“You are old, Father William,” the young man said, “and your hair has become very white; and yet you incessantly stand on your head – do you think, at your age, it is right?”
In my youth,” Father William replied to his son, “I feared it might injure the brain; but now that I’m perfectly sure I have none, why, I do it again and again.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
Don’t worry about tomorrow; who knows what will befall you today?
–Yiddish folk saying
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
–Isaac Asimov
You’re at that age when everything Mother Nature gave you, Father Time is taking away.
–Milton Berle
Five Good Minutes
by Brantley & Millstine @ New Harbinger Books
Using the language of topology to describe complex systems, leads to new insights about waves and weather patterns on earth. Some features of fluid flow on Earth can be explained by principles that traditionally apply to quantum systems.
Earth’s Oscillating Weather – Quanta Magazine
Resolve to be a ball of fire tomorrow, rather than, metaphorically, a damp clammy dishrag. It all depends on one’s incentive to do the right thing at the right time.
Drinking at least two cups of coffee a day could decrease the risk of death from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.
Coffee is rich in polyphenols, a group of compounds with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity which can be divided according to their chemical structure into flavonoids and non-flavonoids.
Copperplate engraving on paper, hand colored from the Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1660)
There is an art, or rather a knack, to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it’s the second point, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t.
You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING, Chpt 9, by Douglas Adams