Smithsonian Quotes

Ask any guy if sex is important in a relationship and the one who says no is lying. I just haven't met that guy yet. When you meet him, let's get him in to the Smithsonian - he's that special and rare.

We want you to break into the Smithsonian." "Always a pleasure," Nick said. Kate raised an eyebrow at Nick. "You've done it before?" Nick shrugged. "Nobody goes to D.C. without visiting the Smithsonian." "Most people go when it's open." "I don't like crowds.

Banks used to issue their own currencies. You can see these old banknotes in the Smithsonian. ‘First National Bank of South Bumfuck will remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,’ or whatever. That had to stop because commerce became nonlocal—you needed to be able to take your money with you when you went out West, or whatever." "But if we’re online, the whole world is local," Randy says.

Perseverance I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.… Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about; otherwise, you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. —Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video Histories, April 20, 1995

The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian’s Doug Erwin, is that we can’t predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors. "There will be plenty of surprises. Let’s face it: who would’ve predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn’t exist, no vertebrate biologist would’ve suggested that anything would do that: he’d have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.

Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half the world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment

Don't you fancy having one of your dresses in the Smithsonian, Shelby?" "Your humor's always been on the odd side, Grant." "Thanks.

The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian's Doug Erwin, is that we can't predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors. "There will be plenty of surprises. Let's face it: who would've predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn't exist, no vertebrate biologist would've suggested that anything would do that: he'd have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.

Tiant, noted for odd pitching mannerisms, is also a famous mound dawdler. Stands on hill like sunstruck archeologist at Knossos. Regards ruins. Studies sun. Studies landscape. Looks at artifact in hand. Wonders: Keep this potsherd or throw it away? Does Smithsonian want it? Hmm. Prepares to throw it away. Pauses. Sudd. discovers writing on object. Hmm. Possible Linear B inscript.? Sighs. Decides. Throws. Wipes face. Repeats whole thing. Innings & hours creep by. Spectators clap, yawn, droop, expire.

team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.

The body is a museum for memories. I am the Smithsonian.

Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

Like a priest carrying home their first computer after hearing about child pornography on the internet, I was practically foaming at the mouth in anticipation during the drive to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

She delivered the paper to the night duty officer and fell into her grateful bed, the voices of the day still whispering, softer than Mapp’s breathing across the room. On the swarming dark she saw the moth’s wise little face. Those glowing eyes had looked at Buffalo Bill. Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half of the world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

that and throughout the Civil War, this single building housed the entirety of the Smithsonian’s collections. But where did this shining testament to science get its true start? Oddly enough, it wasn’t an American who founded the institution,

[Giant northern elephant seals] were presumed extinct as late as 1912 when a group of eight seals was spotted on Guadalupe Island in the South Pacific by a Smithsonian expedition, which shot seven of them! Fortunately they missed one and failed to spot a few others.

When Congress approved the decision to retire the SR-71, the Smithsonian Institution requested that a Blackbird be delivered for eventual display in the Air and Space Museum in Washington and that we set a new transcontinental speed record delivering it from California to Dulles. I had the honor of piloting that final flight on March 6, 1990, for its final 2,300-mile flight between L.A. and D.C. I took off with my backseat navigator, Lt. Col. Joe Vida, at 4:30 in the morning from Palmdale, just outside L.A., and despite the early hour, a huge crowd cheered us off. We hit a tanker over the Pacific then turned and dashed east, accelerating to 2.6 Mach and about sixty thousand feet. Below stretched hundreds of miles of California coastline in the early morning light. In the east and above, the hint of a red sunrise and the bright twinkling lights from Venus, Mars, and Saturn. A moment later we were directly over central California, with the Blackbird’s continual sonic boom serving as an early wake-up call to the millions sleeping below on this special day. I pushed out to Mach 3.3.

Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity. [Joseph Henry was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, named after its benefactor, James Smithson.]

LaHaye’s claim that no historian to date has questioned this prayer book’s authenticity is a flat-out lie. Historians began questioning its authenticity almost as soon as its discovery was reported. In fact, it had already been rejected by the Smithsonian Institution even before its discovery was reported.

69 The Smithsonian’s own view of its mission was that it should “tell visitors immediately what we are about and how we’d like them to change.”70 In other words, the purpose of a taxpayer-supported institution is to express the ideologies of those who run it and to brainwash the visiting public with the vision of the anointed.

