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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

You're terrific!

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” — Ajahn Sumedho

"It has been said that ‘good cooks never measure anything.’ They do. They measure by judgement and experience; until you have a large share of both of these essential qualities, use your spoon and cup or scales." - Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking (1884)


Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. Thoreau, Walden
"...We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity." -George Eliot, Midddlemarch

"To the possessor of money capital, the process of production appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, as a necessary evil for the sake of money- making. All nations with a capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production." - Karl Marx, Das Kapital

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!" - Abraham Lincoln, Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1859

"If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview." Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The New York Times, November 12, 2005,

'[I]t occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!"' -John Stuart Mill, Autobiography.

"All models are wrong. Some are useful" George Box

"[T]he worst of being a really universal sceptic and philosopher [is that] it is such slow work. The very forest of the man's thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy." - Chesterton on George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich - Charles Kindleberger

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide. Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum address