In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:
“Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown.”
- Humphrey Davy
“Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.”
- Jacob Brownowski
In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:
“Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.”
- Isaac Asimov
“It can’t be Nature, for it is not sense.”
- Charles Churchill
“Nature never says one thing, Wisdom another.”
- Juvenal
In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:
“God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I look at the incredible wealth of biodiversity contained within just the class mammalia in its 164 million years of existence, it’s staggering what we don’t know. The immense number of species that weren’t preserved in the fossil record and stories that took place before homo sapiens arrived to witness them are fantastic example of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s observation, “The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance.”

Amphicyon ingens chasing Ramoceros osborni
|
You can check out the complete flickr set here.
In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:
“Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”
- Sir Francis Bacon
“We cannot command nature except by obeying her.”
- Sir Francis Bacon
A short short story where a human avatar for real life is confronted with another client’s superior robot avatar. Posted to 365tomorrows, you can read it here.
In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:
“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge. . . observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.”
- Denis Diderot
“Nature does not give to those who will not spend.”
- R. J. Baughan
Following in the footsteps of bloggers TGAW and Chriggy.
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page of results, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.
The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.**
12. Your flickr name
Here’s my result:

Ryan’s Mosaic Meme
(Click to Enlarge)
|
1. Ryan McGinness,
2. “What? Sushi? What is it?”,
3. Coles runs for TD,
4. My purple all star for the first time at the park,
5. rachel maddow,
6. Bubbly girls,
7. Giza,
8. fruit salad,
9. “Toward a New Enlightenment” Seven,
10. Mars,
11. its true,
12. The New York Botanical Gardens: Darwin Tattoo
Note: PhotoFunLab has a form to create one of these, but I prefer the option of selecting my favorite photo from the first page of results.
In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
- Albert Einstein
“Human beings are part of nature. Anything they do is natural. It’s impossible for anything in nature to do anything unnatural.”
- Philip Jose Farmer
Last year I ran a series of photos and quotes in celebration of Take a Child Outside Week that purely rejoiced in nature. For this year’s event, running from September 24th through the 30th, I’ve chosen quotes emphasizing the importance of nature in education and understanding ourselves:
“Sit down before a fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”
- Thomas Henry Huxley
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
- Albert Einstein