Thursday Quote Du Jour: And here I thought my butt was sore from sitting and studying all the time

Sometimes the littlest things in life are the hardest to take.  You can sit on a mountain more comfortably than on a tack.

~Author Unknown

http://www.quotegarden.com

Thursday Quote Du Jour: Keeping it simple

So apparently this brand of yogurt, Liberte, which is normally crazy expensive but I bought on sale at the Co-op for a deep discount, has a thing for quotes about simplicity.  For, lo and behold, I was eating another cup the other day and received this quote on the lid:

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

–Walt Whitman

Having never been a avid reader of Walt Whitman, I cannot comment on his feelings of simplicity.  However, I have yet to meet a Liberte flavored yogurt I didn’t like.  One might say it is simply delicious.

Thursday Quote Du Jour: Nature is no dummy

I stumbled upon this quote, in all places, on the lid of my yogurt

Nature is pleased with simplicity.  And nature is no dummy. 

-Issac Newton

 

Now, any one who believed nature to be simple, much less pleased with simplicity, has never studied Biochemistry.  Nothing in how nature works at the microscopic/molecular level is simple.  It’s actually quite astounding how complicated the things are that we observe as the simple color blue, eating a ripe apple, or even just breathing.  It may appear simple because we are only seeing the outcome of a million things happening “behind the scenes,” as it were, to make these things possible and we have grown up taking them for granted.  But, I assure you my friends these simple actions are not simple at all.

So, sorry Mr. Newton.  Had you known about Biochemistry you would not have felt this way about nature loving simplicity.  But you were most definitely right in that she is no dummy.

By the way, I actually did well on my first Biochem test.  I’m no mother nature, but not so much a dummy either.  I was a nice four points above the average.  While my teacher was disappointed with what she felt was a low average, in a tough subject that gets the short end of the the homework time stick, I was pleased to be above average, even if just by four measly points.

Thursday Quote Du Jour

I’m not a huge Crow fan, but I do like some of her stuff.  Lately they’ve been playing this one on the internet radio station I listen to at work a lot.  I can’t decide if it’s inspirational or depressing, but end of the first verse really sticks in my head.

From Sheryl Crow’s Soak Up the Sun:

It’s not having what you want,
It’s wanting what you’ve got.

 

Thursday Quote Du Jour: A stiff drink is in order, anyone got any vodka?

I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade… And try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.

-Ron White

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_funny.html#DVvEbRYbu2vOYWDA.99

The semester is finally 100% over.  My last final was yesterday.  Ahhhh.  The freedom.  I think this calls for a celebratory drink.  You bring the vodka, I’ve got the lemons.  Oh, yes, have I got lemons.

Did I mention summer school starts Monday?

Thursday Quote Du Jour: Huh? What’s that? Who are you people? What am I doing here?

Stolen from somewhere in the bowels of the internet. I can’t be more specific, I’ve lost my mind not to mention the citation.

 

Thursday Quote Du Jour: Getting the facts

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

-Mark Twain

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_funny.html#DVvEbRYbu2vOYWDA.99

Okay, okay.  I have a fondness for that pseudoscience alien encounter crap.  Not like I believe for a second that aliens abduct and experiment on people.  But, the possibility that other “sentient” beings exist somewhere in the universe is worth pondering.  I just don’t believe for a second that they have been here.  Or if they have that they would have any interest in experimenting on people.  In my mind, if a race of beings was able to figure out how to achieve faster than light speed travel, what on Earth could possibly be curious to them about human biology.  Seems if you can crack the physics of time and space and travel hundreds of light years across the galaxy, there isn’t much left to be discovered in the primitive race of man.  They’d either destroy us like we destroy an anthill or they’d just totally ignore us.  In a way that’s one and the same.

Still I find these TV shows curiously fascinating.

Seriously though, what I enjoy most about all these “Ancient Aliens” theories is laughing at their bunk.  I find it tremendously fun to laugh at how they are built on the premise that we have no other good explanation for things so, lets assume that ancient human beings were too stupid to have any significant scientific knowledge or sophisticated imaginations and that must mean some alien intelligence was afoot here on Earth to build cities of granite, wage nuclear wars, oh, and, but first kill off all the dinosaurs except a few which they repopulated because they posed no threat to the race of humans they were engineering and nurturing.  WTF?

I watched this show about ancient aliens and dinosaurs last night.  It was like they couldn’t decide.  Did ancient aliens destroy all the dinosaurs so the aliens could then raise up the human race “safely?”  Or did they only kill off some, and that up until rather recently there were still small populations of dinosaurs living with humans as is “evidenced” by “dinosaur like” images engraved in stones and buildings in central America and Asia?

Because you know, we were wrong about the extinction of the coelacanth.  Somehow, we managed to miss the existence of a roughly human sized fish in a huge ocean.  Surely we could be wrong about the extinction of land animals like dinosaurs the size of a building.

Still it makes for a good yarn.