A Dream Like Mine

Who’s ready to celebrate? The Hubble Space Telescope is! In honor of its 36th anniversary this week, the telescope returned a detailed closeup of the Trifid Nebula, which lies about 5,000 light-years from Earth.

The colors in Hubble’s visible light image are reminiscent of an underwater scene filled with fine-grained sediments fluttering through the ocean’s depths. Hubble’s image focuses on a “head” and undulating “body” of a rust-colored cloud of gas and dust that resembles a sea slug that appears as if it is gliding through the cosmos.

The sea slug’s left “horn” is part of Herbig-Haro 399, a jet of plasma periodically ejected over centuries by an actively forming star embedded in the head.

Several massive stars, which are outside this field of view, have shaped this region for at least 300,000 years.

Hubble has helped researchers make discoveries for decades—and supplies new data every day that will inevitably lead to more. Hubble’s varied instruments and the expansive range of light it collects—ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared—have sealed the telescope’s status as an ongoing astronomical pioneer.

Moral Ambition, he writes, is not another self-help book; it’s a call to live up to a high moral standard. You’re not fine just the way you are. Indeed, “you might just have to change your life.”

What does Bregman have in mind? He compares two people—really, two kinds of lives lived—and evaluates how much good they did for others. The first is Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who spent thirty years in a monastery and was dubbed “the happiest brain on earth” when an MRI revealed that sixty thousand hours of meditation had shaped his neural pathways to latch onto good feelings and downplay negative ones. Some might see Ricard’s life of contemplation as radical and holy. Bregman thinks it was a pretty selfish way to live: “Thirty years in which he did little for others, thirty years in which he didn’t lift a finger to make the world a better place.” 

Contrast Ricard’s life with the hero of Bregman’s story: Thomas Clarkson, who helped build the movement to end the slave trade in Britain. Appalled by its horrors, he abandoned his career and became a one-man press and public-relations firm, cranking out pamphlets and lecturing widely. He cofounded the influential Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, conducted extensive research to support his claims, and pursued his mission so unrelentingly that he suffered a mental breakdown at thirty-three. But the man got results: the slave trade was outlawed in Britain in 1807. Bregman ventures that, unlike Ricard, Clarkson probably had a pretty depressing brain. But he helped countless people, changed the course of global history, and “didn’t get burned out from scrolling through never-ending spreadsheets or sitting through yet another PowerPoint.”

Lady Sybil Vimes is one of the ladies, so Sam Vimes is on the warpath until he can find her, while the watch desperately try to keep all infrastructure from falling apart without all the fat ladies who keep it together on a daily basis