Look at the slideshow at Talking Points Memo.

A great lecture from Michael Specter about the danger of denying science in the face of overwhelming evidence.  He is especially moving when talking about the plight of Africa.  High-Tech Colonialism isn’t a term I had heard before but our insistence against genetically modified foods and vaccination really is a new form of colonialism.

When you start down the road where belief in magic replaces the evidence of science, you in end up in a place you don’t want to be.

[hattip: BoingBoing]

[hattip: Civil Commotion]

Watching something like this really shows you how minute and tiny we are in our own world and in the Universe.  Our day to day lives are so hectic and we spend so much time on what ends up being such meaningless tasks that we really do forget how amazing the natural world is.

As an 18 year old, My college roommate, Seth, and I travelled to Rocky Mountain National Park to for a short vacation.  We drove all night and camped in the back of his blue 1993 Ford Ranger pickup truck.  The nights were cold and we had no sleeping bags but none of this matter to us as we were so in awe of the majesty that surrounded us.  Growing up in Arkansas and Tennessee, we had both seen mountains, but nothing of the level of these sleeping giants.

One morning we woke before the sun had risen to hike to the base of the Twin Sisters.  As we climbed up the mountain, past the tree line, through the 2 inches of virginal early fall snow to the summit, we stayed silent.  There was nothing that either of us could say that would make sense before the vistas in front of us.  We made the summit around midday and just sat for hours eating our lunch and staring westward towards the expanse of the Rockies.

These moments come far too rarely in our world.  Whenever the do come by its best just to sit back and just be glad that in a world and Universe so daunting and magnificent, we still have a place to call home.

Just look at this place.  Jay Walker…I salute you.

Just peruse some of what this room holds:

-Sputnik–THE actual Sputnik

-A Kelmscott copy of Chaucer’s works which includes some of the most beautiful literary illustrations every produced.

-The Chandelier from Die Another Day.

-A 1665 Bills of Morality chronicle of London

-The instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket

-Andrea Cellarius’ hand-painted celestial atlas from 1660.  THE 1st such maps not centering the universe around Earth.

-A Coverdale Bible.  THE 1st translated from start to finish in English.

-A Nazi Enigma machine

Wow.  Just Wow.

Wearing a huge can-you-believe-it grin is the collection’s impresario, the 52-year-old Internet entrepreneur and founder of Walker Digital — a think tank churning out ideas and patents, it’s best-known for its lucrative Priceline.com. “I started an R&D lab and have been an entrepreneur. So I have a big affinity for the human imagination,” he says. “About a dozen years ago, my collection got so big that I said, ‘It’s time to build a room, a library, that would be about human imagination.’”

[hattip; My friend Captain Pease]

50 years of Exploration map from National Geographic.

It really is amazing how relatively few missions failed considering the use of what we now see as antiquated and, at the time, untested technologies being used to perform such daring missions.  Kudos to every scientist, engineer, astronaut, cosmonaut, astronomer, factory worker, mathematician, physicist, and bureaucrat that made these missions possible and more successful than we could imagine.

[hattip: Laughing Squid]