That week was hard in purely logistical and physical terms, but it was surprisingly nice to have a whole week without anyone telling me of all the so many things I do wrong.

“NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars. The Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft, will travel with the agency’s Mars 2020 rover mission, currently scheduled to launch in July 2020, to demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the Red Planet.”

— http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/mars-helicopter-to-fly-on-nasa-s-next-red-planet-rover-mission

An anxiety dream about nuclear war again. My worry was that I only had two cans of cat food left, and regret that I don’t have a cabin in the woods to hide away in, and that roads would be too clogged with traffic anyway even if I did, so I might as well stay home and greet the oncoming radiation and hunger.

I had an acquaintance who did have a cabin in the mountains, and he also had a drone flying above his car telling him which way to go.

I always wondered who lives in in these mysterious rooftop structures in out-of-place old midtown buildings.

There was a time when I thought that this is where Karlsson-on-the-Roof might live. Maybe he still does.

Question Your Answers

Civil discourse ultimately depends on a recognition that none of us has a complete understanding of the world—and that we’re at our best when we engage with arguments that confront our deepest beliefs. This is how we, as a society, move toward a better and shared future.

awesome

Took the wrong train. Again. And now I’m late.

explore-blog:

“We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines…”

—

“A Brave and Startling Truth” – Maya Angelou’s stunning humanist poem inspired by Carl Sagan and the Voyager, inverting the telescope to mirror humanity back to itself with a beautiful message so very timely today.

Hear astrophysicist Janna Levin’s sublime reading of the poem here.

profeminist:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

– Hannah Arendt

From The Origins of Totalitarianism

When you give your seat to a pregnant woman who doesn’t acknowledge and doesn’t sit down, and a young Chinese woman with boxing gloves in her tote happily jumps into it, and you have two bags and a book and an hour commute ahead.