Canadians are so lucky.

Perspective.

In America white folks don't riot for justice.

But let their favorite sports team win? Well then it's clearly time to set some cars on fire and kick in a few storefront windows.

Did you ever take a moment to appreciate the true size of Africa?

Courtesy of io9: 

We've seen this comparison made before, albeit never as lucidly as this. Behold: major countries of the world, overlaid atop an outline of the positively giant African continent. 

If this is your first time seeing this comparison, you might be surprised by Africa's immensity. If that's the case, there's a decent chance you can trace your warped view of geographic scale back to a "compromise projection" – map projections so-named for their tendency to sacrifice things like accurate geographic size and shape in exchange for, say, nice, straight lines.

Oh and it's a continent too, not a country. Just in case you were confused by that like somebody we could mention. 

Just a reminder that often things are simply not as they seem.

For instance that is NOT where Alaska is located.

Nor Hawaii for that matter.

The View of Life. A matter of perspective.

I am interested in your feedback to this brilliant graphic.

I read it the first time from the top to the bottom, and did not think too much of it, but after rereading it the other direction I was struck by how deftly it represents the two disparate views of God.

Final image of the day.

That is a picture of Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini probe.

I thought that after a day of fighting over politics, religion, and holidays it might be nice to recognize how petty our silly differences are when put into perspective.

We may feel that we are the center of the universe, and the most important creatures in existence, but the first is simply untrue and the second? Well the second has not yet been determined.

However if I had to venture a guess.

A gentle reminder about perspective from a 1st grade child.

From the mouths of babes.

It's been beautiful in Anchorage lately.

How is it where you live?

It has been a long day, let's end it with an important and timeless reality check from the great Carl Sagan.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. 

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. 

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. 

-- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Sleep well my friends, and never forget that though we may seem insignificant in the great scheme of things, that in fact while we live within the universe, the universe also lives within each of us.

Namaste