Open wide and never stop gasping, By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Open wide and never stop gasping
By Mark Morford

I am completely in love with endless jaw-dropping forehead-slapping heart-stopping bursts of insatiable, inexhaustible, completely unknowable mystery.

I am completely in love with the notion that, were you to place everything we know about life, existence, this planet, each other, the heart and mind and breath, skin and spit and blood, all of the science and accumulated data, facts and figures into one enormous bathtub, and everything we do not know, have yet to know and very likely might never ever know over here in this other enormous bathtub, the latter would dwarf the former like a blue whale to a goldfish, the Milky Way to a speck of lint, boundless ever-expanding deep space to your next quick fast flabbergasted gasp.

Every single day, we find new evidence of our completely wonderful ignorance, the sheer impossibility of ever knowing anything for absolute, irrefutable certain.

The quote you just read up top of this column? It's from a biologist who was part of a NASA-led research team working in the still-frozen north, a comment made shortly after dropping an unassuming little probe through a tiny hole in a massive Antarctic ice sheet, a little camera on a cord sliding 600 feet down into freezing, sub-zero, sunless waters where no measurable life of any note or substance will ever be found, because that's just the way it is. ...

(click here to read the rest)

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/03/19/notes031910.DTL&nl=fix)

[eShirl]

1. What's a "research team working in the still-frozen north" doing down south in Antarctica anyway?

No wonder he has no idea what's going on down there!
:rofl:

I'll read the rest of the article now; just had to stop and point that out before I continued...

Thanks for posting this btw! Very interesting.

[Fumesucker]

3. Geography FAIL..

It's hard to take someone seriously who publishes an article with such a glaring mistake.

[Berry Cool]

4. You don't suppose he just did one of those things where he meant "south" and wrote "north" instead?

It happens to the best of us, and then we see it and go "AGGGGH..."

[Fumesucker]

5. I make mistakes in my writing..

But if I was writing for publication I'd be far more careful and I'd proofread several times..

[annabanana]

2. What a great article.

I have the exact same reaction to the discovery of new realms of uncertainty.. Absolute glee.