#patterns

Many people and governments share the mistaken belief that science, with new, ingenious devices and techniques, can rescue us from the troubles we face without our having to mend our ways and change our patterns of activity. This is not so. ↗

— Henry W. Kendall

#belief #change #devices #face #governments

A climate's changes are tough to quantify. Butterflies can help. Entomologists prefer "junk species--" the kind of butterflies too common for most collections-- to keep up with what's going on in the insect's world. They're easy to find and observe. When do something unusual, something's changed in the area. Art Shapiro's team at UC Davis monitors ten local study sites, some since the 1970s. The ubiquitous species are the study's go-tos, helping distinguish between lasting changes (climate warming, habitat loss) and ones that will right themselves (one cold winter, droughts like last year's). Consistency is key; they collect details year after year, no empty data sets between. A few species have disappeared from parts of the study area altogether, probably a lasting change. On the other hand, seemingly big news in 2012 might be just a year's aberration. Two butterflies came back to the city of Davis last year, the umber skipper after 30 years, the woodland skipper after 20-- both likely a result of a dry winter with near-perfect breeding conditions of sunny afternoons and cool nights. ↗

— Johnson Rizzo National Geographic Feb.

#changes #climate-change #environment #habitat #patterns

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings. We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#day-to-day #escape #explanation #freedom #future

I love my parents very much, but people either continue or break the patterns of what their life should be and I just want to completely break whatever patterns would lead me to the same life choices that they made. ↗

— Leighton Meester

#choices #completely #continue #either #i

I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices, by which to find that pattern and be happy. ↗

— Mary Balogh

#fate #patterns #freedom

There are patterns which emerge in one's life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme ↗

— Jacqueline Carey

#life #patterns #theme #life

A man's thoughts dye his soul, attributed to Marcus Aurelius ↗

— Elisabeth Elliot

#life

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it. ↗

— Tony Hillerman

#order #patterns #rain #randomness #weather

I stepped into the bedroom where he was killed and looked up at the ceiling, where you could still see the patterns of blood that had spurted from bin Laden's head when the bullet fired by a U.S. Navy SEAL tore through the terrorist leader's face. ↗

— Peter L. Bergen

#bin #blood #bullet #ceiling #could

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. ↗

— Edward de Bono

#creativity #different #different way #established #involves