As a child, one of my favorite television shows was the science fiction series Star Trek (the original series), which I have written about previously. I was too young to have seen…

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Arnold Henrich Kortenkamp was born about 1771 and died in Greffen 28 April 1837. 1 He was a kötter (cotter), a farmer who typically owned a cottage and small…

A rare use of a common word

Favorited Deconstructing A 17th Century Letter by Wouter Groeneveld (Brainbaking) This type of thing is always highly fascinating to me. Using artefacts, here 17th century letters that survived to…

A Neptune transit to the angles of your chart is invariably life-changing. These transits put you into a liminal state, as the structure of your life dissolves. You go through some sort of fluid…

Part Two Quote The realm of poetry does not lie outside the world, a fantastic impossibility, the product of a poet's mind; it wishes to be precisely the opposite of this, the unadorned expression of…

One of the first classes I decided to take when starting the Chinese language course at university was History of Chinese Art. And, this is one of my favourite paintings: Night-Shining White by Han…

The Complete Manufacturing Process of a Vintage Typewriter: Archival Engineering Reconstruction—1930–1938 is a 73-page book published in 2025 by Type Space in Portland, Oregon. Type Space is a…

Related Links :: Tags: < personal > · < reflections > Summary: Continuing a lifelong fondness of King Arthur’s court. For the world is only a tissue of masks and veils; And when…

The seventh of Atisa’s nine contemplations is: Your Loved Ones Cannot Keep You from Death Every orphan, of any age, feels the loss of the “protection” that is a parent. Surely if our parents are…

The past few days have been filled with discussion about the Lombards, aka the Langobards, and their origin according to medieval texts. This blog has mostly dealt with them previously because of…

According to Aristophanes, ancient Greek frogs used to say “brekekekex koax koax”. I am fairly sure that “koax” is simply the ancient Greek spelling of “quarks”,…

Analytic A Posteriori Three distinctions have dominated the last four hundred years of philosophy: necessary-contingent, a priori-a posteriori, analytic-synthetic. It used to be thought that these…

I don't have time to blog much nowadays, but I want to keep this place active. One recurring use for the site is to outline things that I find myself having to repeat; better to just have a place I…

Cheap generation makes answers abundant; the scarce task is deciding which past answer is still authorized to govern.

Here’s a story I made. There was once a mathematical system that tried to define itself fully. When it succeeded, it ceased to be a mathematical system — and everything could then be “proved” from…

Genesis 31.3 (KJV): And the Lord said unto Jacob, Return unto the land of thy fathers, and to thy kindred; and I will be with thee. Id. 31.13: Now arise, get thee out from this land, and return unto…

Back from holiday; this year's miscellaneous observations on Darja follow. Gemination of intervocalic p in loans seems intuitive enough, but how to explain the gemination in سيرّو sirru "syrup"?…

I am admittedly a reluctant atheist, but having grown up in the Christian religion and having read the Bible cover-to-cover three times, I have some knowledge of the Christian faith. […]

When we think of shields in the ancient Aegean, we usually think of the round Argive shield with its rim and armband, and the crescent-shaped Thracian pelte with its straps. These are the shields…

This is my second post detailing my experiments in attempting to prompt current AI systems to autonomously generate publishable work in philosophy. In my first experiment, I did not do much work to…

After reading the two front-page articles from the August 20 issue of China Social Science News translated at 2026: Beware Historical Nihilism! The Tang Dynasty was Not a Fake Dynasty I got to…

Madrid On 22 August 1936, violence reached the heart of Republican Madrid when armed militiamen entered the Modelo Prison and murdered dozens of political prisoners held inside its walls. Among those…

Tower and Bridge appear to be the two most common structural metaphors in modernist literature. Crane, of course, wrote about both. Several poets live in towers: Robinson Jeffers and Yeats, who both…

Aa a history teacher, personally, I think it is shocking and haunting at the same time. I mean the fact that entire civilizations once built temples, sang hymns, and offered sacrifices to gods like…

A new 4,000-year-old clay tablet with markings whose symbolism has yet to be deciphered has been unearthed at the prehistoric pile dwelling site of Lucone di Polpenazze in Lombardy, northern Italy.…

