"Cast your net wide. Speculate recklessly. Speak to the wide-eyed. Sink your ship. Build it anew. Burn your agreements. Watch the ashes rise."

— Ahmed Salman

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name."

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (translated by Wing-tsit Chan)

"In the eyes of many human beings, life appears to be a unique and special phenome­non. There is, of course, some truth to this belief, since no other planet is known to bear a rich and complex biosphere. However, this view betrays an “organic chauvinism” that leads us to underestimate the vitality of the processes of self­-organization in other spheres of reality. It can also make us forget that, despite the many differences between them, living creatures and their inorganic counter­ parts share a crucial dependence on intense flows of energy and materials. In many respects the circulation is what matters, not the particular forms that it causes to emerge."

— Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

"I suppose I have a vision of a universe that we’re increasingly able to understand through science — and that includes understanding who we are, where we came from, and why we do the things we do. What drives me is the desire to explore both the details of this vision, for their own sake — things like quantum mechanics and cosmology, simply because they’re beautiful and elaborate and fascinating — but also the ways in which we can adapt to this situation, and use what we’re learning constructively."
Presidential Standard of Vanuatu

Presidential Standard of Vanuatu

Diachronic map of the Spanish Empire
The areas of the world that at one time were territories of the Spanish Monarchy or Empire
Emblem of Kazakhstan

Emblem of Kazakhstan

serendipity (n.)

“faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries,” a rare word before 20c., coined by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann dated Jan. 28, 1754, but which apparently was not published until 1833.

Walpole said he formed the word from the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip” (an English version was published in 1722) whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of” [Walpole].

Serendip, (also Serendib), attested by 1708 in English, is an old name for Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island.”

Attention was called to the word in an article in The Saturday Review of June 16, 1877 [“An ungrateful world has probably almost forgotten Horace Walpole’s attempt to enrich the English language with the term "Serendipity.” etc.]; it begins to turn up in publication 1890s but still is not in Century Dictionary (1902) .

https://www.etymonline.com/word/serendipity

Time Calibrated Morpho-molecular Classification of Nassellaria (Radiolaria), Protist

Miguel M. Sandin, Loïc Pillet, Tristan Biard, Camille Poirier, Estelle Bigeard, Sarah Romac, Noritoshi Suzuki, Fabrice Not,

Volume 170, Issue 2, 2019, Pages 187-208, ISSN 1434-4610

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143446101830110X

Latest Permian Spumellaria and Entactinaria (Radiolaria) from South ChinaSpumellaires et Entactinaires (Radiolaires) du Permien terminal de Chine du Sud
Qinglai Feng, Weihong He, Songzhu Gu, Yuxi Jin, Youyan Meng

Latest Permian Spumellaria and Entactinaria (Radiolaria) from South ChinaSpumellaires et Entactinaires (Radiolaires) du Permien terminal de Chine du Sud

Qinglai Feng, Weihong He, Songzhu Gu, Yuxi Jin, Youyan Meng

Late Sandbian (Sa2) radiolarians of the Pingliang Formation from the Guanzhuang section, Gansu Province, ChinaSiyumini Perera, Jonathan C. Aitchison...

Late Sandbian (Sa2) radiolarians of the Pingliang Formation from the Guanzhuang section, Gansu Province, ChinaSiyumini Perera, Jonathan C. Aitchison (https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-paleontology/volume-96/issue-1/jpa.2021.86/Late-Sandbian-Sa2-radiolarians-of-the-Pingliang-Formation-from-the/10.1017/jpa.2021.86.full)

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