Marvelous and Complex

Cloudy all day, but only a very few drops of rain, so Mike could varnish the stairs and the base for the landing outside, and then fix them in place. And I almost got a wash dry on the line. 

Gratefuls:
- beginning an online course together, Time to Grow, looks good, folk from seven countries, all working in different places
- started picking olives to preserve (though we haven't finished last year's yet), feels such a privilege
- theological discussion with Padre Luís (on Whatsapp) about praying for the dead; miss doing that with him, love learning how someone else sees something differently from how I do

A long quote from The Body, ch4 - The Brain, p57-58
    The most extraordinary thing in the universe is inside your head. You could travel through every inch of outer space and very possibly nowhere find anything as marvellous and complex and high-functioning as the three pounds of spongy mass between your ears...
    Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one millimetre in size - about the size of a grain of sand - could hold 2,000 terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book. Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something in the order of 200 exabytes of information, roughly equal to 'the entire digital content of today's world', according to Nature Neuroscience. If that is not the most extraordinary thing in the universe, then we certainly have some wonders yet to find.