Book Report

98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer.   We take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer.

September 24 is the 267th day of the year.  Today is the day for mindfulness of the heavens, as it gives rise to a wide and big mind.

The sun rose this morning at 7:27 a.m. and will set at 7:31 p.m. for 12 hours and 4 minutes of daylight.  Still not quite equanimity.

The waning gibbous moon is 86% full and will rise at 7:43 p.m. this evening and will set at 11:43 a.m. tomorrow.  

A low-pressure system a couple hundred miles north-northeast of Bermuda has about a 70% chance of developing into a hurricane.  No predictions yet on its track.  Tropical Storm Sam has developed into a full-blown hurricane as predicted, and is expected to become a major hurricane tomorrow. It is slowly moving in the direction of the southeastern United States, but no landfall is predicted as of yet.

The number of new covid cases per day continues to decrease in both the U.S. and the State of Georgia.  Hospitalizations also seem to have peaked, although the daily death count has not yet stated to fall.

Russian author and social critic Alexander Radishchev died on this day in 1802.  Radishchev brought the tradition of radicalism in Russian literature to prominence with his 1790 novel Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. His depiction of socio-economic conditions in Russia resulted in Catherine the Great exiling him to Siberia until 1797. After Catherine's death, her successor, Tsar Paul, recalled Radishchev from Siberia and confined him to his own estate.  When Alexander I became Emperor in 1801, Radishchev was briefly employed to help revise Russian law, a realization of his lifelong dream. Unfortunately, his tenure in this administrative role proved short and unsuccessful. On this day in 1802, after a critic jokingly suggested sending him back into exile in Siberia, a despondent Radishchev committed suicide by drinking poison. Impermanence is swift.

Meanwhile in France, on that very same day that Radishchev died, French geologist and paleontologist Étienne Jules Adolphe Desmier de Saint-Simon, Vicomte d'Archiac was born in Reims.  His early works,  dating from 1835, described the Tertiary and Cretaceous formations of France, Belgium and England.  Later,  he studied the Carboniferous, Devonian and Silurian formations.  His best-known work, Histoire des progrès de la géologie de 1834 à 1859, was published in eight volumes. In 1853, he won the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London and in 1861 he was appointed professor of paleontology in the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.  However, while suffering from severe depression, he committed suicide by throwing himself into the River Seine on Christmas Eve, 1868. Impermanence is swift.

As for modern books and contemporary reading, I'm about half-way through the first volume of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy.  I've come to the realization that these books aren't about the trikaya at all.