Greetings! How are you? My name is Benedict of Constantinople and, yes, I am a real person. If, by any chance, I do not respond to your messages, please kindly assume that real life got in my way and I am dealing with it. Other than that, please feel free to leave as many messages as you want (without vandalizing my talk page) here.
I am a major supporter of Western ideology and culture. That is not to say that I hate everything to do with the Orient, rather it is to say that I merely enjoy studying about the West better.
So, then, without further ado, see you around if I have the chance! Have a nice day!
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
-Cicero, Roman author, orator, & politician (106 BC - 43 BC), Pro Publio Sestio
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana, US (Spanish-born) philosopher (1863 - 1952), The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905
Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.
-Albert Einstein, US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)
Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.
-HH The Dalai Lama
Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice.
-Spinoza
Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
-Immanuel Kant
Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
-Henry David Thoreau
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was a NASA space mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects. The target object, Dimorphos, is a 160-meter-long (525-foot) minor-planet moon of the asteroid Didymos. DART was launched on 24 November 2021 and successfully collided with Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 while about 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth. The collision shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 32 minutes and was mostly achieved by the momentum transfer associated with the recoil of the ejected debris, which was larger than the impact. This video is a timelapse of DART's final five and a half minutes before impacting Dimorphos, and was compiled from photographs captured by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), the spacecraft's 20-centimeter-aperture (7.9-inch) camera, and transmitted to Earth in real time. The replay is ten times faster than reality, except for the last six images, which are shown at the same rate at which the spacecraft returned them. Both Didymos and Dimorphos are visible at the start of the video, and the final frame shows a patch of Dimorphos's surface 16 meters (51 feet) across. DART's impact occurred during transmission of the final image, resulting in a partial frame.Video credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL