Nadia > Nadia's Quotes

“Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.

- A Carcass”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary