Hip As Phuck!

sci-universe:
“Today, 79 years ago, a man with a spectacular sense of wonder was born. Through his lifetime, he explained how the world works, encouraged people to learn new things, and to grasp the Universe as it really is. Other than being an...sci-universe:
“Today, 79 years ago, a man with a spectacular sense of wonder was born. Through his lifetime, he explained how the world works, encouraged people to learn new things, and to grasp the Universe as it really is. Other than being an...sci-universe:
“Today, 79 years ago, a man with a spectacular sense of wonder was born. Through his lifetime, he explained how the world works, encouraged people to learn new things, and to grasp the Universe as it really is. Other than being an...

sci-universe:

Today, 79 years ago, a man with a spectacular sense of wonder was born.  Through his lifetime, he explained how the world works, encouraged people to learn new things, and to grasp the Universe as it really is. Other than being an astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences, he was simply a passionately curious human being.

I am often asked what got me so interested in science. It started when I got to know how enormous the Universe is. When I got to know that there are ungraspably lot of galaxies, each of which are composed of gas and dust and billions upon billions of stars. And that every star of these may be a sun to someone. Yet here, in some forgotten part of our ordinary home galaxy, on a tiny speck of rock and metal, life evolved. And all that I got to know thanks to this same man.

Happy birthday, Carl  (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996)


The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. …

Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex — on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking. …

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. …

Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds.

A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word “crazy” to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. …

When I’m high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. …

[T]he devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. …

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it’s as if two people are reading each other’s minds.

— Happy birthday, Mr. Sagan. (via kateoplis)


They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them refusing anything he may possess when he is asked for it. They exhibit great love toward all others in preference to themselves… They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Christopher Columbus via Howard Zinn (via kateoplis)