"If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as “human rights”? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must consider him worthy of attempts at conversion?"
- Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (via astrotastic)

"I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"
-

Richard Feynman

“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character

(via lospaziobianco)

tiny-librarian:

The first, Emilie du Chatelet, was a woman cut to a superhuman scale. “A genius in virtually every realm of mathematics,” she outsmarted the leading male scholars of her day. In addition, she looked like a celebrity model, loved like a Lotharia, and lived like a sultana. “The wench,” said a Romeo of the age, “is formidable.” “The most brilliant member of her sex in Europe,” she was also a “passionate,” magisterial siren who captured and held the two beaux du jour of Paris, the duc de Richelieu and Voltaire.

Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love

This woman is my hero.