I have not followed every detail of the astounding James Webb Space Telescope’s beginnings but I have been aware of some of the bigger events. I knew when it left Earth atop an Ariane 5 rocket on December 25, 2021, and I listened to reports of its eighteen gold-coated mirrors being unfolded and aligned. I marveled at those first images shared with the world on July 12, 2022. They were impressive on the tiny 6-inch screen on my phone, more so on my compact laptop’s 13-inch screen, and better yet on my small-by-modern-standards 42-inch TV. I need a bigger word than impressive now that I’ve seen some of them on a 72-foot OMNIMAX screen.
Deep Sky was released on October 20, 2023, and has been playing in several theaters spread around the world for a while. It began its run at Cincinnati’s Robert D. Lindner Family OMNIMAX® Theater with an 11:30 showing on Friday, February 2. I was there.
The front end of the movie covers the telescope’s construction, launch, and deployment. Some big numbers were tossed out concerning distance, number of people involved, etc. One that caught my attention was the count of Single Points of Failure (SPOFs). A SPOF is something that causes an entire system to fail if it does. It’s a concept I’m familiar with from my working days in software. A definition found online ends with “mission-critical systems should not have a SPOF”. According to Deep Sky, the deployment sequence for JWST had 344 of them. Not one caused a problem.`
There is a fair amount of computer-generated graphics in the film to illustrate the operation of the telescope in space and other impossible-to-capture views. They are wonderfully done and visually quite stunning on the big dome. Giant images from computers are great and may even equal those produced by the telescope in terms of visual impact but knowing that something you are seeing is an actual capture of something in the real world generates a whole different type of awe.
There is a lot of awe present in the movie itself. It is apparent in every one of the program participants who put in an appearance. These are people who are truly excited to be part of a project that is advancing mankind’s knowledge of this world and their enthusiasm is more than obvious.
Much of the buzz generated by JWST comes from never-before-seen objects it has captured such as galaxies older than any previously recorded. These are well represented in Deep Sky. JWST has also provided better images of things that have been studied for some time. One example is the supernova of 1604 which was observed by Galileo. Another is the “Pillars of Creation” first imaged by the Hubble telescope in 1995. A JWST-generated image of the Pillars is in the movie poster that begins this article. A Hubble version can be seen here. NASA has made bunches of information about JWST and a huge number of images collected by the telescope available here. As I said, those images are truly impressive even on a display screen that fits in your pocket. You don’t have to attend a showing of Deep Sky to be gobsmacked by those awesome pictures but a 72-foot diameter dome jam-packed edge-to-edge with glowing galaxies will gobsmack you a bit differently and maybe a little harder.
While I was at the Cincinnati Museum Center, I took in Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope which was showing ahead of Deep Sky and I snapped a picture of a promotion for the upcoming Pompeii: The Exhibition. All images in this article other than the first two are of a dynamic promotional display in the museum. I very much enjoyed the Goodall movie and there are some sections that take advantage of the IMAX format. I already have my ticket for the Pompeii exhibit which opens February 16. Coordinated with that opening is a return of
Volcanoes: The Fires of Creation which was the first movie shown in the Lindner Theater following its conversion to digital in 2018. I reported on seeing it here.
For both movies that I saw, the familiar psychedelic light tunnel video that traditionally kicks things off was replaced by a video that points out some of the theater’s features while entertaining eyes and ears much like the light tunnel. An attendant told me they have been using the new video for about a month and that the light tunnel is still around and used for some movies.
The year Kevin Patrick spent “connecting with White’s Woods” may have been, as a blurb on the back of Near Woods says “In the spirit of Walden” but the resulting products are not the same. Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond was an experiment in self-sufficiency and the book he wrote some years later documented its success. His observations of nature and seasons were generally used to support some aspect of his minimalist lifestyle and not to educate the reader. I suppose some of Patrick’s observations are also made to reinforce some philosophical viewpoint, but he is a lot more subtle and he helps the reader share the raw observation as near as possible. Exactly one-half of this book’s pages are filled with some excellent photographs.
Of course, Near Woods is better looking than either Walden or PrairieErth. To some degree, that’s just something that color photographs do for a book. But these high-quality and well-chosen photos do more than make the book pretty. They are the “raw observations” mentioned in the first paragraph of this article. The book’s design incorporates the photos wonderfully and helps make reading the book a pleasure. Every lefthand page contains one or more photographs. Righthand pages are all text. Captions are in the extra wide inner margins of the text pages. It didn’t take me terribly long to recognize the beauty of this. Every page turn resulted in a new image that could be studied as quickly or slowly as desired before tackling a new page of text.
