Science
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Poetic Linnaeus
‘Poets are born, not made. I was not born a poet, but a botanist instead, so I offer the fruit of the little harvest which God has vouchsafed me.‘― Carolus Linnaeus
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Preserve your health
‘Strive to preserve your health, and in this you will the better succeed in proportion as you keep clear of the physicians, for their drugs are a kind of alchemy concerning which there are no fewer books than there are medicines.‘― Leonardo da Vinci
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Wisdom
In 2002 the American biologist Chandler Robbins discovered a ringed Albatross on the Midway islands. The ring had number Z333 and it turned out to be a bird he had ringed himself half a century before in 1956. At the time of ringing the Albatross was at least 5 years old, making the bird older…
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Working with dates and times in python
Having finished all the most urgent tasks at work and having started the year end vacation I decided to pick up my python learning on Datacamp again. I followed the course on working with dates and types in python which is part of their python programmer track. It was a nice introduction to the datetime…
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Understanding the Universe. An introduction to physics and astrophysics, James B. Seaborn (ISBN 978-146126868-0, Springer)
James Seaborn has been teaching an introductory course for many years and this book is the translation into book form of that course. The book is intended for non science majors and teaches physics with an emphasis on topics and applications in astrophysics. I was curious to learn how that approach would work. The result…
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Command And Control, Eric Schlosser (ISBN 9780141037912, Penguin)
Command and Control is written by Eric Schlosser. I read his bestseller fastfood nation long ago and liked it a lot so when this book came out in 2014 I bought it and read it. It was a scary read at the time and this year while we were on holiday this summer I decided…
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Space – The Human Quest
This week was a school holiday week. This is always an opportunity to do something together as a family and searching the internet we came across this exhibition. It is an interactive display of the history of space exploration, from the first unmanned flights from the Russians and Americans to the manned Gemini and then…
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The virtue of solitude
‘Put 2 men together and they quarrel. A hundred of them make a rabble, and if there are a thousand or more, they’ll start a war.’― Bernhard Schmidt
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Something for Nothing
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’― The second law of Thermodynamics

