Your Quote of the Day

"According to the recognized, proven principles of aerodynamics, the bumblebee cannot fly because of the shape and weight of its body in relation to the total wing area. But the bumblebee doesn't know this, so it goes ahead and flies anyway."

My favorite quote because, like the Bumblebee, I've overcome most of the challenges I have faced all of my life. ---BBB


A lovely myth, but the reality is different:

The basic principles of bumblebee flight, and insect flight generally, have been pretty well understood for many years. Somehow, though, the idea that bees "violate aerodynamic theory" got embedded in folklore.

The story was initially circulated in German technical universities in the 1930s. Supposedly during dinner a biologist asked an aerodynamics expert about insect flight. The aerodynamicist did a few calculations and found that, according to the accepted theory of the day, bumblebees didn't generate enough lift to fly. The biologist, delighted to have a chance to show up those arrogant SOBs in the hard sciences, promptly spread the story far and wide.

Once he sobered up, however, the aerodynamicist surely realized what the problem was--a faulty analogy between bees and conventional fixed-wing aircraft. Bees' wings are small relative to their bodies. If an airplane were built the same way, it'd never get off the ground. But bees aren't like airplanes, they're like helicopters. Their wings work on the same principle as helicopter blades--to be precise, "reverse-pitch semirotary helicopter blades," to quote one authority. A moving airfoil, whether it's a helicopter blade or a bee wing, generates a lot more lift than a stationary one.

The real challenge with bees wasn't figuring out the aerodynamics but the mechanics: specifically, how bees can move their wings so fast--roughly 200 beats per second, which is 10 or 20 times the firing rate of the nervous system. The trick apparently is that the bee's wing muscles (thorax muscles, actually) don't expand and contract so much as vibrate, like a rubber band. A nerve impulse comes along and twangs the muscle, much as you might pluck a guitar string, and it vibrates the wing up and down a few times until the next impulse comes along.

— Cecil Adams

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.”
Oscar Wilde

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. ~ Charles Kuralt

" Sooner or later, I tend to rub everyone the wrong way" Jack Burton

"Before I knowed it, I was sayin' out loud, 'The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing.' . . . . I says, 'What's this call, this sperit?' An' I says, 'It's love. I love people so much I'm fit to bust, sometimes.' . . . . I figgered, 'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit-the human sperit-the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it."
- Preacher Casey (Grapes of Wrath)

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
--Paulo Freire, educator (1921-1997)

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.
Abraham Lincoln

Never eat more than you can lift.
~miss piggy.

"I'm gonna put a curse on you and all your kids will be born completely naked" - Jimi Hendrix

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
- Eleanor Roosevelt


(Good morning, edgar! )

Morning????? It happens to be night!!!!!!

well, them upside down people is all mixed up

Of course it is, edgar.
Where you are.

Where I am, it's a brilliant, new sunny day ... heading for lunch time.



And I'm hoping you & I will not be the only daily quoters!
Though our quotes are pretty damn good, you gotta admit!

"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."
— Neil Gaiman

Not at all dj!
We're a day ahead of you, for starters!

"Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight." ~ Bruce Cockburn

"A thing is not necessarily a lie just because it isn't necessarily true."
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
— Neil Gaiman