Bill Hicks
(Source: snarkyanarchy)
After changing to fit into society, you are eventually going to want your old self back sooner or later
Stephen Hawking, Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan (via satellite) discuss the Big Bang theory, God, our existence as well as the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
-It’s great to listen to these men discuss science, and life.
Plastic 3-D gun inventor talks gun control, freedom of information.
I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and then many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
Richard Feynman
Senator Warren Introduces the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, her first piece of stand-alone legislation, on May 8, 2013. The bill would would students who are eligible for federally subsidized Stafford loans to borrow at the same rate the big banks get through the Federal Reserve discount window. The full text of Sen. Warren’s remarks may be found here: http://1.usa.gov/143CUcs
David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.
Pawel Kuczynski
(Source: demsiz)
He preferred the hard truth to his dearest delusions. That is the heart of science.
Carl Sagan
Cosmos
Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president’s conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres’s 90th birthday.
Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.
Hawking’s decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.
In April the Teachers’ Union of Ireland became the first lecturers’ association in Europe to call for an academic boycott of Israel, and in the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first national academic group to do so.
In the four weeks since Hawking’s participation in the Jerusalem event was announced, he has been bombarded with messages from Britain and abroad as part of an intense campaign by boycott supporters trying to persuade him to change his mind. In the end, Hawking told friends, he decided to follow the advice of Palestinian colleagues who unanimously agreed that he should not attend.
It’s time to get serious about going to Mars, says NASA
Landing humans on Mars would be a multi-stage process, and there’s not much time if it’s to be done by 2030.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society, where none intrudes,
by the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more…
Lord Byron
