Disagree. Healthy.

"Note further that in science, conformity is anathema to success. The persistent accusations that we are all trying to agree with one another is laughable to scientists attempting to advance their careers. The best way to get famous in your own lifetime is to pose an idea that is counter to prevailing research and which ultimately earns a consistency of observations and experiment. This ensures healthy disagreement at all times while working on the bleeding edge of discovery." Neil deGrasse Tyson

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-degrasse-tyson/what-science-is-and-how-and-why-it-works_b_8595642.html

Photo: Dejan

Persist.

Tourism is one of the most persistent human activities.
http://www.delo.si/mnenja/turizem-je-ena-najbolj-trdozivih-cloveskih-aktivnosti.html

Respond.

"We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are — as far as we know — the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don’t know that, but we’re made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we’re combined in such a way that we can describe what it’s like to be alive, to be witnesses. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding." Mark Strand (1934–2014)

Photo: Dejan

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/28/mark-strand-creativity/?mc_cid=f2a44c2b67&mc_eid=8a631ce51e
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/nyregion/mark-strand-80-dies-pulitzer-winning-poet-laureate.html?_r=0

Limited?

Michael Witbrock's tweet:

at iCiS workshop "No single human can synthesize data from 100 million scientific articles and 1,000 data sources" -> no set of humans can

Photo: Dejan

Science-Fiction, Science-Passion.

"The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is finite."

Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Photo: wikipedia.org

Who do you love?

Thanks, Carrie.

Be free.

There are texts where you just can not change anything. Below is one of them from here.

“I go nowhere. Movies, theater, exhibitions–nothing. My only inspiration is my life. I am old. I have made every mistake possible. I have paid for everything. I am not very good to lead the daily life, to speak frankly. But I am very interested in high-quality literature and very, very interested in science, mathematics, biology, astrophysics, and things like that. I love the poetry of these things.

I live mainly on my oyster farm in the southwest of France, on a small island with 12 houses and without cars, electricity, or water. It’s a very rough life, a very basic life. The island is full of mud. I also have a house on a small island in Venice. If you are with the person you love, a good book, good music, and in front of you is the sea, the forest, the Venice bay, or 200 million oysters, that’s enough.

Every morning, take royal jelly and omega-3 oil, eat oysters, and have a good sexual life. Don’t care about anything, and never listen to anybody. Be free.”

Nothing could better describe myself, than this interview, one of the best I have read in a long time. Meet Philippe Starck, my personal hero, and maybe the most famous and prolific designer alive.

Read the interview with Starck for Fast Company.

Thanks, Andrej, for your description.

Da Vinci Code for Web of Life

Da Vinci Code, biodiversity and Fritjof Capra's Web of Life. What do they have in common? Start with this movie and continue with further readings of the first three.