Botanical Dysania

Look, I think it is important that as many people as possible see these phenomenal photos of Melanobatrachus indicus, because they are damn rare, but truly spectacular.

“Max Fischer emerges as not just a brainy comic character, but as a kid who could do anything, if he weren’t always trying to do everything.”

Gandalf: That's a really terrible idea.

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality’s particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness.

I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpeted earth, …and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. …To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! …that is what I call prayer.

The brain’s true meaning is hidden in its microscopic detail. Its fluffy mass is an intricately wired system of about a hundred billion nerve cells, each a few millionths of a meter wide and connected to other nerve cells by hundreds or thousands of endings. If we could shrink ourselves to the size of a bacterium and explore the brain’s interior on foot, as philosophers since Leibniz in 1713 have imagined doing, we might eventually succeed in mapping all the nerve cells and tracking all the electrical circuits. But we could never thereby understand the whole. Far more information is needed. We need to know what the electric patterns mean, as well as how the circuits were put together and, most puzzling of all, for what purpose.

Most of the philosophers adjudged great in the history of Western thought held that humans are fundamentally different from the other animals. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Locke, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel were all proponents ‘of the view that man differs radically in kind from [all] other things’; except for Rousseau, they all held the essential human distinction to be our 'reason, intellect, thought, or understanding.’ Almost all of them believed that our distinction arises from something made neither of matter nor of energy that resides within the bodies of humans, but of no one else on Earth. No scientific evidence for such a 'something’ has ever been produced. Only a few of the great Western philosophers—David Hume, for instance—argued, as Darwin did, that the difference between our species and others were only of degree.

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement—plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.

Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it.

i love the cultural differences between the science and humanities departments at my uni

Ἐν πᾶσι γὰρ τοῖς φυσικοῖς ἔνεστί τι θαυμαστόν. (In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.)