Why spend money on science?

Via SciAm, I've discovered what might just be the greatest science quote ever. When asked why the US government should spend money on a particle accelerator without any strategic value Robert R. Wilson replied:

It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Amen.

Supper at The Fat Pig

Arriving home later than expected from my afternoon bike ride, I had to scrambled to get myself showered and changed in time to get to The Fat Pig for supper. But I needn't have worried: I bumped into most of the others along the way and we arrived en masse only a few minutes later than planned.

I went for the vegetarian option — squash and artichoke heart risotto — doctor_squale followed convention by going for the muscles, with the partridge being the most popular choice with everyone else — something that occasioned a debate about whether a partridge is a caille or not (it isn't: after consulting with someone's smartphone, we discovered that a caille is a quail, while a partridge is a perdrix). The preferred of choice for pudding was the tarte tatin — very nice but not, perhaps, entirely authentic — with the dissenters either opting for the cheese board or a particularly impressive chocolate brownie.

Sadly, after supper, as befitting our status as people drained by a series of late nights — perhaps I'm being unfair to the others, extrapolating my own state of near-total exhaustion — we (almost) all called it a night slunk off shockingly early leaving AC, the lone adventurous exception, to paint the town in our stead.