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D’arcy Thompson
telekinetics.
a commonplace book
reblogged from: get @baffled
(Source: i-am-the-oracular-spectacular)
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Altruism toward strangers is a behavior not supported by natural selection.Mayr
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When the selective advantage of a skeleton developed among the ancestors of the vertebrates and of the arthropods, the arthropod ancestors had the prerequisites for developing an external skeleton, and the vertebrate ancestors for acquiring an internal skeleton. The entire evolution of these two large groups of organisms has since been affected by this choice among their remote ancestors. It permitted vertebrates to develop such huge creatures as dinosaurs, elephants, and whales, whereas a large crab is the largest type that the arthropods were able to achieve. The need for a regular molt of the external skeleton sets up in arthropods a formidable selection pressure against size increase.Ernst Mayr
Outer space, poems’ rights, and the ocean depths
are the three final frontiers.John F. Buckley
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reblogged from: .i say.
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What people think Old English is: Thou art indeed a fine lad, prithee yonder! Wherefore arest mine pantalones?
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What it actually is: Syððan ǽrest wearð feasceaft funden, hé þæs frófre gebád, wéox under wolcnum weorðmyndum þáh, oð þæt him ǽghwylc ymbsittendra ofer hron-ráde hýran scolde, gomban gyldan. Þæt wæs gód cyning!
Failing and Flying (Jack Gilbert)
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.
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KEEPING QUIETLY
watchful through the blindfold
of sevenfold darkness —
the doctrine of Manifest Density:
1. bright darkness
2. cloaked darkness
3. clotted darkness
4. the dark gong
5. the humming dark engine
6. the plush cinema
7. the disco bat-cave womb
Elaine Equi
After years and years, it’s finally dawned on us.
Art is not an object, but a way of looking at an object.Elaine Equi, “On Hold”