Ah, if I had only known then that he was only a common mortal, and that his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of seeds and uncommon yams and extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs for that poor, useless, innocent, mildewed old fossil the Smithsonian Institute, I would have felt so much relieved.

When I had the honor of being included in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2019, I sat for a painting with four objects on a shelf behind me in the composition: a photo of my parents; a photo of Raj, Preetha, and Tara; a Yale SOM baseball cap; and a PepsiCo annual report with the words “Performance with Purpose” on the cover.

A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912–67) was born in Okemah, a small town in Oklahoma, and was named for the Democratic presidential candidate by his father, a businessman involved in real estate, newspaper writing, and local and state politics.

We have to start relocating the things we value,” he says. “Like the Smithsonian Institution, which is sited on top of an old marsh. We have to make seed banks, a global archive for the future, and we have to move our power plants, in order to maintain a functioning society. We have to start lining the trash dumps that line our shores, we have to start preparing for inundation. Remember, the last time carbon dioxide levels were the same as they are today, the ocean was one hundred feet higher.

The telescope, in enabling us to look far out into space, also allows us to look back in time. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. When we look up into the daylight sky, we are not seeing the sun as it currently is but as it was about eight minutes ago, since it takes that long for the light radiating from this familiar star to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Similarly, when the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) receives light waves from the depths of the universe, those waves will have originated from points as far as 76 sextillion (76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away. It will have taken those waves some 13 billion years to arrive on earth, meaning they left their source about a million years after the big bang, and roughly nine to ten years before Earth even formed.

French participation proved decisive in the Battle of Yorktown. Coordinating strategy with Washington, France sent twenty-nine warships and more than ten thousand troops, ultimately forcing the surrender of British General Cornwallis, which effectively ended the war.

It is spring 2007, and the block-long security lines into the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) are missing now while it is closed for renovation. The once controversial and “technically superb” exhibition Science in American Life is due to be phased out. The hot new museum exhibit is at the National Museum of Natural History’s (NMNH) Kenneth E. Behring Hall of Mammals. There, entering this multimedia, multisensory immersive installation, we are invited to a “Mammal Family Reunion—Come meet your relatives!”—in a savvy response to antievolution religious activism.

selling it as a supplement”: In the May 2009 issue of Smithsonian, the article “Honorable Mentions: Near Misses in the Genius Department” describes one Stan Lindberg, a daringly experimental chemist who took it upon himself “to consume every single element of the periodic table.” The article notes, “In addition to holding the North American record for mercury poisoning, his gonzo account of a three-week ytterbium bender… (‘Fear and Loathing in the Lanthanides’) has become a minor classic.” I spent a half hour hungrily trying to track down “Fear and Loathing in the Lanthanides” before realizing I’d been had. The piece is pure fiction. (Although who knows? Elements are strange creatures, and ytterbium might very well get you high.)

Stanford commencement address; Andy Behrendt, “Apple Computer Mogul’s Roots Tied to Green Bay,” (Green Bay) Press Gazette, Dec. 4, 2005; Georgina Dickinson, “Dad Waits for Jobs to iPhone,” New York Post and The Sun (London), Aug. 27, 2011; Mohannad Al-Haj Ali, “Steve Jobs Has Roots in Syria,” Al Hayat, Jan. 16, 2011; Ulf Froitzheim, “Porträt Steve Jobs,” Unternehmen, Nov. 26, 2007. Silicon Valley: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell. Jobs, Smithsonian oral history; Moritz, 46; Berlin, 155–177; Malone, 21–22. School: Interview with Steve Jobs. Jobs, Smithsonian oral history; Sculley, 166; Malone, 11, 28, 72; Young, 25, 34–35; Young and Simon, 18; Moritz, 48, 73–74. Jobs’s address was originally 11161 Crist Drive, before the subdivision was incorporated into the town from the county.

The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons—more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of existence—the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers’ fruit and had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies’ hat. In 1914, the last surviving members of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity. A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s. These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.

The goal was ambitious. Public interest was high. Experts were eager to contribute. Money was readily available. Armed with every ingredient for success, Samuel Pierpont Langley set out in the early 1900s to be the first man to pilot an airplane. Highly regarded, he was a senior officer at the Smithsonian Institution, a mathematics professor who had also worked at Harvard. His friends included some of the most powerful men in government and business, including Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell. Langley was given a $50,000 grant from the War Department to fund his project, a tremendous amount of money for the time. He pulled together the best minds of the day, a veritable dream team of talent and know-how. Langley and his team used the finest materials, and the press followed him everywhere. People all over the country were riveted to the story, waiting to read that he had achieved his goal. With the team he had gathered and ample resources, his success was guaranteed. Or was it? A few hundred miles away, Wilbur and Orville Wright were working on their own flying machine. Their passion to fly was so intense that it inspired the enthusiasm and commitment of a dedicated group in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. There was no funding for their venture. No government grants. No high-level connections. Not a single person on the team had an advanced degree or even a college education, not even Wilbur or Orville. But the team banded together in a humble bicycle shop and made their vision real. On December 17, 1903, a small group witnessed a man take flight for the first time in history. How did the Wright brothers succeed where a better-equipped, better-funded and better-educated team could not? It wasn’t luck. Both the Wright brothers and Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen scientific minds. They were pursuing exactly the same goal, but only the Wright brothers were able to inspire those around them and truly lead their team to develop a technology that would change the world. Only the Wright brothers started with Why. 2.

The troupe also made a 20,000–mile trip into the European war. Hope was the first American entertainer to perform in Sicily. He did a show at Messina just after the enemy had fled the town and was still bombarding the area with its artillery. By the end of the war, it was estimated that Hope had appeared at virtually every camp, naval base, and hospital in the country. He had made half a dozen trips overseas, including a tour of the South Pacific in 1944 that was highlighted by a crash landing in Australia. With him then was the same crew that had gone to Italy the year before: Langford, Colonna, dancer Patty Thomas, guitarist Tony Romano, and an old vaudeville pal, Barney Dean. Newsweek called it “the biggest entertainment giveaway in history,” a pace that no one in show business has ever equaled. “It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective,” novelist John Steinbeck said of Hope. For his service to the country, Hope was given more than 100 awards and citations and two special Oscars. He was voted a place in the Smithsonian’s Living Hall of Fame.

The final word was her daughter’s, in a frank and touching memoir, Knock Wood. Yes, there were disagreements; there were plenty of generation-gap misunderstandings. At the bottom of it was a girl who desperately needed the approval of a father who felt stripped when he had to speak as himself, with no dummy on his lap to make light of things. The book is a love story on both sides: in the end Candice Bergen has placed Charlie McCarthy in an open, healthy spotlight, as a vital piece of her personal history. Bergen did little in television. He was a radio man, even though his art was primarily visual. With Charlie and Mortimer, he emceed the 1956 CBS audience show Do You Trust Your Wife?, and he made numerous guest appearances on TV variety shows of the ’50s. He grew old and gray. Charlie, of course, was eternally young. In September 1978 Bergen announced his retirement: he would do a few more shows, then give his dummy to the Smithsonian. Charlie had been his companion for 56 years. A week later he appeared with Andy Williams at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He died in his sleep after this performance, Oct. 1, 1978.

Trading on the respected names of Harvard and the Smithsonian made Soon’s work particularly valuable. His many obfuscations over the years have been promoted by groups and bloggers aligned with ExxonMobil, the Koch foundations, and the conservative think tanks to which they donated. Many news outlets then reprinted versions of these stories without critical examination,

Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness and The Healing Heart, divides the human race into “positive” and “negative” people: The positive people work miracles, accounting for the evolution of human performance. I add another division, productive and nonproductive people: those who can do things and those who only talk about things (especially talk about why they can’t do things). As far back as I can remember, I was determined to contribute something, to be productive, and I’ve always questioned those who—though they may know much—go through life without making a mental contribution to the species: “If I live, I ought to speak my mind.” Productive people have a love affair with time, with all of love’s ups and downs. They get more from time than others, seem to know how to use time much better than nonproductive people—so much so that they can waste immense quantities of time and still be enormously creative and productive. One of my favorite examples is John Peabody Harrington, the great anthropologist of the American Southwest. At the time of his death, Harrington’s field notes filled a basement of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and several rented warehouses in the Washington suburbs were needed for the overflow. Yet Carobeth Laird, his wife and Harrington’s biographer, called him one of the greatest wasters of time she’d ever known—and said he felt the same way about himself.

