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Looking through these three windows on history reminds us that while the tools of civilization evolve, the human story continues to be driven by many of the same hopes, challenges, and ambitions that have shaped every generation. Continue reading

Genex Tower in Belgrade, Serbia, an iconic example of Yugoslav brutalism, framed with abandoned car park. Today is 35 years since both Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia, and started the breakup of Yugoslavia.

kallerna, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

I.
One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.
Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer the calf is dead.

II.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day,
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day, o'er hill and glade.
Through those old woods a path was made.

III.
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged, and turned, and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath,
Because 'twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed—do not laugh—
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.

IV.
This forest path became a lane,
that bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

V.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half,
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

VI.
Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed the zigzag calf about
And o'er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A Hundred thousand men were led,
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent,
To well established precedent.

VII.
A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun,
To do what other men have done.

They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move.
But how the wise old wood gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf.
Ah, many things this tale might teach—
But I am not ordained to preach.

(This poem is in the public domain)

Sam Walter Foss (1858 – 1911) was an American librarian and poet born in Candia, New Hampshire. He gra­du­at­ed from Brown Un­i­ver­si­ty, Pro­vi­dence, Rhode Is­land, in 1882, His works include The House by the Side of the Road, Two Gods and The Coming American. He served as librarian at the Somerville Public Library in Massachusetts.  Foss used to write a poem a day for the newspapers and his five volumes of collected poetry

By Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Why would the shadow of a space shuttle launch plume point toward the Moon? In early 2001 during a launch of Atlantis, the Sun, Earth, Moon, and rocket were all properly aligned for this photogenic coincidence. First, for the space shuttle's plume to cast a long shadow, the time of day must be either near sunrise or sunset. Only then will the shadow be its longest and extend all the way to the horizon. Finally, during a Full Moon, the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the sky. Just after sunset, for example, the Sun is slightly below the horizon, and, in the other direction, the Moon is slightly above the horizon. Therefore, as Atlantis blasted off, just after sunset, its shadow projected away from the Sun toward the opposite horizon, where the Full Moon happened to be.

The Small Sagittarius Star Cloud (Messier 24) is a dust-free window into distant regions of the Milky Way, visible to the naked eye in dark skies. This 3-panel mosaic spans only a small portion of the star cloud in near infrared and visible light. The field includes the open clusters NGC 6603 (left) and Collinder 469 (center), the dark nebula Barnard 92 (right), and the H-II region Sharpless 41 (green glow). Tonight, the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud can be seen all night from most of the world.

Brainandforce, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

By Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What would it look like to fly past Triton, the largest moon of planet Neptune? Only one spacecraft has ever done this -- and the images of this dramatic encounter have been gathered into a video. In 1989, the Voyager 2 robotic spacecraft shot through the Neptune system with cameras blazing. Triton is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon but has ice volcanoes and a surface rich in frozen nitrogen. The first sequence in the video shows Voyager's approach to Triton, which, with the exception of an overall false green tint, appears in approximately true color. The mysterious cantaloupe terrain seen under the spacecraft soon changed from light to dark, with the terminator of night crossing underneath. After closest approach, Voyager pivoted to see the departing moon, now visible as a diminishing crescent. In 2015, the robotic New Horizons spacecraft famously flew past Pluto, an orb of similar size to Triton. Almost Hyperspace: Random APOD Generator

Watch NASA's Astronomy Video of the Day

A group of Dorcas gazelle at dusk in Morocco.

Anass Errihani, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.