For what do you marvel at humankind?

Monogamy, It doesn't work for a lot of other spieces

 

I went to Italy last year, and after seeing them, I might never be able to really get my brain around the idea that the David and the Sistene Chapel were done by the same person. It blows my mind.

 

I am awed by the Internet search engine ... and I am awed by Wikipedia.

For quite a while, I took the view that you can't trust Wikipedia (which you can't completely) and all that. But you know what? That's actually kind of secondary when you see the glut of information on ANYTHING, and the immediacy of it. I mean, shit, you can find the up-to-date roster of Nottingham Forest in 10 seconds ... with links to any player's complete biography.

Am I going to quote it as a news source? No. Is the information valuable and comprehensive? Hell, it's no wonder nobody looks at Britannica anymore.

 

I was awed by other churches in Europe, but none quite like St. Paul's in London. Walk to the middle and look up at the dome and the surrounding walls, the intricate designs done hundreds of feet in the air with such precision absolutely blew my mind.

 

He called himself "something half-finished by nature."

 

He was right, too.
I am awed that we didn't hang his half-finished ass for treason.

 

They fully expected him to die in prison or they probably would have hanged him from the nearest tree.

I am awed -- freakin' awed -- that something that feeble could wield so much power, influence and statecraft.

I have a photo of myself lying next to the small gate that fell on him and crippled him late in life.

 

Spaceflight blows my mind.
To think, we can build a spacecraft that can hit one of those little points of light in the sky as much as 10 years down the road, like the New Horizons mission to Pluto is doing now, is nothing short of miraculous. And then when you look at something like the Cassini probe, where they're doing precision maneuvers through Saturn's rings and landing something made by human hands on a moon halfway across the solar system...my god, that's a beautiful thing.
And to think, it's an undertaking that's still in its infancy., relatively speaking. Who knows what we'll be able to do and where we can go with the technological advances of the next 100 years?

Something else I marvel at is just how the whole system of a city works. Pipes, electricity, sewage, garbage, food delivery ... how it all keeps humming and rarely misses a beat. So many parts, so many people all interdependent on each other and yet somehow it works.

 

Skyscrapers and air travel amaze me as well, given the whole thing about how if people were meant to fly, they'd be born with wings. I often think about the whole fact that we have developed thumbs and how difficult things would be without them.

But to me, I think that the most marvelous thing about humankind is sight itself. I don't know that anything in the world could exist if people didn't have eyes. We could still communicate without ears, we could eat without taste buds, but we couldn't get anywhere without eyes.

 

Art.

 

OK. I'll plead stupid here. Who is that?

 

An insanely obscure reference for this or any thread: Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States of America.