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Marie Curie is one of my science heroes, and I posted some of her quotes the other night after at the Heterodox Academy discussion of this. I thought I'd repost them here as a bit of a break from the rest of the arguments over the memo. Also, if you want a great descriptions of why Marie Curie is so cool, look here:

http://www.badassoftheweek.com...

Anyway, Enjoy!

âoeBe less curious about people and more curious about ideas.â

âoeIn science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.â

âoeLife is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.â

âoeYou cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.â

âoeNothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.â

âoeI am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.â

At least one site begs to differ...

http://www.badassoftheweek.com...

His service records are sealed and Lee doesn't talk much about his service (when pressed on the subject, he reportedly asks his interviewer, "Can you keep a secret?". When they excitedly say yes, he leans in close and says, "So can I."), but we do know that by the time he retired as a Flight Lieutenant in 1945 he'd been personally decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslavian, English, and Polish governments and was good friends with Josip Broz Tito, so draw your own conclusions.

There's a wonderful bio here that kind of expands on a lot of those points.

What about the Haast's eagle that preyed on the moa? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... For a more colorful description see http://www.badassoftheweek.com...

Forget about Chuck Norris and Rajnikant, look at Bishnu Shrestha instead.

Regarding the "millennia of decline" : Middle Ages, once called the Dark Ages... but apparently some good things happened in there too besides the societal collapse and depopulation, so the unreservedly dark term has become less popular. It was an unambiguous step backwards though that lasted a rather long time.

No, it's not unambiguous.

At least, one very good thing happened: the fall of an empire that had its own share of bad things (slavery, military industrial complex through its Legions, its own share of systematic corruption and inequality, etc.). Hey, like you said: not all change is good. The street goes both ways, the fall of Rome isn't necessarily a bad thing. What came after is much more vibrant, and frankly awesome (if Rome didn't fall, we might not have had stories like the Crusades or the Vikings (who has the most badass religion)

Wow, they even had to bring a ninja in on the case to bring him down:
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/paleokostas1.jpg

Well, you could always get a bunch of your friends together, storm the prison, and free him yourself.

You don't need a bunch of friends, just a helicopter: http://www.badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=29600886975

With little media attention on the recall, Musk might have a point about the unfair treatment Tesla gets in the news.

Well you haven't factored in that with a name like "Escape", you know the outcome of any fires will be fine. No such assurance strapping yourself into something named after a guy who lit 200 lightbulbs from a power source 26 miles away.

Who is the webmaster of this site?

Jules Winnfield?
http://www.badassoftheweek.com/winnfield.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/

Or his 'real life' doppelganger, Samuel L. Jackson? :D
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000168/

Can't tell since the registrant is a privacy proxy service based in Provo, Utah.

Anyway, that site is how a basic website SHOULD be done with an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM OF BS.

Back when the web got started, it was just HTML-enhanced text, pictures, and links to other webpages and downloadable content.

Thanks to advertising/marketing, the web is now CHOKED with bloated webpages who's sole purpose is to get people to buy stuff or serve up ad impressions or corporate image slickness as much as possible and across as many pages as possible.... :P

CAPTCHA: organic
Pretty much describes the early web before it got 'turned out' through commercialization and became 'plastic' and artificial as it is now for the most part.... :(

Such as the US of the Victorian era?

I agree comrade! Let's start another Civil War that kills off more Americans than WW1+2 combined. Disposing dead bodies is a lot cheaper than caring for them.

But it's not like we don't have cutting edge technology to treat people who aren't quite dead yet. Just ask Mary E Walker and her saw. Get it? Saw? Cutting edge?

So after we killed off a bunch of our citizens or leave them crippled, we can raise income taxes (thanks for introducing it to America, Abe and Victorian Era US Republicans!) and force Reconstruction on select states. Those states would be further crippled, so the people would become desperate, so they'll leave for other states and offer themselves up for cheap. That will solve the whole businesses-can't-hire-cheap-workers problem.

But I'm still not sure how we can keep things going in the long run and prevent history from repeating itself. No, I don't mean WW1 or 2 repeating. I mean socialists like Ford showing up again. It's all Ford's fault really. If he didn't pay and treat his workers well, those workers would remain cheap, and unions and in turn socialism wouldn't have gained so much strength (they wouldn't be able to point to Ford and say "but he can pay well, why can't you")

This is the story of one man and his rifle: http://www.badassoftheweek.com/hayha.html

And Cliff Young proved it long ago without resorting to random CAPITALIZATION that sounds like RANDOM SCREAMING to the inner voice that most of us USE when reading your blimey POST.

War is full of stories of individual soldiers facing down numerous enemies. Take for example:
Army Dentist who was found with 98 dead enemy soldiers in front of him. Later study shows that he was shot 76 times, and speculation is that 24 of those bullet wounds were while he was still alive.
Daniel Inouye Killed 25 enemy soldiers in WWII. Literally gave his right arm to kill Nazis.
Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart. Yes, there were two of them, fighting hundreds of armed enemies. They killed over 20 bad guys, while armed with a semi-automatic rifle, a bolt action rifle, and pistols.
Or you could just go read the listing of MoH citations. There's thousands of men who took it upon themselves to take on larger enemy forces. No regard for their personal safety, many made the ultimate sacrifice and died

War is full of stories of individual soldiers facing down numerous enemies. Take for example:
Army Dentist who was found with 98 dead enemy soldiers in front of him. Later study shows that he was shot 76 times, and speculation is that 24 of those bullet wounds were while he was still alive.
Daniel Inouye Killed 25 enemy soldiers in WWII. Literally gave his right arm to kill Nazis.
Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart. Yes, there were two of them, fighting hundreds of armed enemies. They killed over 20 bad guys, while armed with a semi-automatic rifle, a bolt action rifle, and pistols.
Or you could just go read the listing of MoH citations. There's thousands of men who took it upon themselves to take on larger enemy forces. No regard for their personal safety, many made the ultimate sacrifice and died

This has got to be one of the best tributes to the A-10 Warthog :)

Hell, you could contract with the guy who writes http://badassoftheweek.com/ and make movies about the people he writes about. A lot of them would probably turn out like 300, but some would be really good movies

It's probably more feasible just to get Aki Ra to train people.

He's pretty good at it.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Buzz's attempt to make punching idiots in the face a fashionable pass time failed.

Perhaps it isn't a fashionable pastime for you.

Just like so much in Australia, they're like a normal magpie except they want to kill you.

As documented here