Yesterday I finished a 2-reel video documentary on the life of Alexander the Great over dinner, then fell into a long night of sleep after morosely leafing through men's magazines, an adolescent habit I almost always avoid until very late at night. So today the cloud cover shows both head-nose and Playboy-nose appendages over Kansas. Astrophysicist Dr. Donald D. Clayton is in northwest South Carolina, the state from which my forbears immigrated to Springfield, Missouri just before the Civil War to get out of the way of the Union war machine. This year I read his book on isotopes and noticed that Clayton had abandoned his primordial abundances of the elements obtained by Aller in 1963 from a study of the envelopes of planetary nebula in favor of a more generally accepted figure used by his predecessors according to Dr. Martin Schwarzchild. He used Aller's abundances in his classic Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis, which I guess was written when he was a student of Fowler's at Caltech. However, I thought he had recently given in to peer pressure instead of to science, and am still myself for Aller's 1963 abundances, as I can easily approximately derive the Aller 1963 figures from statistical mechanics as far as the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium in the Big Bang are concerned. I wrote to him about it, but he declined to reply. For my approximate derivation of Aller's abundances from basic big bang theory, see the last part of my first-order study of the Sun, Starz. The zero-order model, incidentally, is a zero-age main sequence ZAMS polytropic star that is perfectly uniformly mixed. The first-order star depletes the hydrogen content in the core to arrive at the age of the star by matching the observed luminosity with the computed luminosity. Higher-order approximations like Star8 (for the sun only) more precisely model the details of hydrogen consumption throughout the core during stellar evolution. However, I need to prepare another version using Dr. Hong-Yee Chiu's screened fusion reaction rates to get the best results for the age of the Sun in this case.

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Today when I showed up at the university library, there was a cloud over it that looked like the Star Wars story banner scrolling up into space in an endless sequence of story lines. I received it as good-natured kidding from above about writing endlessly into equipment for no obvious financial reward on these cloud vision stories. I have many practical projects to work on that look like a better investment, but its addictive to wolf down and analyze those illustrated marshmallow pies.
Audio: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds | Star Wars Movie Theme

Here a Texas Angel heads east towards the Bush camp, shown with a papal headdress looking out into the Atlantic and rising over Maine, while four horsemen of the apocalypse ride West over a broad desert before reaching an amazing oasis. Perhaps this one was stimulated by the Harley-Davidson Motocycle computer graphics piece I put into Cloud Visions a few frames back. The papal spirit seems to have one hand raised to the vulva of an angel, signifying that now he will be able to reproduce, while the four horsemen riding in the other direction will not be able to do so, but must tangle with war, famine, pestilence, and death.
I have seen the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse incarnate themselves in a cloudy vision once before, in 1969 during the Viet Nam War. It reminds me today of the Brando movie from Stanley Kubrick, Apocalypse Now.

Note how the 4th rider is a set of fine butt cheeks riding West. In mythology, the fourth horseman, death, was of a greenish color. Coincidentally, my Mother Ruth recently rode West to Green Valley, Arizona and may now lie close to death. It seems the leg of the steed beneath the 4th rider passes through Green Valley. Perhaps this means that my probably non-reproducing Brother Tom, the 4th of Mom's 4 boys, is flying in from Zanzibar, Tanzania, where he manages Emerson & Green's Hotel.