The office was a treasure trove for those who delighted in the macabre. It was the Smithsonian of the Lowest Common Denominator. My

Occam’s Razor: The simplest theory is usually the correct one.” He

As circus owner David Hannum famously said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ And, no, dear reader, it was not P.T Barnum who spoke these wise words.

The telescope, in enabling us to look far out into space, also allows us to look back in time. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. When we look up into the daylight sky, we are not seeing the sun as it currently is but as it was about eight minutes ago, since it takes that long for the light radiating from this familiar star to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Similarly, when the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) receives light waves from the depths of the universe, those waves will have originated from points as far as 76 sextillion (76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away. It will have taken those waves some 13 billion years to arrive on earth, meaning they left their source about a million years after the big bang, and roughly nine to ten billion years before Earth even formed.

William Duncan Strong was a scholar, a man ahead of his time: quiet, careful and meticulous in his work, averse to spectacle and publicity. He was among the first to establish that Mosquitia had been inhabited by an ancient, unknown people who were not Maya. Strong spent five months traversing Honduras in 1933, going by dugout canoe up the Río Patuca and several of its tributaries. He kept an illustrated journal, which is preserved in the Smithsonian’s collections—packed with detail and many fine drawings of birds, artifacts, and landscapes.

About 98% of the atoms in the human body are renewed each year. This surprising fact is discussed by Dr. Paul C. Aebersold of Oak Ridge in the latest Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Aebersold based his conclusion on experiments with radioisotopes, which trace the movements of chemical elements in and out of the body.

For more than half a century, [...] American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how the past should look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations should evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored evidence for any human presence at all prior to Clovis--until, at any rate, the mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing paradigm by storm.

I believe in full disclosure and complete transparency. The American people should know as much as they can about a candidate before entering the ballot box.

I know you are loyal to the Smithsonian," Gray finally said. "I know you consider them peaceable, harmless scientists. They aren't. They have an agenda." "Yes!" She said passionately. "Their agenda is to unlock the mysteries of the world around us. There's no profit motive involved, just the insatiable, unquenchable need to know.

The public space of the museum is not my favorite, loud and full of tourists and school groups and hungry hordes. Their curiosity is endearing---they're acolytes for the natural world. And the marble gleams with architectural detail and precious objects all around. But on these, my gray days, entering the building carries the weight of death: all the specimens, thousands of carcasses of every species, stuffed or otherwise retrieved from oblivion so we can know them, yet all dead. The birds I draw and paint, all dead. On these days, my only defense is to imagine every pinned butterfly taking wing, every stuffed marsupial waking up, every preserved plant specimen blooming and carpeting the marble floor like a time-lapse forest, and every bird coming to life, flying up to the dome and away. On the days when the fog comes and hooks into my gut like a sharp-toothed parasite, these visions can save me. The steadier, more consistent salvation, of course, is the work. I can lose myself for hours drawing, for instance, the common loon, with its inky head, white banding at the neck, and an intricacy of pin dots and fractured rectangles cascading across the wings. With the right precision, I can bring the deadness of a bird skin to a striking facsimile of life.

Delores, the Wise Woman of Botany, told me while I was in Washington that every seven years, employees of my pay grade are entitled to a sabbatical, and I'm two years late in taking mine. She helped me fill out the form. I listed my purpose: "to study the birds of the southeastern United States with an emphasis on the marshlands of Florida." Hugh Adamson sputtered an objection, but he couldn't do a thing. Apparently, the sabbatical is a long-standing Smithsonian policy that would actually take an Act of Congress to reverse. I didn't write on the form of my other intention: to freelance, get my name out there, and see whether Florida is where I belong.

Under the sun, they had lain on a wide, thick quilt. A basket held sandwiches, snacks, thermoses of water, and a nice supply of paperbacks. The Washington Monument towered to their right. The US Capitol loomed to the left. The Smithsonian museums lined the streets between the two attractions. Tourists buzzed around them.

Celestial was a tricky woman to figure out; she almost didn’t marry me, although I never doubted her love. For one thing, I made a couple of procedural errors with my proposal, but more than that, I don’t think she planned on getting married at all. She kept this display she called a “vision board,” basically a corkboard where she tacked up words like prosperity, creativity, passion! There were also magazine pictures that showed what she wanted out of life. Her dream was for her artworks to be part of the Smithsonian, but there was also a cottage on Amelia Island and an image of the earth as seen from the moon. No wedding dress or engagement ring factored into this little collage. It didn’t bother me, but it bothered me.

