Quotes & Links

From Johnny Biscuit at A Little Nonsense:

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

Leonardo da Vinci
Italian engineer, painter, & sculptor (1452 - 1519)

From Ronni Bennett at A Time Goes By:

Eventually, every one us must make peace and accommodation with declining strength, but never as young as sports stars. From my perspective now, I think of 40 not as the beginning of old age, but as finally having enough experience to soar.

Not needing exquisitely tuned bodies, most of us have many more years than professional athletes before our physical abilities begin to wane in ways that matter. And even when it happens, we can still get better at what we like to do best and take on new kinds of challenges too. We are so much more than our bodies.

From Maciej Ceglowski at Idlewords:

This adept manoeuvering has kept the Shuttle of sharing the fate of more worthy but politically naive projects like the Superconducting Super Collider, but it has also produced a technical monstrosity. The lastest 'enhancements' to the orbiter system read almost like a parody. The shuttle is to launch, photograph itself from every angle, then immediately to deploy an extended (Canadian!) mechanical arm to carefully look over its own belly, using image processing technology especially developed to identify black holes in black tiles. Astronauts are supposed to take home videos out the window during launch to see whether anything falls off the fuel tank. The whole setup is Rube Goldberg in the extreme, not because NASA engineers suddenly woke up to the danger of tile damage at launch, but because they were not allowed to design the safety features in at the beginning and are suddenly being asked to bolt them on. The entire space shuttle / ISS system is a fossil record of shifting priorities and the design changes made on the fly to address them.

I'll end with this one. It will take you a while to read the whole thing. It is worth it.