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Temporal displacement
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Published Thursday, July 03, 2014 @ 8:17 PM EDT
Jul 03 2014

To accommodate advancing age and the fact that I'm usually a lot sharper in the evening than I am at 6 a.m., beginning today the usual quotes of the day or daily post will show up on or after 8 p.m., instead of at midnight or some other ungodly hour.

"Quotes" is usually tied to someone's birth or death date. For example, the "Quotes of the day: Marie Curie" post below is tied to tomorrow, July 4. But "tomorrow" is relative. In Sydney, Australia it's been tomorrow already for 13 hours.

For you old fogies, just think of this as the bulldog.


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Quotes of the day: Marie Curie
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Published Thursday, July 03, 2014 @ 8:01 PM EDT
Jul 03 2014

Marie Sklodowska-Curie (November 7, 1867 - July 4, 1934) was a Polish and naturalized French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit.

I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.

There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

We cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.

After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.

We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something.

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It was my good fortune to be linked with Mme. Curie through twenty years of sublime and unclouded friendship. I came to admire her human grandeur to an ever growing degree. Her strength, her purity of will, her austerity toward herself, her objectivity, her incorruptible judgement- all these were of a kind seldom found joined in a single individual... The greatest scientific deed of her life— proving the existence of radioactive elements and isolating them— owes its accomplishment not merely to bold intuition but to a devotion and tenacity in execution under the most extreme hardships imaginable, such as the history of experimental science has not often witnessed.

Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.
-Albert Einstein

Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one- Marie, the famous Madame Curie- and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.
-Isaac Asimov


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Quotes of the day: Dave Barry
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Published Thursday, July 03, 2014 @ 12:01 AM EDT
Jul 03 2014

David McAlister "Dave" Barry (born July 3, 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and columnist, who wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for The Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. He has also written numerous books of humor and parody, as well as comedic novels. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.

By today's beauty standards, Marilyn Monroe was an oil tanker.

Everybody- by which I mean not you- is getting rich off the Internet.

Florida's number three industry, behind tourism and skin cancer, is voter fraud.

Gradually, without noticing it, you turn into a Republican and judge everything on the basis of whether or not it will increase your taxes.

I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball or saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.

If you asked me to name the three scariest threats facing the human race, I'd give the same answer that most people would: nuclear war, global warming and Windows.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not and never will achieve its full potential, that word would be: 'meetings.'

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

If you should open up a baby's head- and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should-you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland.

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.

In a democracy, you say what you like and do what you're told.

In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid.

Internet investors have the brains of grapefruit. If you started a company called Set Fire to Piles of Money.com, they'd be beating down your door.

It's income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.

Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers.

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

People who feel the need to tell you that they have an excellent sense of humor are telling you that they have no sense of humor.

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have orgasms? The answer is yes, they have orgasms almost constantly, which is why they don't mind living in pools of warm slime.

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.

Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.

The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.

The high rate of teen-age suicide might be due to those seeing all those Old Milwaukee ads with the rednecks in the pick-up truck saying, 'It doesn't get any better than this!'

The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.

The metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.

The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

The word aerobics comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning 'ability to,' and bics, meaning 'withstand tremendous boredom.'

There is a very fine line between 'hobby' and 'mental illness.'

They can hold all the peace talks they want, but there will never be peace in the Middle East. Billions of years from now, when Earth is hurtling toward the Sun and there is nothing left alive on the planet except a few microorganisms, the microorganisms living in the Middle East will be bitter enemies.

We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.

We don't know where the digital revolution is taking us, only that when we get there we will not have enough RAM.

We have an old saying in journalism: If you don't understand something, it must be important.

What happens if an asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

Williamsburg is an authentic colonial restored place in Virginia where people in authentic uncomfortable clothing demonstrate how horrible it was to live in historical colonial times.

Without software, a computer is just a lump of plastic- whereas with software, it's a lump of plastic that can permanently destroy critical data.

You have to be a real stud hombre cybermuffin to handle Windows.

You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

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(Today is also the birthday of Tom Stoppard and Franz Kafka.)


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