A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

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Edvard Munch (12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) is a Norwegian painter who is considered the father of expressionism and one of the most influential figures in the world of modern art. His childhood was darkened by illness, death, and the constant fear of inheriting a mental condition that ran in the family. However, he managed to maintain a relative mental composure. 

He studied Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania (today's Oslo), where he became part of the bohemia and met the Norwegian nihilist writer Hans Jæger. The latter inspired Munch to begin to paint his inner emotional and psychological states, which was seminal for the development of his style.

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1. The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

2. If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

3. Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

4. Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

5. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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As the aviation industry emerges from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, when passenger numbers plummeted, the number of flights is increasing again. The industry is recovering to pre-pandemic levels of air passenger journeys, with some estimates forecasting over 40% growth by 2050.

In general, crises aside, air passenger travel tends to double every 15 years, with the aviation sector also proving one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It currently accounts for 2% of global GHG emissions, but this is forecast to potentially triple by 2050 from 2015 levels on its existing trajectory.

Credit: Kurt Vonnegut in a 1990 portrait Yousuf Karsh / National Portrait Gallery

"A Man Without a Country (subtitle: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America) is an essay collection published in 2005 by the author Kurt Vonnegut. The essays deal with topics ranging from the importance of humor, to problems with modern technology, to Vonnegut's opinions on the differences between men and women. Many of the essays explicate Vonnegut's views about politics and the issues in modern American society, often from a humanistic perspective." (via Wikipedia)

Credit: A February 1848 daguerreotype of Schelling; via Wikipedia

1. "There is no greatness without a continual solicitation to madness which, while it must be overcome, must never be completely lacking. One might profit by classifying men in this respect. The one kind are those in whom there is no madness at all ... and are so-called men of intellect whose works and deeds are nothing but cold works and deeds of the intellect... But where there is no madness, there is, to be sure, also no real, active, living intellect. For wherein is intellect to prove itself but in the conquest, mastery, and ordering of madness?"