Once In A White Moon - by Gina Therese Hvidsten
© 2024
Once In A White Moon

Give a little bit of yourself today and save a life tomorrow!

Today is the World Blood Donor Day. Donating blood is such an easy thing to do, and is also a very easy way to help save lives. You only give about 15-30 minutes of your time, and a pint of blood. Seeing how many lives are saved each year because of blood donors, the choice shouldn’t really be that hard to make, but still there is a profound lack of available blood in hospitals around the world. I am, of course, a donor. Even though I hate syringes and needles, I go through with the donation roughly once every three months. Being such an easy way to help others, I gladly do it. I get a gift from the local hospital every time I do […] Read more

Freedom of speech

Today is Amnesty‘s "Freedom of speech day": A movement to illuminate the lack of freedom of speech around the world. They encourage everybody to do something related to freedom of speech on this day, and this is my contribution. Freedom of speech is one of the most important liberties in our lives. If we did not have the right to express our opinions, our lives would be radically different from what we are used to today. I doubt we would even have the ability to go to space if it wasn’t for freedom of speech. That does sound a bit too far fetched, but let’s think about it for a minute. In the middle ages the church was the de facto governing administration. They followed […] Read more

Existential summer reflections

I hope you’ve been to the beach and reflected upon the grains of sand as I suggested in one of my previous blog posts. Even if you didn’t, here’s something else to think about.Go back to that previous post and look at that Hubble photo once more. How many galaxies can you count in that photo? If you do end up with a number, let me know, because there are too many for me to count. Even if you don’t count them you can clearly see there’s a lot of them. And bear in mind that this is just a very, very small piece of the skies above us. Also remember that every galaxy consists of a whole lot of stars (roughly 3 x 10^11, […] Read more

Scientific summer reflections

Summer have arrived in Norway (although it’s taken a short break now). It has been hot and the beaches have been crowded. This reminded me of a little thought experiment you can try on your own the next time you’re on the beach.While you’re there, grab a handful of sand. How many grains of sand would you guess you had in your hand? One hundred thousand? A million? Even more? Now try to think how many grains of sand there are in total on that beach. A number you can hardly imagine, right? This number would actually be close to the number of stars in our galaxy (roughly 3 x 10^11, or 300 billion).Now look at this latest photo from the Hubble Space Telescope. What […] Read more