26 FEB 2014 by ideonexus

 A Small Contribution to a Large Project

That evening, at a café near the work site, I had a drink with an iter physicist, who was despondent, fearing that the machine would never work. Why he was staying with the project he couldn’t say. But a few weeks later, after thinking about it, he told me that his mood had lifted. He had come to see his role in both small and sublime terms—akin to a stonemason toiling for years on the York Minster cathedral (begun 1220, finished 1472) without witnessing the work being completed. “I no...
  1  notes

What's it like to be a single individual working on a project that takes many lifetimes? Perspective.

30 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Color Means Nothing in Survival of the Fittest

In these strenuous times, we are likely to become morbid and look constantly on the dark side of life, and spend entirely too much time considering and brooding over what we can't do, rather than what we can do, and instead of growing morose and despondent over opportunities either real or imaginary that are shut from us, let us rejoice at the many unexplored fields in which there is unlimited fame and fortune to the successful explorer and upon which there is no color line; simply the surviv...
Folksonomies: natural selection
Folksonomies: natural selection
  1  notes

Words from George Washington Carver encouraging African Americans to engage in plant breeding to develop improved species.