For the stars

"He aimed for the stars, but sometimes he hit England."

- Mort Saul on Werner von Braun

the death of knowledge

"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge." - Alfred North Whitehead

As quoted on the excellent futilitycloset.com

No misnomer

Gentleman in wigs and satin knee-britches composing philosophical tracts - the Founding Fathers (and their equally quaintly bedecked spouses) little resemble the 20th-century image of revolutionaries: Lenin atop a cannon rallying the sailors at Kronstadt, or Mao in peasant garb haranguing the troops on the Long March. But the American Revolution was no misnomer. It irreparably shattered the twin pillars of tradition: monarchical authority and hereditary privilege; it revivified an ancient experiment in democracy, conferring political form on a fractious people; and it loosened the bonds of society, giving free rein to acquisitive, religious, and reforming energies. More than its topographical constituents - mountains and farmlands, forests and towns - the new nation was an amalgam of ideas, extracted from classical Greece and Rome, from the Old and New Testaments, from peasant culture and Enlightenment philosophy, fused in the heat of war and invasion, and then poured, white hot, over much of North America, whose borders it eventually overspilled.

- from Mapping America's Past, pg. 60

From Asimov

- Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel, commander-in-chief of the British fleet, was murdered in 1707 by an old woman as he struggled ashore after the loss of his ship on the rocks of the Scilly Islands. She killed him in the belief, current at the time among coastal inhabitants, that a body washed up was a derelict, thus giving her legal possession of the emerald ring on the admiral's finger.

- The American paleontologist Edward Cope (1840 - 97), whose large collection of fossil mammals is at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, was a Quaker and consequently refused to carry a gun during his U.S. Western expeditions, despite the very real danger from Indians. He once flabbergasted hostile Indians surrounding him by removing his false teeth and putting them back, over and over. The Indians let him go.

- Ben Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the U.S. national symbol. He considered the eagle "a bird of bad moral character" because it lives "by sharping and robbing."

- Cyprus was one of the world's important mining centers in ancient times, but for reasons still unknown the Romans halted operations there and sealed the tunnels. Many of the tunnels were found and reopened in this century, thanks to clever detective work by an American mining engineer, D.A. Gunther. In the New York Public Library, he had happened to find an ancient account of the mines. Years of ingenious search in Cyprus led him to the tunnels, which he found complete with usable support timbers and oil lamps. Cyprus became an important mining center again.

- A well-intentioned philanthropist, Eugene Scheifflin, instituted a project in the 1890s to bring to America all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. Unfortunately, Hotspur talks about the starling in Henry IV, Part I; starlings were therefore let loose in New York's Central Park. The noisy nuisances now number in the millions from Alaska to Mexico, and they will be with us for as long as the plays of Shakespeare. Maybe longer.

- from Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts