Posts under ‘The Thinker’

Nostalgia can be a funny feeling. It’s joy mixed with longing, familiarity mixed with deploration. As I come to end of The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, I felt like begging Fortey to bring me back there one more time, once more to visit the warrens of hidden corridors beneath and behind the [...]

When I lack the wordmanship to form my thoughts into a legible form, and when quotes from other books and authors fall short of what I want to express, I turn to Michel de Montaigne.
Montaigne and his Essays have never failed to soothe my soul:
Not being able to control events I control myself: if [...]

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
~ H. P. Lovecraft

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
The experience of overcoming fear [...]

Moreover, scientists are usually careful to characterize the veridical status of their attempts to understand the world - ranging from conjectures and hypotheses, which are highly tentative, all the way up to laws of Nature which are repeatedly and systematically confirmed through many interrogations of how the world works. But even laws of Nature are [...]

Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep desire for absolutes. The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or even, dreadful thought educational.
~ Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune, book IV of the Dune Chronicles

Perhaps more than just so that I can improve on the quality of my pictures and not be limited by adverse lighting conditions all the time, the drive to get a f/2.8 mid-range zoom lens - which costs almost as much as my D200 body - was spurred in part by a need to protect [...]

Here be random scribblings from my jotterbook, not necessarily in sequential order…
- 1 -
The fares to Japan usually cost more than flights to elsewhere, relatively speaking. I noticed that the in-flight menu had better quality paper and finishings. The meal trays too, were more aesthetically pleasing and had a Zen feel to it. [...]

… I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or [...]