“I believe in the indomitable human spirit and the amazing capacity we have for understanding the world; for love, joy and happiness. Science not only does not take away any of those things, it adds to the sum of human knowledge. When I look through my little telescope in my backyard at the planets, moon or Andromeda galaxy that is 2.9 million light-years away, I can enjoy the beauty of the night sky and appreciate it on an emotional level. Then I can think that the photons of light that are landing on my retina left 2.9 million years ago, when we were just barely bipedal hominids in Africa, and are just now arriving tonight. Boy, that’s just awe-inspiring.”

Read it here.

It took me long enough, but I finally got through the 1000+ pictures we brought home from our trip to Zambia and London. Don’t worry, I’ve pared them down to about 250, so you don’t have to wade through out-of-focus shots of monkeys and zebras. Go here to see them. We’re still planning to edit our videos down and post a few select clips, but don’t hold your breath for those.

Also, I posted pics from the most recent Solstice Parade. See them here, unless you don’t like looking at painted cyclists.

For no particular reason, I decided to rebuild PetermanDotNet around a blog application (WordPress). Not so much to become a (oooh!) blogger, but rather just to have an excuse to play with some more open-source code.

Older, more static articles appear in the list on the right, so that’s where you’ll need to look to get your fix of junkie squirrel stories. All the photos are over in the Gallery, should you happen to be looking for them.

I’ve had this quote on the site in one form or another since day one. No reason to change that tradition.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, eveyone 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… 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