departure to unknown lands
Of the gladest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey to unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the Slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood….afresh dawns the morn of life…
Richard Francis Burton, Journal Entry (2 December 1856)
Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.
Niels Bohr
- Catalan number (Wikipedia)
In combinatorial mathematics, the Catalan numbers are a sequence of natural numbers that occur in various counting problems, often involving recursively defined objects. They are named after the French-Belgian mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think that this to be the normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Douglas Adams in The Scientific Indian Science Fiction Anthology
To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.
Mark Twain
