Communion Of Dreams

Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, has been at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austen most of this week, and has had a wonderful series of posts about the meeting. He just posted the final one this morning (though there will undoubtedly be follow-up posts once he is home as sorted things out). You can find the whole series on his blog.

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Jacob sent me this note:

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/16012/1066/

Not exactly related to Communion aside from “tholins”, but I thought you’d be interested.

It is interesting to see that these complex organic molecules have been found in such abundance. The term tholin was coined by Carl Sagan in his early writings about Titan, and I discuss the material extensively in Communion of Dreams (if you haven’t read it -and if not, why not?).

~~~ Thanks, Jacob!

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Speaking of notes, I got this nice one from Carl:

I just wanted to say that I’ve truly enjoyed your posts since you’ve joined UTI and your novel is top-notch. I’m not a big sci-fi fan, but your characters and description held me all the way through.

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A brief update on my MIL’s condition: the visit from the hospice nurse on Thursday confirmed what we’d seen this week – continued deterioration. Her BP is very low, pulse weak, and heart rate very high (all worse than they were the previous week), and her lungs have diminished capacity and evidence of fluid. Once again we have tweaked her meds and treatment procedures, but this is mostly just an effort to keep her as comfortable as possible. I think part of the exhaustion my wife and I feel is just ongoing anticipation.

I’ll keep you posted.

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Jim Downey