nature Archives - neal umphred dot com

bone wars, rock-star scientists, and runaway egos

IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES for discovering new dinosaur species—hundreds of them! Allosaurus! Brontosaurus! Stegosaurus! Triceratops! Bloody reptiles with wings! Grate Grommett’s Balls of Fire, there were birds with teeth! What was next? What a heady, marvelous time it must have been to be a scientist! [Continue reading]

not your typical african grey parrot

I MET THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS in the last month of the last year of the last century. I was 47 and Berni was, well, let’s say younger. People who know us now think we’re a perfect match, a ‘natural’ couple. [Continue reading]

“shazam” with a small “s” and no exclamation mark

FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN then there is no mountain then there is. I had made this walk a hundred times before today but today was extraordinary, but then every day is extraordinary.

So, I walked as I always do and always did. [Continue reading]

ken crawford and barnard 33

IF YOU KNOW NOTHING about astronomy and galactic formation and nebulae, you still probably know about the Horsehead Nebula. The gorgeous image of that mass of dirt and debris above was taken by Ken Crawford in 2011. [Continue reading]

FAVORITE QUOTES

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." – Richard Feynman

"So many of people have so much time and energy invested in cognitive dissonance as a lifestyle choice that they're never gonna give up on it now." – nealism

"A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth." – John Dryden, 1682

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired" – Jonathan Swift, 1721

"What has not been reasoned in, cannot be reasoned out." – Sydney Smith, 1869

"You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into." – anonymous

"Always tell the truth! It makes your lies that much more believable." —nealism

"All the angels are gone. There's only devils left." – John Dutton

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened." – Michel de Montaigne

"You don't fight fascism because you're going to win. You fight fascism because it is fascist." – Jean-Paul Sartre

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.” – Frank Zappa

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." – James Baldwin

"If women learned to read there seemed to be a possibility that some day some good man might come home and find his wife reading, and the dinner not ready—and nothing could be imagined more horrible than that! That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind—that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man’s comfort." – Nellie L. McClung

"What people call the Christmas spirit [is] a kind of dream or hope we carry with us from childhood. But as adults ... we're imbued by the pragmatic routines of life, which makes it difficult for us to regard anything with childlike wonder. But, you know, it's alright for us to try. We put on silly hats and drape trees with sparkly lights and wrap gifts in garish paper and that's good for us. It's not only alright for us to allow children the transient experience of innocence and joy, it's our responsibility." – Lance Sweets

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." – anonymous

"‘What saves a man is to take a step ... then another step." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The old dreams were good dreams. They didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.'" – Robert Kincaid

"Fascists in a democracy demand the right of free speech, but once in power will absolutely, definitively, not grant it to anyone other than themselves. That's their trick and they know it perfectly well." – William Gibson

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – Carl Sagan

"Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” – Avi Loeb

"If you value the wrong things, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're going to end up in the wrong place. If you ask the wrong questions, it doesn't matter how much data you collect, your answers will be meaningless." – Mark Manson

"You are better off trying something and having it not work and learning from that than not doing anything at all." – Mark Zuckerberg

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it's important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are." – Maya Angelou.

"Sometimes fear needs fearing more than the things we fear." – Elizabeth Bligh

"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you see the cost of hiring an amateur." – nealism

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." – Karl Popper

“A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.” – Edward Gibbon

"Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” ~ Lao Tzu

"So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old." – John Stuart Mill

"Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration." – H.G. Wells

“When you speak truth to power, power fights back." – Alexandria Octavia-Cortez

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind." – Virginia Woolf

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." –Albert Einstein

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." – M. Scott Peck

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." – George F. Will

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble—it's what you know that just ain't so." – Mark Twain

"I don't trust anybody I'm not close enough to kill." – Kelly Burkhardt

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats." – Eckhart Tolle