THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth: never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.”

— Carl Sagan

BIRTHDAYS:

1730 Charles Messier, French astronomer (comet hunter, cataloguer of nebulae/star clusters as “M objects”).

1824 William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Irish-Scottish mathematical physicist and engineer (Kelvin scale, transatlantic telegraph).

1892 Pearl S. Buck, American author (e.g., The Good Earth; Nobel Prize in Literature 1938).

1913 Maurice Wilkes, British computer scientist and inventor (stored program concept for computers).

MISCELLANEOUS:

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