A Very MLE Kind of Day

So the Jupiter thing is pretty cool. Imagine being that amateur astronomer who found something so major--how exciting! But as I listened to the story about this dark spot, I couldn't help think about this, from MLE's A Swiftly Tilting Planet:

"At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness —
All these I place
By God's almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness."

Remember that? To ward off the Ecthroi and their spreading darkness? Yikes. That's stuck with me for a long time. So I looked for a picture of Jupiter's newest feature, and found this:


The light spots are actually the dark thing, and I was relieved to see such a relatively small mass, rather than the ever-growing malignant cloak I saw in my mind's eye (I do have my drama queen moments).

And THEN my friend K sent me a link to an article about Sangeeta Bhatia. K saw Bhatia on NOVA the other evening and was terribly impressed with the biomedical engineer who's using "computer-chip technology to craft tiny livers." The woman is a scientist, teacher, mother, and mentor, and I love her.

I grew to love her even more when I read the interview and she said this, in answer to a question about what normally happens to liver cells when they're forced to live outside the body:

"Normally, when you take liver cells out of the body and you put them on a dish, they lose all their functions. They're not "happy" in that environment, because you've taken them out of the body, where they've gotten lots of signals that keep them happy. So the goal of my Ph.D. was to think about how to surround them with neighbors that would make them happier—to sort of give them a better community—and to figure out how that needed to be organized so that they would function best."

Does that remind you of MLE in any way? Think of A Wind in the Door, and those pesky litte farandolae--the one we got to know was called Sporos--who would "deepen" and so were screwing up Charles Wallace's mitochondria and cells and were killing him?

Sometimes MLE astounds me.