I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. - Neil deGrasse Tyson

What keeps me awake at night: wondering whether human species is just too stupid to figure out the Universe. I just wonder. I lose sleep over that. Because we define ourselves as intelligent— because we made up the test to say that. And we sit alone at the top of the intelligence chart because we invented the exam, and all the other species of life on Earth are not. So who's to say that the first species (us) to be intelligent (us) has just enough intelligence to actually decode everything that's decodable in the Cosmos? [...] Think of the next closest thing to us, the bonobo chimp— 98½% identical DNA, yet you cannot teach them trigonometry, they have no concept of it. So if that's only 1½% difference in our DNA— and so imagine 1½% beyond us, rather than below us, in intelligence. [...] Their toddlers would be talking about things that would completely confound us.

Respect to all graduates this spring. Reminder that a Commencement is a beginning not an end. If your school did right by you, a lifetime of continued learning awaits, lest you ossify in place, forever clutching to how things were on graduation day, while the World passes you by.

It has been said that every great emerging scientific truth goes to three phases: First people say: "It can't be true". Second they say: "It conflicts with the bible." Third they say: "It's true all along."