Orts #891

World population has tripled in my lifetime.
When my parents were born, the world’s population was less than 1.8 billion.

"There are currently 7.6 billion people on the planet, and in 2030 there will be 8.6 billion — another one billion in just over a decade! If even half of them get cars, have air-conditioners and eat high-protein diets like Americans now do, we will devour and burn up the planet beyond recognition. So what does that mean? It means clean energy and efficiency have to be the next great global industry or we’re going to be a bad biological experiment, whether there is climate change or not."
    —Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times, August 14, 2018
                          https://nyti.ms/2KVKUqC


You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.
     -- Barbara Ehrenreich, in Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
     context: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/opinion/life-is-short-thats-the-point.html
 

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"Fingerprints are formed by friction from touching the walls of our mother’s womb”
more than you knew there was to know about fingerprints:
https://bit.ly/2NCLVpT