Her dream was for her artworks to be part of the Smithsonian, but there was also a cottage on Amelia Island and an image of the earth as seen from the moon. No wedding dress or engagement ring factored into this little collage. It didn’t bother me, but it bothered me.

In 1958, a New York diamond merchant named Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institute. At forty-five-and-a-half carats, the gem is worth an estimated $200 million (give or take $50 million), but Winston didn’t hire an armored car to deliver it to the Smithsonian. He sent it via the U.S. Postal Service, placing it in a box, wrapping the box in brown paper, and insuring it for $145.29.

The Eyes Of Einstein Albert, you who stood modestly On the shoulder of a giant and saw Worlds beyond Sir Issac's vanishing point, we want your eyes! Eyes that read the Braille of a scarified universe with relative ease, you, Herr Professor, are the seeing eye companion for the dim 20th Century. Atomic pacifist, what patent is there for your dual vision? What fair price for your inner eyewitness Testimony that God is not a gambling man And the curvature of our Space-Time continuum is a grave matter indeed? Your eyes are going to the block soon. I hope the Smithsonian waves the winning paddle So you may, at long last, rest your weary eyes Near the glass jar that contains your Cyclops brain.

On February 8, 1928, known as Lindbergh day since it was the day he crossed the Atlantic Ocean the year before, Charles A. Lindbergh landed at the Campo Columbia airfield near Havana. Lindbergh had visited many countries in his plane, and he had the national flags of each country painted in the fuselage. Having flown from Haiti, on a Goodwill Tour of the Caribbean in his "Spirit of St. Louis," he had the Cuban flag painted on his a single-engine Ryan monoplane. It was the last country he visited before he donated the “Spirit of St. Louis" to the Smithsonian Institution, where it is still exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Like a priest carrying home his first computer after hearing about child pornography on the Internet, I was practically foaming at the mouth in anticipation during the drive to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. I

The buckskin shirt launched one of the most voracious collecting careers in American history. Heye became obsessed with all things Native American, and he would eventually amass a collection of a million pieces. In 1916, he established the Museum of the American Indian on upper Broadway in New York City to house his collection. (In 1990, the museum moved to Washington, DC, and became part of the Smithsonian.) Heye

whale behavioral researcher, Woods Hole Oceano-graphic Institution. Jim Mead Curator of marine mammals, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,

Smithsonian is actually a group of nineteen different museums and a zoo,

Washington used this sword after 1777. On its scabbard is etched “J Bailey, Fish Kill,” as the sword was remounted with a new hilt and silver cross guard in Fishkill, New York, by John Bailey, an immigrant cutler from Sheffield, England. It was used by Washington as his battle sword when commanding the Continental Army for much of the Revolutionary War.

The most prominent of these programs was SELGEM, created by the Smithsonian Institution. An acronym for “SELf GEnerating Master,” SELGEM was a replacement for an even earlier Smithsonian information management system, SIIR. Developed during the 1960s and first placed in operation at the Smithsonian in 1970, SELGEM was soon made available to nonprofit organizations free of charge. Composed of thirty-three unique programs, the package was issued as “a generalized system for information storage, management, and retrieval especially suited for collection management in museums.

Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world, and that’s always been true,” he said in a 1995 interview for the Smithsonian Institution’s oral history project. “I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young.” At the time of the interview Jobs was trying to build NeXT, a software company aiming to disrupt existing players.

Just then they saw a white van driving slowly down the road. It stopped about thirty feet from where KC and Marshall were standing. A

Meanwhile, you have an extra room. Your child’s room. Do not under any circumstances leave your child’s room as is. Your child’s room is not a shrine. It’s not going to the Smithsonian. Turn it into a den, a gym, a guest room, or (if you already have all three) a room for wrapping Christmas presents. Do this as soon as possible. Leaving your child’s room as is may encourage your child to return. You do not want this.

In the words of their best-known commander, the B-29 “had as many bugs543 as the entomological department of the Smithsonian.

The Skunk Works was a unique production company with highly streamlined management, the ability to operate with a high degree of secrecy, and a distaste for paperwork.

