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Quotes of the Day for 27 December 2004 - Ovals

Johannes Kepler war born at Weil-der-Stadt, Germany on this date in 1571. Born to a poor family, his intelligence earned him a university scholarship at T&uuml;bingen where he prepared to become a Lutheran pastor. However, he was sidetracked by learning of the work of Copernicus and spent the rest of his life working in the physics of vision and planetary motion. He determined that the path of the planets was elliptical rather than circular, was the first to understand that the tides are caused by the moon, and is credited with a staggering list of insights in astronomy. Alas, he had a theological dispute with the Lutheran church, and a greater one with the Roman church, so found himself forced to leave several situations as the two sides gained and lost ground through the Thirty Years War. In his honor, I've dug up some gems on ovals, ellipses, and orbits.

You really have to experience the feeling of being with the president in the Oval Office.... It's a disease I came to call Ovalitis.
     - John Dean

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets - they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.
     - May Sarton, 1912 - 1995

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
     - Victor Hugo, 1802 - 1885

Love is that orbit of the restless soul
  Whose circle grazes the confines of space,
  Bounding within the limits of its race
Utmost extremes.
     - George Henry Boker, 1823 - 1890

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
     - Douglas Noel Adams, 1952 - 2001

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