“But to politicks and literature there must be an end.” Leave it to Dr. Johnson to remind us of the vanity of our wishes. Human striving often comes to little or nothing. Above he writes of a poet…

Blessed art thou, O daughter, by the Lord the most high God, above all women upon the earth. Blessed be the Lord who made heaven and earth....Because he hath so magnified thy name this day, that thy…

Justin Bieber's "Sorry" is a song about regret, asking for forgiveness, and wanting another chance after having hurt someone. But philosophically speaking, what exactly makes an apology morally…

(I wrote this using help of translation tools so this is no indicator of how good my italian actually is - it's really much worse.) Ho questo problemo, che volo potere parlare molte lingue, ma perché…

Unpacking my things after months in storage, I rediscovered a book I bought just before the move: Sculpture by Johann Gottfried von Herder. I only made it partway through before it went into a box,…

People who don’t stick with the Party line on China’s history are sometimes denounced as historical nihilists. Don’t be one of those. There are consequences. See: 2026: PRC…

In the previous chapter, Culture As Armor, I explored Ernest Becker’s argument that culture provides us with systems of meaning that help protect us from the psychological weight of knowing that we…

When is a number not a number? Let’s find out. The Swahili word nymba [ˈɲu.ᵐbɑ] looks and sounds a bit like the English word number, but actually means house. It comes from Proto-Bantu *njʊ̀mbá…

God’s Sovereign Plans Behind Your Most Unproductive Days / In My Father’s School Are Many Classrooms / Dads: When You Stumble, Stumble Forward / The Weight of Glory / What New Opportunities and…

The Battle of Dunkeld was fought on 21 August 1689 in the narrow streets around Dunkeld Cathedral, pitting Jacobite clansmen against a newly raised regiment of Covenanters. Although heavily…

I could not have articulated it this way back then, but I felt straitjacketed by much of the male poetic tradition in which I was being educated and in which I understood I would be expected to write

The top answers seem to be: productized Easter eggs, World’s Fair swag, and to trick unproductive hens into laying eggs. Finding out any more involves going on Facebook, so I’ll just…

One of America’s leading Shakespearean actresses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was born in Poland and spoke English with a pronounced Polish accent. Helena Modjeska (1840-1909)…

The Educating for American Democracy roadmap asks all educators (and policymakers–and perhaps students) to address this challenge: “How can we offer an account of U.S. constitutional…

My husband and I began our journey of curating our family history collection in 2013. We had hundreds of theater and concert programs to donate, collected by Wood ancestors and our relatives from the…

My brain’s favorite 3:00 a.m. thoughts are the ones that make it hard for me to get back to sleep. Here’s the doozy it woke me up with in the wee hours this morning. It said, “If…

The Royal Navy R-class battleship HMS Royal Sovereign (05) in 1941 was a Great War-era bruiser who was having a very busy year. With larger German surface raiders amok in the North Atlantic, she rode…

21st August, 1879 147 years ago tonight, something happened in the quiet village of Knock, County Mayo, that would change not only the lives of the local village, but of millions of Irish and…

From his post guarding the Chain Bridge above Washington, Lieutenant Martin Byrne watched General McClellan and President Lincoln ride through a grand review of the division on August 21, 1861.…

Faith, at least in my strangled neck of the woods, was always hard to come by. I’ll start close to a macro. How can you believe in love when your own parents beat the stuffing out of you. Then made…

I Flew for the Führer (1952) by Heinz Knoke is account of a German Luftwaffe ace. Knoke joined the Luftwaffe in 1939 and fought almost all the way through the war. The book is short and surprisingly…

I thought about making a Facebook post that said "Endorsed!" But most people wouldn't know what I meant--they'd rightly ask, "Endorsed by whom?" On Wednesday, I met for an Endorsement panel for…

"there was no payne that might be suffrid leke to that sorow that I had to se Him in payne" In Chapter 17, Julian continues her prolonged meditation upon the dying and dead body of Jesus. It gets…

The comedian Eddie Izzard has a bit in her show Dress to Kill where she characterizes colonialism as sticking a flag in the ground to claim a place, then ignoring the assertion of the locals that…