Asch took from his bankruptcy an important lesson: he decided that he never wanted to record another hit record. In early 1949, he commented to an unnamed writer from People’s Songs (the newsletter of left-wing folk music) that he had “focused too much time and money on popular jazz” and from this point forward he would focus on “good records,” which would be “sold to a small circle of people who will buy them.

Genesis 6:4; Numbers 13:33; Deuteronomy 3:11; 1 Samuel 17:1. All these passages spoke of giants.

By declaring to world dollar holders their paper would no longer be redeemed for gold, Nixon ‘pulled the plug’ on the world economy, setting into motion a series of events which was to rock the world as never before. Within weeks, confidence in the Smithsonian agreement had begun to collapse.

One generation’s brainwashing was another generation’s mental hygiene. This, too, shaped our world. The psychiatrist’s office ransacked in 1971, with its broken file cabinet (now in the Smithsonian), turns out to be a fitter symbol than the hotel burgled in 1972, not only of the decade’s political fiascoes, and the years leading up to them, but of disasters yet to come whose seeds were already planted.

The first CORONA mission was ready for launch on February 28, 1959—less than 10 months after program go-ahead.

CORONA showed that using a small team of committed people is the right way to carry out such programs. All experience since then has shown that using accounting systems, business school approaches, and management slogans cannot substitute for a small team of intelligent and highly motivated people.

The Air Force’s interest grew greatly. I can recall that shortly before Sputnik, we were all encouraged not to use the word “space” in any documents, but immediately after Sputnik we were encouraged to use the word “space” in all documents.

You’re not expecting us to jump to that?” I asked, worried. “I’m not expecting anything. We’re doing it.” With that, Erica sprang over the railing onto the whale skeleton. She sailed through the air and landed perfectly atop the skull with an agility and finesse I knew I didn’t have in the slightest. I looked around for another way out. The only other exit was blocked by the government agent, who was digging himself out of the dinosaur toys. He had a livid glare in his eye and a plesiosaur jammed in his ear. The SPYDER agents appeared to have lost us, but the government agent was threatening enough. I jumped over the railing. To my surprise, I landed deftly atop the whale skull. Only, the perfect balance thing was completely beyond me. I pitched forward and nearly took a header into the piranha display below. Erica caught me at the last instant and steadied me, but my weight had thrown her off balance too. She now pitched forward herself and had no choice but to leap from the skull and catch onto the lip of the model humpback whale. The cables supporting it strained under the sudden jolt. One snapped free from the ceiling and the whale shifted wildly. Erica swung from the whale’s lip, launched herself into a backflip, and stuck the landing in the middle of the hall. The tourists gathered there all applauded, impressed. As though they figured the Smithsonian had started hiring circus performers to spice things up. Erica looked to me expectantly. So did all the tourists. Now I had potential death and performance anxiety to deal with. Knowing I couldn’t possibly do what Erica had just done, I carefully shimmied down the metal framework that supported the whale skeleton—and still biffed the dismount. I fell backward and landed on my butt atop a large sea turtle. The tourists groaned, like I had let them down.

There was also taken from the mound the skeleton of a man eight feet tall. There were no ornaments beside it. These skeletons were sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

The scene which met my eyes was at once compelling and repelling. The original sweatshop has been preserved for posterity at Levy Pants. If only the Smithsonian Institution, that grab bag of our nation’s refuse, could somehow vacuum-seal the Levy Pants factory and transport it to the capital of the United States of America, each worker frozen in an attitude of labor, the visitors to that questionable museum would defecate into their garish tourist outfits. It is a scene which combines the worst of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; it is mechanized Negro slavery; it represents the progress which the Negro has made from picking cotton to tailoring it. (Were they in the picking stage of their evolution, they would at least be in the healthful outdoors singing and eating watermelons [as they are, I believe, supposed to do when in groups alfresco].) My intense and deeply felt convictions concerning social injustice were aroused. My valve threw in a hearty response.

A 2018 report by Smithsonian magazine and the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund (now Type Investigations) found that over the previous ten years, US taxpayers had directed at least forty million dollars to Confederate monuments, including statues, homes, museums, and cemeteries, as well as Confederate heritage groups.

Nature has a habit of placing some of her most attractive treasures in places where it is difficult to locate and obtain them. —CHARLES DOOLITTLE WALCOTT, FOURTH SECRETARY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Good,” Mr. Axelrod said, “but we cannot meet you at the airport. Are you familiar with the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian?

