taken from BibliOdyssey
Nikolaus Joseph (van) Jacquin (1727-1817) was a Dutch scientist who studied medicine, chemistry and botany in Leiden, Paris and, most notably, Vienna. As a regular visitor to the gardens at Schönbrunn Palace* in Vienna, Jacquin met the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and was invited to accompany a botanical collecting voyage to the Caribbean and Central America in the 1750s.
The four year expedition gave rise to Jacquin’s first botanical publication and brought him to the attention of the great Carl Linnaeus*, who became a life-long correspondent and friend of Jacquin. Linnaeus commented about that first Jacquin publication ['Enumeratio Systematica Plantarum' (1760)] on West Indian plants:
“I have seldom seen such a small booklet so rich in golden knowledge. I read it during the evening and could not sleep at night because I dreamed of your beautiful plants.”
But I think this tykylevits is from Finland, he’s not ice swimming but it does look a bit chilly. You may remember his video We Have Many American Cars I posted not long ago…
Pier 54 used to be really beautiful, a landing for luxury ships on Manhattan’s west side. The Titanic was supposed to land here, instead The Carpathia arrived bearing the survivors of the Titanic. The structure was torn down in 1991 in favor of the West Side Highway (gag).
As it is now it’s one of my favorite spots because there’s nothing on it, a rarity in Manhattan. Hardly any people use the two benches at the end so you can actually be alone there. Don’t tell anyone about it. I’ll try to go back and get some more photos of it soon.
Here’s a throwaway image from my cellphone.
this image looks to me like it was taken from a VHS ‘back in the day’.
Here is the pier in its glory days with The Lusitania docked along side.
There is a banner on the gate to the pier laying out some rough plans for a park there, they currently host concerts.
This is NGC 4911: Spiral Diving into a Dense Cluster, taken from this great website ‘Astronomy Photo of the Day‘. On their site they have explanations of the pictures and huge versions so you can really get into them. Very cool.
