The stupidest sentence I've read today

"We account the whale immortal," Herman Melville wrote in the ur-whale text, Moby-Dick. Yet even as Melville published his book, in 1851, it would take another century for humans to film the whale in its natural habitat. We knew what the Earth looked like from outer space before we knew what the sperm whale looked like underwater. As Ishmael notes, "the living leviathan never fairly floated itself for its portrait."

- Philip Hoare, "Whales," Slate,
Friday, March 5, 2010
(emph. added)

Wow! That's almost as amazing as the fact it was another 37 years from Melville's publication of Moby Dick to the invention of the first motion-picture camera we know of and 26 more years on top of that until somebody shot the first underwater movie!

Amazing!