At it’s most basic level, we believe man is essentially good. Organized religion and big government believe the opposite, that man is fundamentally evil and needs to be controlled or policed.

Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Zombies are of limited use, whereas puppets are invaluable.

To a man holding the puppet strings, the whole world is their Pinocchio.

When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that dated back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had “declined by a third since the industrial revolution—and the change closely tracks with the rise in carbon dioxide

Join the Smithsonian’s Neighborhood Nestwatch program. This is only available in some cities, so check if yours is included. Then researchers will work with you to enhance your nest box observations. If you are not in a Neighborhood Nestwatch city, it is always worth recording your observations on eBird, noting in the comments section what you see the birds doing.

The Wright brothers are famous for pioneering powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft in 1903.* What’s remarkable is that their entire effort cost about $1,000† (approximately $35,000 today2); in contrast, the Smithsonian’s Samuel Langley spent $50,000 ($625,000 today)3 but was unsuccessful in getting his Aerodrome to fly. Numerous French aeronautical dilettantes, though well funded, also couldn’t approach the capabilities the Wrights demonstrated. Each of these failed attempts had something in common: they did not incrementalize. Instead, they designed, built, and tested their “aircraft” all at once. Without feedback along the way, there were flaws in what they thought and in what they built, and they ended up running out of resources before they could try a second or third time.

I also want to point out—and this is much more distressing—that the only people I saw complaining were White. I posted the Smithsonian’s image on my Facebook page, where I expected many of my 250 Black friends would express their outrage. Only one commented. I called Ibou in Senegal. I told him the source of the poster and explained why it was a big deal. I said, “I’m just going to read it to you, from top to bottom. Without comment. Just listen.” So I read it to him: “To be White is to be logical. To be White is to believe in hard work. To be White is to be rational.” When I was done, he just said, “Then I guess I’m White.” He went on to say the people who wrote it are inhuman because these are the things that it takes to be a well-rounded human being. These are the character traits that everyone needs to succeed in life and to lead a good, honorable life.

I think of a buckskin shirt I saw in the Smithsonian Museum. It belonged to an Oglala Lakota man whose body was seized at his death and kept in cold storage for 130 years. He was allowed to be taken home by his family only after the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed in 1990.

Mark W. Moffett is a Smithsonian entomologist who has won the Lowell Thomas Medal from the Explorers Club and the Bowdoin Medal for writing from Harvard. After completing a PhD under E. O. Wilson, he spent years watching ants for his book, Adventures Among Ants.

Extremely important work is being done in the brain biochemistry section of the National Institutes of Mental Health on the subject of brain-body interaction. One of the pioneers in this research is Candace Pert, once chief of that section, whose work is demonstrating communication between the brain and different parts and systems of the body. For those interested, an excellent review of this work appeared in the June 1989 issue of Smithsonian, written by Stephen S. Hall.

It didn’t seem right, it didn’t seem right at all, and part of me wondered—as I looked at the empty kitchen and the empty living room and the locked glass doors leading outside—if my agreement with Felix didn’t cover guests, if it only covered myself. “Paula?” I repeated, my voice a bit louder. On the kitchen counter was the note I had written on the back of a subscription envelope from Smithsonian: “Paula—Off to run some errands. Will be back.

In 1902, as Jim Crow continued to expand as a violent and politically repressive force, the state’s all-white legislature created an annual allocation of the state’s funds for the care of Confederate graves. Smithsonian’s investigation found that in total, the state had spent approximately $9 million in today’s dollars. Much of that funding goes directly to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which received over $1.6 million in funds for Confederate cemeteries from the State of Virginia between 1996 and 2018.

Why is it that we have nineteen Smithsonian museums--nineteen, one just for goddamn postage stamps--and not one is dedicated to memorializing those people who lived in bondage and helped build this country? We would not be the world's superpower today if we had not had two hundred and fifty years of free, limitless labor on which to build our economy. Why now, you ask? What were their names, Dan? They were our founding fathers and mothers just as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whip against their backs. Isn't it time this country made the effort to remember them? And to calculate how much we owe them? It is past time, my friend.

His home in Vermont—the one we actually lived in, as opposed to the two other pristine structures intended mainly to impress his significance upon the world—was a vast, private Smithsonian, packed so tightly it seemed to be constructed of artifacts, rather than mortar and stones.

