The Blaisdell Blog

The United States has 4% of the world’s population.   We have 25% of the worlds COVID-19 infections.   We have averaged more than 1000 deaths every day since COVID was identified in February.   In six months, more people have died from this virus than died in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.     I blame Dr. Faust.     Faust is the story of a man who makes a deal with the Devil and comes to regret it.   [We all do.]   This story has been around, whether as a folk tale, opera or epic morality play, since the 16 th century.   It’s form changes to reflect the worst fears and best hopes of the people in each era, but the outline stays the same.     In each case a successful and gifted man wants more from life.   Dr. Faust is a much-favored man who simply can’t let well-enough alone.   In steps the Devil.   Faust gets his personal and gratifying reality, but the Devil gets his soul. Faust thinks he has...

Education, as we have always known it, is being reshaped by COVID-19, a mutated Goldilocks virus that has found a near-perfect combination of asymptomatic infection, replication and morbidity. Another school year is about to start and our children, who have had one year of education stolen from them, are about to be cheated out of another. With no direction or leadership from the federal government our local school districts are carefully weighing options. To their credit, most districts have decided that a careful decision is better than a hasty one. Into the middle of this gloom, I would like to shine a ray of light. Every realistic model for education in the COVID era includes some version of limited student attendance. Whether it is half the students every other day, or half the students in the morning and the other half in the afternoon, half time on-sight instruction followed by half-time online instruction, all intelligent models limit the class size to ensure social dista...

The evening of Monday, March 25, 1996 was crisply cold and clear.   It was quite late. With an early alarm and at least 10 hours of work ahead of me the next day what was I doing driving out of St. Louis toward the dark farm fields of rural Illinois?   The answer, of course, is love.   I love my husband and he loves astronomy.   We were going to see Comet Hyakutake, an interplanetary traveler who had taken everyone by surprise.   What I saw took my breath away.   Comet Hyakutake was brighter than most stars (magnitude zero on a scale where the smaller the number the brighter the object), with a coma larger than the moon.   Its tail covered 80 degrees of arc; you could not see it all without moving your eyes along its length.   Near the zenith, it was so close you could see it move against the star field!   It had a bluish-green color due to its emissions of diatomic carbon.   Celestial beauty does not come any rarer.    T...