Thought

Robert A. Heinlein

Sharing

Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.

Robert A. Heinlein, Assignment in Eternity (1953)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Townhall: Be Like China?
SharingIt’s getting to become more and more popular to bash …
Petition Rights and Wrongs
SharingQuite a theory: No law is unfair if only that law …
A Different Conversation
Sharing“Here’s the difference between me and the other candidates,” says …
Extraordinarily Unusual
Sharing“It’s a government-on-government fight,” reports Seattle-based KOMO News, as the Pierce …
Blue Colorado Big Spenders
Sharing“The Trump years may have cemented Colorado’s blue-state status — time will …

Abolish. Or Set in Stone
November 13, 2024
Paul Jacob knows what to do with hypocrisy on at …Read More »
Destroying Dane Farming
November 12, 2024
Paul Jacob on Europe’s ongoing suicide over “greenhouse gases.”Read More »
Disaster Relief Pass-Over
November 11, 2024
Paul Jacob on partisanship at FEMA.Read More »
Exemplary Rejections
November 8, 2024
Paul Jacob celebrates voters in three states who protected their …Read More »
Not Now
November 7, 2024
Paul Jacob on political lessons to be learned — or …Read More »

The Blob
SharingSometimes people say that term limits are irrelevant. It’s not …
Quinn Is In
SharingBlagojevich is out! Quinn is in! There is gubernatorial hope …
The Smoking Russian Donut
Sharing“Politicians in prison garb,” headlined a recent Sun Sentinel editorial, “shake …
Abiding by Term Limits
SharingU.S. Senator Tom Coburn would easily win a third term in …
A Bloombergian, Buzzing Confusion
SharingA politician has changed his mind about term limits. Over the …

Awful Aspirations
SharingA funny thing happened on the way to voting on …
Re-Packaging Nonsense as Wisdom
SharingWhen committed to folly, clever people make it look wise. An …
Overkill … for Your Health
SharingNews stories about death- and illness-by-vaping keep hitting us. But …
The Venezuela Chaos
SharingI have friends who call themselves anarchists. Their theory? Government …
They Aren’t Lying Now?
Sharing“You lie!” When U.S. Representative Joe Wilson (R‑SC) shouted this …

On this day in 1833, Denison Olmsted was alerted by his neighbors to something truly amazing, a night sky filled with shooting stars.

Not just a one or two or a dozen or a hundred: 72,000 or more per hour. Though recognizing where among the constellations meteors came from was ancient knowledge, it had not been recorded by modern-era scientists, at least in this case. What Olmsted noticed was that the meteors were coming from one point in the sky, the constellation Leo. This regular meteor event is now called the Leonid meteor stream.

In the morning, Olmsted wrote a brief report on the meteor storm for the New Haven Daily Herald newspaper, which elicited correspondence from around the country, thus beginning a social storm, in a sense: crowd-sourced science.