Have a beautiful Day of Aphrodite aka Venus' Day aka Frigg's Day aka Friday 🌹
"Who, Sappho, is doing you wrong?
For if she flees, soon she will pursue you
if she refuses gifts, soon she shall give them
and if she doesn't love you, soon she will
even if she doesn't wish to."
[...]
"Whatever my heart desires to happen,
make it happen. And you [
Calamus 31 What ship, puzzled at sea
Just when I'm beginning to think I have some facility reading Whitman I meet a head-scratcher like this. Taken literally this is a poem about Whitman offering to guide a boat at sea, or to offer military troops to a besieged city.
But presumably it's a metaphor. Whitman offering to guide and help those in need. It's a little strange?
Hard-pressed for a gay reading here but I'll focus on this:
Here, sailor! Here, ship! take aboard the most perfect pilot.
Here Whitman is offering himself to a sailor, naming himself the most perfect pilot. I could imagine that being a metaphor of sexual mentorship. But honestly that's a stretch.
"""
"[…] Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never! No, no. None of that for me."
"Why not?" Tenar demanded.
Taken aback, Moss said simply, "Why, what man'd marry a witch?" And then, with a sidelong chewing motion of her jaw, like a sheep shifting its cud, “And what witch’d marry a man?"
They split rushes.
"What's wrong with men?" Tenar inquired cautiously.
As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, "I don't know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell." She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. “It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside."
Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, "But if he's a wizard—"
"Then it's all his power, inside. His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty." She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. “Nothing."
"And a woman, then?"
"Oh, well, dearie, a woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark." Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. “I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who’ll ask the dark its name?"
"""
(Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu)
Measurement of radionuclide production probabilities in negative muon nuclear capture and validation of Monte Carlo simulation model
Y. Yamaguchi, M. Niikura, R. Mizuno, M. Tampo, M. Harada, N. Kawamura, I. Umegaki, S. Takeshita, K. Haga
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08301
Why M-dwarf flares have limited impact on sub-Neptunes' atmospheric evaporation
Andrea Caldiroli, Francesco Haardt, Elena Gallo, George King, Juliette Becker, Federico Biassoni, Riccardo Spinelli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08014
Comparing observations of the closely located JUICE and STEREO-A spacecraft during the widespread solar energetic particle event of 2024 May 13
L. Rodr\'iguez-Garc\'ia, E. Palmerio, M. Pinto, N. Dresing, C. M. S. Cohen, R. G\'omez-Herrero, J. Gieseler, F. Santos, F. Espinosa Lara, I. Cernuda, M. Mewes, C. Vallat, O. Witasse, N. Altobelli
…
"Eventually, I stopped responding to my body. I was responding instead to a dashboard." — @…
This is a great point and very much translates to so many other parts of life/work where people stop listening to their "body" (or to their org/product/offering), outsourcing/numbing/dumbing down their decision making based on dashboards of col…
Happy Pride! Everyone deserves dignity and respect at every stage of their life - including end of life. Help your loved ones and community celebrate you properly and appropriately by doing all your advance planning now -just think of how hard you'll party when it's done 🎉🌈
Got questions? I'm here to help and I am an ally and safe space for everyone in the LGBTIQA community and the kink community.
FAUST XXVI. The dust opacity spectral indices of protostellar envelopes bridge the gap between interstellar medium and disks
Luca Cacciapuoti, L. Testi, A. J. Maury, C. Chandler, N. Sakai, C. Ceccarelli, C. Codella, M. De Simone, L. Podio, G. Sabatini, E. Bianchi, E. Macias, A. Miotello, C. Toci, L. Loinard, D. Johnstone, H. B. Liu, Y. Aikawa, Y. Shirley, B. Svoboda, T. Sakai, T. Hirota, S. Viti, B. Lefloch, Y. Oya, S. Ohashi, S. Feng, F. Fontani, Y. Watanabe, A. Lopez-Sepulcre, Y. Zha…
Robust and Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework with Communication for Autonomous Vehicles
Keshawn Smith, Zhili Zhang, H M Sabbir Ahmad, Ehsan Sabouni, Maniak Mondal, Song Han, Wenchao Li, Fei Miao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00982