged back in...

[motivationalquotescollection]

[unravelledtales-deactivated2014]

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

I will never apologize for being me, but I will apologize for the times that I am not.

Michael Carini (via awakenedvibrations)

[thenewenlightenmentage]

The April 2014 Total Lunar Eclipse

Image Credit: Ben Cooper

[dontgetleftbehind-deactivated20]

Read. It makes you more intelligent. It’s that simple. We all see the universe through the tiny keyhole of our own eyes, and every book is another keyhole from which you can gaze.

Ethan Hawke (via dontgetleftbehind)

[thenakedraver]

Only the weak apply over-control. The strong cooperate, share, exchange ideas, work with other men and women. They do not have to manipulate, but advise, offer friendship, help. Their basic philosophy is one of constructiveness, not destructiveness.

(via thenakedraver)

[thenewenlightenmentage]

[raindanceaugy-deactivated201407]

[azspot]

The face of the Religious Right may change, and the particular stance on certain issues may shift (now abortion, next contraception), but the existence of a conservative protestant Christian political movement is probably here to stay. Realistically it can be traced back to the founding of America and I suspect it will continue until Protestants no longer make up a majority of the country.

The End of the Religious Right, Take 47 (via azspot)