Beauty in the face of sadness

In the absence of real con­tent about either the Apo­logy or what’s just happened in East Timor (I prom­ise I will post about both tomor­row), I give you this from 

mer­ovingian

:

“There is a dif­fer­ence,” the cater­pil­lar told me, “between a reas­on­able argu­ment and a proven cor­rel­a­tion. A good orator can come up with argu­ments to sup­port any point of view, and even find stat­ist­ics to back it up. If you want to be a good orator, you should learn how to do that, too. The only way to find truth is to take those points of view, use them to make pre­dic­tions, and then com­pare those pre­dic­tions with real exper­i­mental data – and you’d better make the pre­dic­tions before you look at the data, son, or you’re not going to learn any­thing. This is how we find truth. This is the dif­fer­ence between sci­ence and opinion.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, “Prove it.”

The cater­pil­lar sighed, and in rapid suc­ces­sion he turned into a cocoon, then a but­ter­fly, then Lao Tzu.