mental scrapbook for the future

from bill bryson's "a short history of nearly everything:"

[atoms] are also fantastically durable. because they are so long-lived,
atoms really get around. every atom you possess has almost certainly
passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on
its way to becoming you. we are each so atomically numerous and so
vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up
to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once
belonged to shakespeare. a billion more each come from buddah and
genghis khan and beethoven, and any other historical figure you can
name. {forces a re-think in me about reincarnation.}

physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields.
when the great austrian physicist wolfgang pauli's wife left hi for a
chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. "had she taken a bullfighter
i would have understood," he remarked to a friend, " but a
*chemist*..."

it was a feeling rutherford would have understood. "all sciene is
either physics or stamp collecting," he once said, in a line that has
been used many times since. there is a certain engaging irony,
therefore, that his award of the nobel prize in 1908 was in chemistry,
not physics.

alexander von humboldt [a friend of swiss naturalist, louis agassiz] may
have had agassiz at least partially in mind when he observed that there
are three stages of scientific discovery: first, people deny that it's
true; then people deny that it is important; finally they credit the
wrong person.

this snippet from charles bukowski's poem, "the burning of the dream"
(wrapping as in the poem, but my ht/blogger might bastardize it)

i was to discover two
things:
a) most publishers thought that anything
boring had something to do with things
profound.
b) that it would take decades of
living and writing
before i would be able to
put down
a sentence that was
anywhere near
what i wanted it to be.