The International Space Station’s orbit has been adjusted to avoid a cluster of space garbage, Russia’s Mission Control Center (MCC) said on Thursday.

“Information on a possible collision was received from Russian and American services and was used by the MCC specialists to perform calculations for an ISS orbit adjustment,” mission control said.

It said that the engines of the Jules Verne Automated Transport Vehicle (ATV) docked to the ISS were activated to lower the station’s orbit by 1.7 km to 353.7 km over Earth’s surface.

“When John Ronsheim talks, he uses his entire body. He leans forward, leans back, stands up and paces from one side of the room to the other. His face is a changing stream of expression. He comes up close to his listener and bends over eyeball to eyeball to make a point, jabbing the air with his finger. Than he moves away, plops down in his chair, then he’s up again, his voice rising and falling. words tumbling out, his mind and his body never still, gesturing, gesturing, his arms in motion, conducting the conversation as if it were a musical score. He jumps from topic to topic, quickly, without warning, leaving threads dangling in the conversational weave. . . .” Lectures@ronsheim.org

“Ed Ricketts was a lone, largely marginalized scientist — an outcast to academia, with no degrees, no honors, no memberships in learned societies. Despite his meager means and at times threadbare poverty, he conducted pioneering work in seashore and fisheries ecology from his ramshackle lab on Cannery Row. His 1939 treatise, “Between Pacific Tides,” was the first book to take an ecological approach to understanding seashore animals. It is considered the bible of marine biology. Yet with the exception of “Between Pacific Tides,” citations of Ricketts’ pioneering research are few and far between, since he was never published in scholarly journals. In an odd twist of fate, there’s probably more of Ed Ricketts in John Steinbeck’s canon than all the scientific journals of the 20th century. A man who dedicated his life to collecting facts about the natural world has become, himself, a fiction.” Of Myths And Men@sfgate.com

“It is a matchless morning in rural England. On a fair hill we see a majestic pile, the ivied walls and towers of Cholmondeley Castle, huge relic and witness of the baronial grandeurs of the Middle Ages. This is one of the seats of the Earl of Rossmore, K. G. G. C. B. K. C. M. G., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., who possesses twenty-two thousand acres of English land, owns a parish in London with two thousand houses on its lease-roll, and struggles comfortably along on an income of two hundred thousand pounds a year. The father and founder of this proud old line was William the Conqueror his very self; the mother of it was not inventoried in history by name, she being merely a random episode and inconsequential, like the tanner’s daughter of Falaise.” The American Claimant@projectgutenberg.org

“Thetis was one of the Nereids. Zeus desired her, but she rejected his advances. The goddess Themis then revealed that Thetis was fated to bear a son who was mightier than his father; fearing for his dominion, Zeus gave Thetis as bride to a mortal, Peleus, and all the gods attended the wedding. Thetis bore one son, Achilles, whom she tried unsuccessfully to make immortal. In one version of the story, she anointed the infant’s body with ambrosia and then placed it upon a fire in order to burn away the mortal parts; when she was interrupted by the child’s horrified father, she deserted their household in a rage.” Thetis Bio@pantheon.org

“My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution. Nicaragua had the best revolution, he and I agreed. There were several other revolutions in the area—in El Salvador and in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Panama (sort of). My boyfriend said we should get shots and malaria pills and that we would ride the bus there. I knew my mother and father were not going to go for this so I didn’t tell them. I wrote them a letter from Mexico. Actually I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border and mailed it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side.” Part One@mcsweeneys.net

INTERVIEWER: What technique do you use to arrive at your standard?

FAULKNER: Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

William Faulkner Interview (1956)@theparisreview.org
William Faulkner, American Writer@olemiss.edu
Nobel Prize In Literature Acceptance Speech@nobelprize.org

“Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s passport – I have in mind the one that will convey him to posterity – tells us when and where he was born, details that we need in order to establish his artistic identity. Born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, he belongs to the first generation of Soviet Russian writers who grew up with the new form of government and he is indivisible from the climate and the time in which he was born. Solzhenitsyn himself has said that he cannot contemplate living anywhere but in his native land. His books can; they are already living all round the world, now, perhaps, more than ever before, in the future, perhaps, more than now. But their vitality springs not least from the feeling that roots his being to his country and its destiny. Here, too, Solzhenitsyn is of the incomparable Russian tradition. The same background offsets the gigantic predecessors who have derived from Russia’s suffering the compelling strength and inextinguishable love that permeate their work ” Nobel Prize Presentation@nobelprize.org