Hard to argue with this..............

 

In the big picture of contemporary science, there are many things that we do not understand, and one of the things that we understand least about is ourselves.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

The James Webb Space Telescope..................

 

............................................continues to surprise.  Hate it when our "models" don't work:

They contain a significant amount of nitrogen, far more than what we observe in our Sun, while most other metals are present in lower quantities. This suggests there were processes at play in the early universe we don’t yet fully understand.

JWST has shown our models of how stars drive the chemical evolution of galaxies are still incomplete, meaning we still don’t fully understand the conditions that led to our existence.

as culled from here

image via

local knowledge.....................

 

     I spent ten days on the roof as we flowed through the migration and the migration flowed around us.  It was always amazing to watch Uncle John stop and film in the bush.  Camera crews from the BBC, the Disney Channel, National Geographic, and other networks were fighting for the best position at various crossing points so they could capture the tumult of thousands of wildebeests massing to plunge into croc-infested waters.  Uncle John was nowhere to be seen.  On the advice of some Masai friends, he'd be asleep under his frayed bush hat, half a mile from where the action was about to take place.  Sure enough, at the last moment, a single wildebeest would break rank, run the half-mile down to where Uncle John was parked, causing an avalanche of pounding hooves to follow suit.

     "Buddy, never follow the rules," he'd tell me.  "Stick with the local knowledge and build relationships—that's how you get the shots."  Then he'd offer up his trademark vampire smirk, having just canned to best high-action sequence of the day.  After the first wildebeest jumped, thousands of others likewise took the plunge, and they churned through the water, swimming nose to tail, battling the current.  Crocodiles began slipping off the banks in pursuit.  The water boiled, foaming white as the crocodiles' powerful tails thrashed back and forth.  Their jaws mashed down on wildebeests, pulling them beneath the surface.  The air shrilled with wildebeests' alarm calls as they disappeared from sight.  The ones who made it to the other side, heaving with exhaustion, found lions in wait.  After so many hours of sitting around, I found the scene unbelievably thrilling. 

-Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home

But, but, but.......................

 .........well, they beat the Bengals anyway.  Go Browns!

      more fun stuff here

Don't look now, but.................................

It's likely fallen off the cliff here of late, but......

The Gross Domestic Product.  So, what is it really?  Well, that's easy you say:  the GDP is the sum of all goods and services that a country produces, corrected for seasonal fluctuations, inflation, and perhaps purchasing power.
     To which Bastiat would respond:  You've overlooked a huge part of the picture.  Community service, clean air, free refills on the house — not of these things make the GDP an iota bigger.  If a businesswoman marries her cleaner, the GDP dips when her hubby trades his job for unpaid housework.  Or take Wikipedia.  Supported by investments of time rather than money, it has left the old Encyclopedia Britannica in the dust — and taken the GDP down a few notches in the process.

-Rutger Bregman,  Utopia For Realists:  How We Can Build The Idea World

The bigger picture....................

"It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it. 

"Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love.  History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks."

-Will Durant

Yea, but this sounds really hard.........

The way to rob the narrative managers of their ability to manipulate our sense of normalcy is to create an image of a sane and healthy world for ourselves to hold onto at all times, and to make that image into our own personal sense of what normal is. By having a vivid picture of what a sane and healthy world would look like in your mind, the false normal that the propagandists are trying to sell you will have no purchase.

-as culled from here

And don't forget, as we've said here many times before, normalcy is merely the psychosis of the majority.

I'm not sure which I like more..........

..............the photography at the Astronomy Picture of the Day, or the educated guesses offered to describe and explain the pictures.

The biggest picture....................

You want to talk about "big picture" thinking?  It doesn't get any bigger than this.  We're talking about stuff like fate and destiny.
      We often confuse those two words as meaning the same thing.  But UCLA professor Howard Suber clarifies the distinction.   Fate is that thing we cannot avoid.  It comes for us despite how we try to run from it.  Destiny, on the other hand, is the thing we must chase, what we must bring to fruition.  It's what we strive toward and make true.  When bad things happen, the idea of fate makes us feel better, whereas taking the time to consider eulogy values helps us think more about destiny.  Success doesn't come from shrugging off the bad as unchangeable and saying things are already "meant to be";  it's the result of chasing the good and writing our own future.  Less fate, more destiny.

-Eric Barker,  as borrowed from the chapter in Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong, wherein he compares "resume" values and "eulogy" values

Size matters.............................

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” 

-Kilgore Trout, as channeled by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

image via

Incomprehensibly.............................

"How incomprehensibly strange is this world; how large, in the passing of trivial events.  In thanksgiving for the peace that passeth all understanding, let us whisper deep to deep."


-David Warren, as culled from recent commentary - here


photo, enlargeable with explanation, via

Yes, I am that old.......................

How confident are you....................

.................................that you truly understand the big picture?

Color me clueless.

photos via APOD

Wishing all the "settled science".............

.................................................folks would take this to heart:

Your learned friends are wrong.

They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
-Francis Church, as excerpted from his 1897 New York Sun "Yes, Virginia" editorial

"A century ago, most scientists believed the entire universe was deterministic, and that if you could only specify all the details at one instant of time, you could calculate what was going to happen, forever. As for God, many scientists believed that he just wound up the clock of the universe and set it in motion, and didn’t do anything after that. Time was considered an absolute quantity that nothing could affect… not even God.

"And then along came Albert Einstein, who realized that space and time are not absolute quantities, but are related to each other, forming a space-time continuum. The absolute-ness of time was abandoned, determinism was discarded, and scientists realized they hadn’t dug very deep after all."

"As editor Francis Church wrote in 1897, “Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.” That point has gradually sunk in with scientists. By accepting with humility that we don’t know it all, and that our scientific instruments only investigate a small slice of the universe, we realize that reality extends far beyond the boundaries of science. “Love and generosity and devotion exist, and we know that they give to life its highest beauty and joy.”
-last three quotes excerpted from this American Thinker post

via

On the benefits of "You"................

.....................or, avoiding "protocol passion."   Here.

You might think this is a close-up snap-shot of.......

......................Kurt's grilling-ready charcoal, but actually it is a photo of the rarely-seen center of our very own Milky Way galaxy:

People, can you get your mind around the notion that, according to scientists' estimates, there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe - and,  "the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy some 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter which contains 100–400 billion stars. It may contain at least as many planets as well."?  The mind reels.

larger photo and description is here

I neglected to watch...........................

...................the most watched TV show in the history of world-wide television (and probably would have been very confused if I did).  I did watch #2 on the list.  It was breath-taking.

thanks craig

Uh-oh................................

41.  Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things.
-from this translation (free on Kindle) of La Rochefoucauld's maxims

Betcha didn't know.....................

Today's geography question:   How big is Africa?

BIG

Larger that the combination of the United States, India, China, Japan and most of Europe.  Enlargeable map is here