mcdspot

“If you think it’s a socialist plot, then please drop out of the federal employees health program.”

– Sen.Richard Durbin (D-IL), to Republican lawmakers at the February 25, 2010 health care reform summit.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

- Carl Sagan

The first thing I should say, is that I’m not retiring. Under Cambridge University regulations, I will no longer be the Lucasian Professor, but I will have a new post as a Director of Research at Cambridge.
I will carry on with my scientific work, and my efforts to explain it to other people. I’m currently working on the quantum creation of the universe, and the rapid inflation in size that followed.
Despite having been unfortunate enough to get motor neurone disease at the age of 21, I have had a full and satisfying life. I have three wonderful children, and have been able to add to our understanding of the universe.
It has been a glorious time to be alive, and doing research in theoretical physics. Our picture of the universe, has changed a great deal in the last 40 years, and I’m happy if I have made a small contribution.
I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm. There’s nothing like the Eureka moment, of discovering something that no-one knew before. I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

– Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking on his change of position

“If you’re scientifically literate the world looks very different to you.”

– Neil Degrasse Tyson

Can’t find that appropriately witty yet bizarre Monty Python to whip out at the next party? Look no further.

When anybody reminds him of [his potential wealth], the craigslist founder says there is nothing he would care to do with that much money, should it ever come into his hands. He already has a parking space, a hummingbird feeder, a small home with a view, and a shower with strong water pressure. What else is he supposed to want?

– from this good article on craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

I know we’ve only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days. And the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days. And the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day, and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. I have it written down, but I can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it.

– Steve Martin in The Jerk.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

– Errol Morris, riffing on George Santayana

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human, All-Too-Human

…how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

– from the recent Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin

“Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects.”

– Keith Moon’s secondary school art teacher

Chimping: The act of reviewing the digital pictures one has recently taken on a trip and emitting oh, oooh sounds.

– from an article on camera selection basics for the lightweight backpacker.

“Victims of snakebites in North America usually have two common denominators, tattoos and alcohol intake.”

– from a web page discussing snake bites in the U.S.

“It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people’s money being used to pay the fiddler . . . all this to settle a question in which the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.”

– Abraham Lincoln in a January 11, 1837 speech to the Illinois Legislature Concerning the state bank.

“They were debating the question “Did Darwin kill God?” at a sell-out event organised by the theology think tank Theos. God himself appeared to intervene early in the debate by muting Professor Jones’s microphone and preventing anyone from hearing what he had to say, but a replacement mic was quickly found.”

– from an article on a debate between believers and non-believers recently held in Westminster Abbey.

“No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.”

– Jack Schulze

– “like a platonic glory hole.”

– Waxy’s Andy Baio describing The Anonymous Hugging Wall.

“Clumpy, musty odor, like drinking beetroot juice spiked with cheap vodka that has spoiled at the bottom of the ocean for three hundred years.”

— one backpacker’s honest review of dehydrated wine.

“Cheney…responded with a barnyard epithet, urging Mr. Leahy to perform an anatomical sexual impossibility.”

– wonderful euphemism quoted in the Washington Times.

“As its name implies, the Anarchist Bookfair is a popular event bringing together anarchists, punks, communists, eco-terrorists, homeless people, and every sort of fringe political movement that opposes the United States in particular and civilization in general.”

– from this page covering a speech made by controversialist Ward Churchill at an anarchist event in 2005. Not for the squeamish or prudish.