Cyndie’s done it again. As I began to write this review of Cyndie L. Gerken’s fourth book on the National Road in Ohio, I revisited my reviews of the previous three thinking I might come up with a better opening line but everything I saw just reinforced my initial thought. Cyndie has indeed done it again.
Although I certainly know better, I tend to instinctively think of big stone arches when I hear the phrase “National Road bridges”. One reason is that many of those stone bridges, some of them S-shaped, are still in existence. There were also many wooden bridges along the road but all were much shorter-lived. Building the Bridges… includes both. It identifies twenty-one covered wooden bridges built for the National Road in Ohio in addition to probably forty-some stone bridges. There were also well over a thousand stone culverts and one reason an accurate count of stone bridges is difficult to produce is that not everyone followed the same rules when distinguishing culverts and bridges. Span length was and is the distinguishing characteristic. Twelve feet, twenty feet, and no doubt some other numbers of feet were used to make the distinction and some reports did not distinguish the two at all.
After telling us about as many of the bridge builders as she could identify, Gerken touches on some of the iconic National Road bridges east of Ohio, including the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, before beginning a county-by-county trek across the state. Each county chapter begins with a thumbnail of the county and the National Road through it. A map locating the National Road bridges in the county appears very early in each chapter. Sections on each of the bridges and some of the culverts in the county appear also in east-to-west sequence. Just as some bridges east of Ohio were touched upon preceding the border-to-border coverage, a few in Indiana follow it. 
At a minimum, the location of each structure and what it crossed is given. The builder or builders are identified if known and, thanks to some pretty good sleuthing, many of them are. Beyond that, the information given for each bridge or culvert varies widely but it is a natural variation. For unnamed culverts over unnamed intermittent streams, location might be just about the only thing known. For major structures, lots of additional information might be included and usually supported by various graphics. Topographic maps are fairly common and there are lots of historic photographs and drawings. Plenty of modern photos also appear and if a structure is still standing there’s a good chance that the book contains a very modern picture of it taken by the author herself. Stories about events associated with happenings at or near a particular bridge can pop up anytime and are often fleshed out by reproducing contemporary reports.
When I wrote about 
The stories are divided into six sections: “Ghostly Legends”, “Legendary Characters”, “Legendary Villians”, “Legendary Places”, “The Unexplained”, and “Legendary Events”. Having lived my entire life in southern Ohio, I was already at least somewhat familiar with most of them. There are exceptions including all four “Ghostly Legends”. It is the only section where every story is new to me and it is the only section dealing more or less directly with possibly supernatural phenomena. I’m thinking those two facts might very well be related. I’m also thinking that this is the right place to mention that Willis is the founder and director of the paranormal research group The Ghosts of Ohio. I find it somehow reassuring that this is also the only section where that comes into play and even here there is no straying from the “verifiable facts” approach.
I don’t believe I learned anything new about any of the “Legendary Characters” but I appreciate the concise and complete descriptions. Willis’ reporting on John Symmes and his hollow earth theory is among the most even-handed and comprehensive I’ve read. Likewise, his tale of “Legendary Villian” George Remus where I did learn a few details for the first time.
“Legendary Places” combines a place I had never heard of (Athens Pentagram) with three that I am quite familiar with. That somehow makes it my favorite section. One of the three familiar places, the Loveland Castle, was the subject of a blog post here 
In the prologue of Philippines, Palau, and Guam, Matt Cohen says he considered but discarded the idea of organizing the book along the lines of the Philipines’ four ‘B’s — basketball, beauty contests, boxing, and beaches. I guess that was on my mind as I scanned it for the first time and found myself registering three ‘C’s — color, culture, and composition.
Although it is not presented as such, the book really is a travelogue of sorts. Most if not all of the travel photos were taken during a single extended trip taken by the author and his wife in early 2023. After deciding not to use the four ‘B’s as organizing tools, Cohen went with a fairly straightforward geographical organization. The Philippines gets three chapters covering the three areas where they spent the most time. These are Manila, North Luzon, and Cebu/Bohol. Palau and Guam each get their own chapter. Each chapter begins with an actual postcard that the Cohens mailed to themselves from the region covered by the chapter accompanied by a brief description of the region. A map, with locations of interest marked, follows.
The chapters are then filled with pictures of people, places, and things accompanied by text ranging from a few words to a few paragraphs. Most questions I had when first encountering a photo were answered in nearby text. The places pictured range from mountains to markets. Things range from colorful new balloons offered for sale to an abandoned Japanese tank slowly being claimed by foliage. People include unnamed workers, islanders in native dress, a mayor, a governor, a president, and a would-be bride left at the altar.