Excerpts from Book that I read

Starting in 1816, the Niepce brothers also worked sporadically on the idea of fixing a shadow image. They found that certain asphalt compound was light-sensitive, and in the 1820s they produced the first photograph, an image of a man leading a horse, dates from 1825 . the heliograph was an image fixed on polished pewter coated with a thin layer of bitumen, or asphalt, dissolved in lavender oil. The image had to be exposed in the camera for at least eight hours, the brothers said, but it may have taken days. Nicephore Niepce took his invention to the Royal Society in London, whose members were not impressed. He then partnered with Louis-Mande Daguerre, who developed a technique for capturing images on silver-coated copper sheets. Silver salts were extremely light-sensitive. Daguerre's copper images -- daguerreotypes -- along with lithography, enjoyed tremendous popularity, whereas heliographs were completely ignored. ~ Page 236

In order to feel socially connected to others, we like to think we know them, and that to some extent we can predict their behavior. Take a moment to think about someone you know well -- a close friend, family member, spouse, and so on, and rate that person according to the three option above. Now go back and rate yourself on the same items. Most people rate their friend in terms of traits (the first two columns) but rate themselves in terms of situations (the third column). Why? Because by definition we see only the public actions of others. For our own behaviors, we have access not just to the public actions but to our private actions, private feelings, and private thoughts as well. Our own lives seem to us to be more filled with rich diversity of thoughts and behaviors because we are experiencing a wider range of behaviors in ourselves while effectively having only one-sided evidence about others. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls this the "invisibility" problem -- the inner thoughts of others is invisible to us. ~ Page 144

Planet Earth has a second and more accessible source of energy; sunlight! In the past, few critics derided Darwin's evolutionary scenario because, they claimed, evolutionary progress contradicted the second law of thermodynamics. The second law tells us that everything in the universe runs down or moves to a state of lower energy and diminished organization. Evolution on planet Earth has done exactly the opposite! Not to worry: the second law applies to closed systems, and planet Earth is not a closed system -- as anyone who has suffered a sunburn knows! By circling the Sun in the "Goldilocks orbit," the Earth and its atmosphere maintain just those temperatures needed for keeping water wet. Clearly, the second law holds true: the Sun is "running down" on an enormous scale. Intercepting less than a billionth of that outward flowing radiation, our days are sunny, allowing photosynthesis to power much of the living enterprise. Though a number of bacteria can make a decent living at the edge of lightless 'sea-floor vents, or by using a descent living at the edge of lightless sea-floor vents, or by using the energy of chemical degradation, all the rest of us are powered by our star. ~ Page 205

English is a river. Its content is always changing and it has many tributaries. Its characteristics include impermanence. Indeed, there can be no single definition of the English language. This conclusion applies across history and across countries. It's not only the language that's different now. So are the speakers. In the middle of the last century, around 400 million people spoke English. The total is now 1.5 billion, while the proportion of them living in Britain, North America and Australasia has declined. There is no historical parallel for this growth in English usuage and the shift in the language's center of gravity. English has become a global language not through any inherent virtues but because of the political and economic power of successively the British Empire and the United States. ~

Existential philosophy challenges the contention that philosophy is inherently high-flown; that the search for truth quires a turning away from the world of our concrete experience, as Plato's cave allegory would have us believe. It rejects the Platonic-Cartesian-Hegelian ideal of eternal truth or absolute knowledge on the one hand and, on the other, the positivist levelling which insists on objectivity and calculation. Contending that both approaches are abstract and inadequate for an understanding of our being-in-the-world, existentialist philosophy seeks to awaken us to an awareness of our fundamental involvement in a natural-cultural-historical milieu. It stresses that we are not neutral observers but rather, situated participants in an ongoing, open-ended, socio-historical drama. It claims that truth comes into being in our concrete co-existence with others and cannot be served from language and history. The existentialists declare that a non-situated human being is inconceivable, that the philosopher does not survey the world, and the philosophy is firmly rooted in a situation which has a historical depth. Far fom being the unfolding of absolute knowledge, 'philosophising starts with our situation' and attempts to illuminate it. The existentialist philosophers' central concern is to prompt humans not to live thoughtlessly but rather, to have a keen awareness of their freedom and responsibility in the shipping of a situation in which they are always already involved. ~ ix Preface

We live on a smoky planet. Viewed from s;ace, the Earth is brighter than it once was, as sunlight reflects outward from a worldwide haze layer several kilometers thick. From the ground this baze makes skies that were once an intense dark blue appear milky over most of the planet's inhabited areas. The denser the population, the thicker the haze layer: One pollution plume streams out into the Atlantic from the east coast of North America, while and equivalent European plume spreads eastward into Asia. From China a thicker pall stretches across the Pacific, while smoky clouds from South Asia and southern Africa extend over the northern and southern portion of the Indian Ocean. Worldwide smoke dust, and other airborne particles released by human activity have the same combined effect as a constant medium-size volcanic eruption, scattering sulfur and soot high into the upper atmosphere. Here is another, very visible, manifestation of the Anthopocene: We have changed the color of the sky Together, these anthropogenic airborne particles are known as "aerosols," and their impacts jointly from one of climate science's greatest unsolved puzzles. The same particles may have a warming or a cooling effect overall, depending on its elemental makeup and where it hangs in the atmosphere at any precise time. .... Page 183

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_occidentalis ****

There is a peculiar paradox in the Present. On the one hand, we willingly define it as 'being'; what is present 'is' -- in contrast to the future which is not yet and to the past which is no longer. But on the other hand, a rigorous analysis which would attempt to rid of the present of all which is not it -- i.e., of the past and the immediate future -- would find that nothing remained by an infinitesimal instant. As Husserl remarks in his 'Essays on the Inner Consciousness of Time' the ideal limit of a division pushed to infinity is a nothingness. Thus each time that we approach the study of human reality from a new point of view we rediscover that indissoluble dyad, 'Being and Nothingness' ~ Page 176

www.smithsonianmag.com/history/origin-number-zero-180953392