Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Micro-sand! just sayin'...

Pictures of sand: Close up photographs reveal its incredible beauty

'via Blog this'

3 comments:

  1. Super neat! I love how something can appear so ordinary at first, but when examined up close it can be extraordinary. Beautiful.

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  2. This immediately reminded me of Carl Sagan. Here is a passage from the wikipedia page:

    The popular perception of his characterization of large cosmic quantities continued to be a sense of wonderment at the vastness of space and time, as in his phrase "The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth." However, this famous saying was widely misunderstood, as he was in fact referring to the world being at a "critical branch point in history" as in the following quote from Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 8: "Journeys in Space and Time":
    "Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history: what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well."

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  3. I do believe Carl was reading his Blake
    http://www.bartleby.com/236/60.html

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