AdamSmith

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-12-year-old-prodigy-whose-first-language-is-mozart/

I think I have noted before that it took Herr von Braun to say to us: "If your core design goal is lightness, you are never going to get a rocket structure sufficient to withstand the rigors of flight. "Permit me first to design you a brick shithouse of a spacecraft that will survive flight. Then we will find a way to make the engines capable of lifting it!" That is why the then-extant Air Force rocket establishment, which resented his intrusion into their realm, liked to denigrate his Huntsville, AL operation as "The Chicago Bridge & Iron Works." Which turned out to be exactly the right approach!

P.S. Isn't there a Hindu creation myth about the earth resting on the back of a sacred monkey?

"All the way down!"

An illusion owing to its actually being cube-shaped.

Actually, the counter-intuitive reality of relativity and quantum mechanics would seem to suggest somewhat the opposite...? Likewise the fact that non-Euclidean geometry turns out to describe space-time more accurately than the conventional 'common-sense' Euclidean version. 'If the idea is not at first absurd, then there is no hope for it.' -- Einstein

'suspended' Works for me.

The Divine Afflatus!

...Freud published a short piece on the Family Romance in Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1908) – the study later appearing separately in print both in German and in English.[2] Freud had anticipated the theme in the 1890s, in a private reflection on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.[3] In his article, Freud argued for the widespread existence among neurotics of a fable in which the present-day parents were imposters, replacing a real and more aristocratic pair; but also that in repudiating the parents of today, the child is merely "turning away from the father whom he knows today to the father in whom he believed in the earliest years of his childhood".[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_romance

RIP

I think I already posted this, but it is interesting enough (to me) to warrant re-posting... Los Alamos From Below: Reminiscences 1943-1945, by Richard Feynman WHEN I say "Los Alamos From Below"' I mean that, although in my field at the present time I'm a slightly famous man, at that time I was not anybody famous at all. I didn't even have a degree when I started to work with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos - people in higher echelons - worried about some big decisions. I worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath. So I want you to just imagine this young graduate student that hasn't got his degree yet but is working on his thesis, and I'll start by saying how I got into the project, and then what happened to me. I was working in my room at Princeton one day when Bob Wilson came in and said that he had been funded to do a job that was a secret, and he wasn't supposed to tell anybody, but he was going to tell me because he knew that as soon as I knew what he was going to do, I'd see that I had to go along with it. So he told me about the problem of separating different isotopes of uranium to ultimately make a bomb. He had a process for separating the isotopes of uranium (different from the one which was ultimately used) that he wanted to try to develop. He told me about it, and he said, “There's a meeting --.” I said I didn't want to do it. He said, “All right, there's a meeting at three o'clock. I'll see you there." I said, “It's all right that you told me the secret because I'm not going to tell anybody, but I'm not going to do it." So I went back to work on my thesis - for about three minutes. Then I began to pace the floor and think about this thing. The Germans had Hitler and the possibility of developing an atomic bomb was obvious, and the possibility that they would develop it before we did was very much of a fright. So I decided to go to the meeting at three o'clock. By four o'clock I already had a desk in a room and was trying to calculate whether this particular method was limited by the total amount of current that you get in an ion beam, and so on. I won't go into the details. But I had a desk, and I had paper, and I was working as hard as I could and as fast as I could, so the fellows who were building the apparatus could do the experiment right there. It was like those moving pictures where you see a piece of equipment go bruuuuup, bruuuuup, bruuuuup. Every time I'd look up, the thing was getting bigger. What was happening, of course, was that all the boys had decided to work on this and to stop their research in science. All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that was not much science; it was mostly engineering. All the equipment from different research projects was being put together to make the new apparatus to do the experiment - to try to separate the isotopes of uranium. I stopped my own work for the same reason, though I did take a six-week vacation after a while and finished writing my thesis. And I did get my degree just before I got to Los Alamos - so I wasn't quite as far down the scale as I led you to believe... http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm

Woops.

"If it's a pill, take it!" Sutherland, Dancer from the Dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancer_from_the_Dance

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/20/opinions/al-franken-must-resign-opinion-perry/index.html Franken needs his day in court. To document what he actually did -- and didn't -- do. But this current reveal of harassment is just staggering to me. For 25 years I was boss/manager of many young men and women, all (most ) of whom I physically lusted over. But I kept that impulse, a natural human one, strictly bottled up deep inside. Just inconceivable -- or, rather, not -- how many bosses it turns out now could not do so. I think Franken should resign right now. I am no Pollyanna. The unique politics of the day need it.