Solar System: 10 Things To Know

“There have been too great a tendency to call anyone ‘impractical’ who dare to look too far in advance of the well beaten path. What is being ‘practical’? One must have imagination in order to be truly practical.

"I know scientific men who have spent years in attempts to do some obviously impossible thing and who yet have been called 'practical’ because if they succeeded in accomplishing that for which they were striving they would make much money.

"The same man would have jeered not long ago at the suggestion that we on the earth might receive signals from Mars. Big things are not 'practical’. They are wonderful. Many scientific minds, like many minds which are not scientific, shy at anything which is wonderful. Yet the simplest things in nature are wonderful almost beyond the limits of the human imagination.

"Men ignorant of the way in which plants grow would jeer at a farmer if suddenly they should be so placed that they saw him planting seeds. They would declare him an impractical creature because the fruition of his efforts if at all possible of realization is so remote. They want immediate results.

"The sending to and reception from Mars of signals would be an achievement by no means as wonderful as Nature’s simple process of making seeds grow in the ground.”

–Nikola Tesla

“Marconi Credits Mystery Flash To Far Planet”New York Sun, January 25, 1920.

hate doesn’t just happen. war doesn’t just happen. And we are definitely not “right” enough to kill or bring pain to anyone… // Hina Syeda

Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (via inthenoosphere)

you: lich

me, an intellectual: spelleton

"When Shelley's corpse washed ashore, a friend identified it by a copy of Keats's 1820 volume in the coat pocket, which he knew Shelley had taken with him. Then, after cremation in which Shelley's heart, hardened by calcium, did not burn, this same friend snatched it from the embers and presented it to Mary Shelley, who kept it thereafter in her desk, wrapped in a copy of 'Adonais."

Here’s your morbid literary fact of the day.

news report: survey says

me: what was the sample size? the distribution? the demographic??? this is meaningless. you could have asks two people in line at starbucks

https://www.instagram.com/thepersonalquotes/

Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula

Image Credit & Copyright: Albert Barr

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Highlights From This Semester’s Cultural Anthropology class

“So, like the dolphin, what you really want to do is maximise the fish returns on your dead seagull investment.”

“Don’t forget, breakfast is never just breakfast. Your avocado is never just an avocado.”

All the best stories start with “so I was hanging around with some Armenians in Moscow…”

‘How to not get arrested during field work’ is a vital anthropologist skill.

“Once you create a state it’s really hard to get rid of.”

Accusations of witchcraft roll downhill.

“You don’t want a continual pattern of recessions and depressions, because then your citizens start reading Marx, and you don’t want your citizens reading Marx, because then bad things happen to you.”

Professor:  “And what did Columbus bring with him when he set off to sail to India?” Student: “Diseases?”

Good luck on your exams everyone, we’ve almost made it!