What blows your mind most......................

 

............................about the Universe?

via

Efficiency is overrated..............

We are rooting for the renaissance of community banking.   Please..........

. . . interstate banking was effectively outlawed until the 1980s. While this was inefficient, it had the effect of ensuring that every state had at least one major bank. Now there are only a handful of major banks in the entire country, and they do not have the same stake in local economies.

Arnold Kling, from here

On bigness..........................

 Adversarial interoperability creates productivity and value. And having a smaller part of a more vibrant market is far better than dominating a moribund one.

-Seth Godin, from here

On power..........................

Why has there been so much misunderstanding around that day in the Valley of Elah?  On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power.  The reason King Saul is skeptical about David's chances is that David is small and Goliath is large.  Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might.  He doesn't appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.  Saul is not alone in making that mistake. . . .

      What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant.  In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness.  There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants.  The powerful and strong are not always what they seem.

-Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

50,000 light-year wide close-up....

The question was posed, "How much should we know?" and the answer gently wafted by, "Not so much."

Messier 61 Close Up Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, ESO, Amateur Data; Processing & Copyright: Robert Gendler & Roberto Colombari
Explanation: Image data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory, and small telescopes on planet Earth are combined in this magnificent portrait of face-on spiral galaxy Messier 61 (M61). A mere 55 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies, M61 is alsoknown as NGC 4303. It's considered to be an example of a barred spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way. Like other spiral galaxies, M61 also features sweeping spiral arms, cosmic dust lanes, pinkish star forming regions, and young blue star clusters. The bright galactic core is offset to the left in this 50 thousand light-year wide close-up.

from the Astronomy Picture of the Day

A great sentence....................

Sure, there is government waste, but it is commensurate with size and clarity of mission. 

-Preston McAfee, as cut-and-pasted from here

Scale.............................

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. 

-Jeff Bezos, from here again, as they say, read the whole thing"

Biggitude...............................

"M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars."

All the information you want (and a larger photo) is here 

If you are interested in the "are there more stars in the sky or grains of sand on the beach" question, you can pursue answers here.

Color me doubtful...........

     In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.

-Neil deGrasse Tyson, from the opening paragraph to Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

And we're making more every day.....

"The commercial real estate market is roughly the same size as the U.S. stock market."

-taken from here

Subsidiarity..............................

"People should learn to deal with a world, which since the Fall of Man has been demonstrably imperfect.  They should  'cultivate their gardens.'"

-David Warren, as extracted from this Too Big to Succeed essay

subsidiarity defined here 

More stuff I never knew.......................

     Aristotle, a leader of Greek learning with a passion for encyclopedic knowledge, described the earth as unmoving.  Even so, the Greeks soon discovered that the earth was not what it seemed.  They found that the earth was a sphere, and that was a big surprise.  The Greeks also knew quite accurately just how big our sphere is.
     The Greeks noticed that the slant of the sun's rays changed as one moved from north to south.  The difference of the angle at two points on earth, one directly south of the other, could be easily observed at noon during the summer solstice (when the sun appears to come as far north as it ever does).  If one knows this angle and the distance between the points of measurement, on can determine the circumference of the earth.  Eratosthenes is credited with originating this principle and first applying it.  To measure the angle, he used a perpendicular stick in Alexandria and a well with vertical walls in Syrene (modern Aswan).  The stick in Alexandria cast a shadow that indicated the sun was 7° 12' from the vertical.  At the same time, the sun was shining directly down the wall at Syrene.  The distance between the well and the stick was 493 miles. Since 7° 12' is 1/50 of 360°, the circumference of the earth was calculated to by 50 x 493, or 24,661 miles.  This is only about 150 miles less than today's best measurement.

-Edward Teller,  The Pursuit of Simplicity

Size matters.............................

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” 

-Kilgore Trout, as channeled by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

image via

There really is no way...................

.......................................you can make Her fit:

Columbus makes a few mistakes....

     The diameter of the spherical Earth had been calculated accurately by the Greek Eratosthenes in the second century BC, and his calculation was still widely known in the time of Columbus.  Though no European foresaw what lay in wait for Columbus, since all thought mistakenly that the  Ocean Sea, empty of land, was much larger than it was, almost all who could read and had looked into the subject understood that Columbus was seriously underestimating the overall size of the Earth.*
     Columbus, basing his calculations on inaccurate assumptions, theorized that the east coast of Asia could be reached by a European ship within a few weeks of its leaving port.  The actual circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers, whereas Columbus assumed it to be closer to 25,000 kilometers.  Compounding his mistake was his misreading - in a Latin translation - of a renowned ninth-century Persian astronomer, Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Faghani, known in the West as Alfraganus.  The Persian's correct measurements were given in Arabic miles, which Columbus assumed to be the same as Roman miles.  In actuality, Roman miles are about 25 percent shorter than Arabic ones.  Had the Ocean not held the Americas and the vast sea been empty of land between Europe and Asia, Columbus and his crew, heading west, would have perished in the deep and never been heard from again.  This had indeed been the fate of several earlier (and well-known) attempts.

-Thomas Cahill,  Heretics and Heroes

*No one who knew anything thought the Earth was flat.  This was an anti-Catholic fable created by a nineteenth-century Frenchman named Jean Antoine Letronne and disseminated widely to English speakers by Washington Irving in his unreliable biography of Columbus.

On drops and buckets......................

"Portion control via vessel size is a secret to success and happiness."

-Seth Godin, as excerpted from here

The historian in me....................

...............................................believes this to be a mighty truth:

"The treaty seems to mean whatever the politicians in the big countries want it to mean."

-Mervyn King

Expecting a correction, any year now..................

............but for now, we're still opting for wide open spaces:

Larger graph and back story are here.

Size matters.......................

Speaking of Paradoxes.............

12.  Make small, big.  And big, small.

These endless small things.  What's the context?
Where do they really fit in?  What are you actually trying to do?  Make the small, big.

Those big things.  The 'man on the moon stuff.'  How can you make it brain friendly?  And time friendly?  Break it down, break it down, break it down.  Make the big, small.

-Nicholas Bate,  Paradoxical Productivity 35