Crazy Cousins: My Extraordinary Family Tree
According to a rather intriguing genealogy website, I appear to have some decidedly eccentric distant cousins. While researching an ancestor, General Joseph Gardner Swift, I stumbled across a website…
Constans and Monothelitism
So Constans II survived the attempt by Valentinus to become emperor in 644, and ruled for another 22 years, accomplishing a few "firsts" for an eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor. He was the…
Incarnations of Joy
It is a rich, thickish light, heavy with late summer. Lavish, almost. The colour of candlelight against an untouched buttercup. He could weep. Behind him are the chalky walls of the city in which he…
Infanterie Regiment von Bose
The 250th anniversary of the battle of White Plains is nearly upon us! This weekend not only will over 1500 revolutionary war reenactors converge for the largest event in decades, but the German…
Tabard Inn History: Sold in 1927, Bought Back in 1930
The Tabard Inn's founder sold it in 1927, then bought it back at a 1930 foreclosure auction for $2,000. Deeds, plats and census records tell the story. The post Tabard Inn History: Sold in 1927,…
New Dickens exhibition looks at the smells and poverty of old London
A foul and putrid air is once again abroad in London, as the stench of cholera and death that once haunted its streets seeps into the Charles Dickens Museum.Read more ›
The Women of Route 66
And Their Roles in Creating and Maintaining the Highway's Kitschy-Americana Environment The post The Women of Route 66 appeared first on WednesdaysWomen.
Everywhere we look, the various events of people’s lives have turned to the advantage of democracy……
Democracy in America Everywhere we look, the various events of people’s lives have turned to the advantage of democracy… The gradual unfurling of equality in social conditions is therefore, a…
Transplant Shock and Spiritual Formation in Protestant Spaces: Part 7, Grace is Not Opposed to Effort
The next contrast between the soils of spiritual formation I want to consider concerns synergism versus monergism, how we think about divine/human agency. Historically, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have…
Did Men’s Trousers in the Regency Era Have a Waistband? + the Upcoming Release of “Lady Christiana and the Colonel,” Arriving 18 November 2026
I know this is probably a crazy idea for a post, but before I wrote the scene I needed to know if men’s trousers in the Regency era had a waistband. So here goes… Yes, men’s trousers in…
Welcome to Wordorigins.org
Detail of Bayeux Tapestry: Norman cavalry attacking an English fort. Image by Myrabella, 2013, licensed under Creative Commons. And we’re on Bluesky and Mastodon too.You can also follow the site on…
Supernatural “history.” Church Fathers. Atonement. Gospel sources. All sorts of Questions!
I continue to receive great questions from folk and continue to try to answer them. Here is a wide range on key issues for anyone interested in the informed study of the New Testament.…
On This Day — Pablo Neruda Awarded Literature Nobel Prize (October 21 1971) — Was Neruda a KGB Agent? [UPDATE : Forensic probe confirms Neruda was poisoned]
“And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams and leavesand the great volcanoes of his native land?Come and see the blood in the streets.” I explain a few thingsPablo Neruda…
Finding True Peace: A Reflection on 'You Are the Happiness You Seek'
🪷 Finding True Peace: A Reflection on “You Are the Happiness You Seek” 🔗 We’ve all been there: chasing the next promotion, waiting for the perfect relationship, or buying that one…
A-Yokai-A-Day: The Fox Who Sought Out a Surgeon and Repaid His Kindness
Readers will be happy to know that tonight’s kitsune tale is a heartwarming one, not a sad one like the previous animal stories we had. The story refers to a man named so-and-so and a place…
Quotations
"Any city, however small, is in fact divided into one city of the poor, the other of the rich." Plato "One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human…
How the God of Israel Was Born
There was not one God. “Reading a Bible translation today, the text seems to speak everywhere of a generic “God” or “the Lord”. This, however, is a linguistic illusion…
A LiDAR Lens for the Ure henges: Thornborough to the Devil's Arrows
After the Wiltshire LiDAR Lens , I wanted to look at the other great henge landscape, in North Yorkshire. So there is now a second one, free and with no login: the LiDAR Lens for the Ure henges .…
A to Z topics & themes in North Woods by Daniel Mason
The story is mainly about North Woods and not just the humans who lived in it. Generations of humans used[...]
Emperor Maximilian's Cipher from 1496?
I uploaded a new article, "An Imperial Cipher from 1496?" . This is about a cipher recently identified independently by Daniel Bourdeau and George Lasry. Lasry dated it to 1496, to which Bourdeau…
The Collision Collector
Every hash function treats a collision as a defect — except the ones he runs on language, where the collisions are the whole point.
The largest henge in the world?
This post is the companion to the short film The largest henge in the world? , which revisits a post from October 2016 with fresh LiDAR. The measurements, sources and caveats follow. The earthwork In…
Shubho Bijoya!