I had always believed that the [Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture] should be a safe haven that helps Americans wrestle with and better understand the difficult current issues of race, justice, and equality. In essence, the museum is a bully pulpit that provides NMAAHC with the opportunity and responsibility to clarify and contextualize concerns that often divide or perplex the American public.... I think it is important for NMAAHC, for the Smithsonian, to engage in the public square in a manner that brings reason, knowledge, and contextualization to the contemporary challenges faced by America. Actions like this are not without risk to an institution that operates within a federal umbrella. Yet I believe that museums like NMAAHC have an obligation to use their expertise, their platform, to contribute to the greater good of a nation.

I hope that the [Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture] never retreats from embracing controversy and, no matter how multifaceted or incendiary the issue, NMAAHC will strive to help the public find contextualization and common ground in a safe and civil environment. I trust that the museum will always be a bully pulpit where boldness and innovation are more than just words. And to use that platform to combat the creeping sense of selective historical amnesia that limits America's ability to understand its past, and itself. I hope that NMAAHC will always celebrate its diverse staff in ways that nurture, protect, and challenge. And it is my hope that the museum will prod and remind other cultural entities, both within and outside of the Smithsonian, that the ultimate goal is to make a people, make a country better.

(Smithsonian magazine, July 2001, page 55.)

As I conceptualized the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I knew it had to fulfill Mamie Mobley's charge: to be a place that carried the burden of history and the weight of memory, regardless of how painful or difficult it was. At the core of the museum, therefore, would be a commitment to remember.

The careful writer of fiction wants the disaster which grows out of the goal to put considerable additional pressure on the character very soon. If you allow Fred, for example, to pick a scene goal of convincing the Smithsonian Institution to fund his expedition, it could well lead to a “disaster” in which some Washington official says “Yes, but” such requests have to be formally approved by a board which meets only twice a year – thus meaning that the result of this disaster is a waiting period of several months. Or – and this is a much more common mistake – you might err by failing to have Fred note at the outset, in stating his goal, that he needs a decision or declaration right away; in such cases, disasters have a tendency to look more like indefinite delays – and again the story bogs down because the goal was not set up or stated in such a way that a fairly immediate result could be forthcoming.

the Millennium Project, founded after a three-year feasibility study with the United Nations University, Smithsonian Institution, and the Futures Group International, where synthetic biologists affirm that “as computer code is written to create software to augment human capabilities, so too genetic code will be written to create life forms to augment civilization.”[24] Furthermore, as biotech, infotech, nanotech, and cognotech breakthroughs quickly migrate with appropriate synergies to create widespread man-machine adaptation within society, a “global collective intelligence system [hive supermind] will be needed to track all these science and technology advances,” the report goes on to say.

As of February 8, 1979, James Arthur Springer—Jim, as he went by—had been twice married. His first marriage, to a woman named Linda, ended in divorce. His second wife was named Betty. Jim Springer grew up in Ohio and once owned a dog named Toy. He had a son named James Allan (although perhaps with one L). He was a chain-smoker who liked beer. In his garage he had a woodworking bench. He drove a Chevy, suffered from high blood pressure and migraines, and once served as a sheriff’s deputy. His family lived on a quiet street—theirs was the only house on the block. As of February 8, 1979, James Edward Lewis—Jim, as he went by—had been twice married. His first marriage, to a woman named Linda, ended in divorce. His second wife was named Betty. Jim Lewis grew up in Ohio and once owned a dog named Toy. He had a son named James Allan (although perhaps with one L). He was a chain-smoker who liked beer. In his garage he had a woodworking bench. He drove a Chevy, suffered from high blood pressure and migraines, and once served as a sheriff’s deputy. His family lived on a quiet street—theirs was the only house on the block. As of February 8, 1979, Jim Springer and Jim Lewis had almost no knowledge of one another. They had met before, but only as infants. On February 9, 1979, the two met for the first time in nearly forty years. They were identical twins, given up for adoption as one-month-olds, now reunited. The shocking coincidence seems like that of myth, but it’s almost certainly not—shortly after the twins’ reunion, People magazine and Smithsonian magazine reported on the incredible confluence of genetically identical twins with anecdotally identical lives. The two men piqued the curiosity of a researcher named Thomas J. Bouchard, a professor of psychology and the director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota.