I always wondered how stormtroopers did that!

Enceladus, Saturn's Europa

Cassini recently made its first close flyby of Enceladus, and the first images are back: Here is the great high-resolution photomosaic and here are some more images. I cannot tell you, my readers, what joy these pictures bring to my eyes. They remind me of seeing Triton or Miranda or Gaspra for the very first time close up. Enceladus is Saturn's Europa or Miranda--the tortured icy moon with the fresh young surface, tightly packed with regular ripples of folded ridges.

For the dialectician views things in their connection [sunoptikos], but he who is not a dialectician does not.

Plato, Republic, 537c.

I like Eve Adler's book on the Aeneid very much, but I wish that she had referenced the Eclogues, instead of the Georgics. To write about Vergil's political thought and to neglect the first ten poems--this is like the vestiges of sin!