Today is Bijoy Dashami (or Vijay Dashimi) the final day of Durga Puja or simply pujo as we Bengalis call it. It is the most important festival for Bengalis. Today, Durga, the beloved daughter of the…
On This Day in the Spanish Civil War: 21 October 1936, including the Siege of Oviedo
Oviedo, Asturias By mid-October 1936, the northern front of the Spanish Civil War had reached its most dramatic climax. For three months, thousands of Republican Asturian miners had kept the…
11,000 Virgins
Today is the feast of St Ursula and Companions . St. Ursula has always intrigued me, and was one of the most popular saints in the Middle Ages, although she has since been banished from the Roman…
Terracotta sarcophagus with unique Silenus relief found in Turkey
A terracotta sarcophagus bearing a relief of a Silenus mask has been discovered at the ancient site of Attouda in western Turkey. It is the first time one of the cylindrical terracotta sarcophagi…
How critter souls are living in human bodies
Not to worry, the critters’ souls were once housed in human bodies too. They were degraded to spend a life[...]
'Fullness For the Time That Was to Come'
Donald Justice on Edwin Arlington Robinson: “Robinson’s techniques were more or less the same as those of his contemporaries, the meters strict always, so strict and even jingly at times as to…
Appealability, Prevailing Party, Section 1717: Although Defendants’ Appeal Of An Order Denying Attorney’s Fees After A Voluntary Dismissal Was Accepted, The Request For Prevailing Party Fees Was Premature
That Was The Case Because Plaintiff And Defendants Were Still In Arbitration. This next case had a little bit of everything: appealability, prevailing party, Civil Code section 1717, and prematurity…
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Lessons From the Life and Legacy of Blessed Karl
From Blessed Karl of Austria : His Imperial Royal Highness Imre von Habsburg-Lothringen , archduke of Austria, is the great-grandson of the last emperor and king of Austria-Hungary, Blessed Karl…
Notes on #139 & #140
So, catching up on some published volumes that I haven’t discussed yet in much detail… The Center for Social Presence arose out of a collision between a few different things, one of which…
Breathing Really Hard
“Every fruitful minister in the history of the world has routinely been in over his head. Trust God and go . . . And when you have done all, and you stand before your Maker—cut, bleeding, grimy,…
1951: AM or FM for British VHF?
Seventy-five years ago, the BBC realized that it needed to start broadcasting on VHF. The reason was simple: The mediumwave band in Europe was too crowded. But unlike America, which had been using FM…
True Love and Mere Lust
A reprint of a column from May of 2003. Please note this was written in my Atheist days, so nothing but secular reasoning is here. I have been asked what the vice might be in a man and woman, both…
Life
In the natural realm, biological living beings act in view of five ends: nutrition, organic growth, self-defense, self-repair, reproduction. The analogies to spiritual life are present in the…
Classical mereology, atomism, temporal parts, and unrestricted diachronic fusions
In this post, I aim to answer the question of the conditions under which in an atomic world with classical mereology we have unrestricted minimal diachronic fusions, as Sider claims we always do. I…
Not a huge fan, but the question is dead on right…
Why was Fr. Ripperger silenced for a year while the sodomy peddler, James Martin, SJ is free to spread grave immorality and error? https://t.co/P5YjcLMHPN — Lepanto Institute (@LepantoInst) October…
Is Taming of the Shrew about Male Fragility?
Perhaps Taming of the Shrew is less about taming shrews and more about male fragility. That would restore some of Katharina's dignity. The post Is Taming of the Shrew about Male Fragility? first…
Agriophagians: Serenus the military prefect on “worthless wild animal eaters” of the eastern desert (122 CE)
Ancient author: Sulpicius Serenus, IPan 87 [i.e. Bernand 1972 below] = SB I 4282 = PH219404 (122/123 CE; link). Comments: That categorizing and characterizing populations in negative terms was not…
Mark 13:32: Can We Choose What God Already Knows?
Jesus knew who would betray him and who would deny him, yet said he did not know the day or the hour. What that tells us about free will. Giotto di Bondone, Kiss of Judas, fresco, Scrovegni Chapel,…
Snowy Love.
I recently had the chance to see Nizhalkuthu (നിഴൽക്കുത്ത്, Shadow Kill); I think it’s my first movie in Malayalam, so I kept my linguist hat on as I watched, and one repeated word was സ്നേഹം…
Researchers: We think we’ve found Amelia Earhart’s crash site. Everyone: Yay! Researchers: It’s on a…
Researchers: We think we’ve found Amelia Earhart’s crash site.Everyone: Yay!Researchers: It’s on a remote tropical island. If she survived the crash, she could have lived out her…
The Shanghai Agents by Heather Salter
Heather Salter’s The Shanghai Agents – The Soviet Plot to Start a Revolution in Interwar China (Cambridge University Press) is an excellent addition to the Old Shanghai shelf……
How Does Love Conquer Evil?
Love has an extraordinary power: it can disarm another person and deprive their evil impulse of its energy. At the same time, it disarms the evil within us as well. Why, then, is it so difficult for…
Meet Fanny Tunison, the Woman Who Sewed with Her Tongue
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Fanny Tunison of Sag Harbor, New York, (September 1867 – March 1944) made a living sewing, painting, drawing, and embroidering. But unlike other women who may have…
The Interplay of Literature and Medical Authority
Tuesday, October 20, 2026 - 10:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project In parallel with the 19th century French medical establishment's difficulties in responding to non-binary bodies, French…
From the late middle ages to markets
As previously mentioned ( here ), in 2023 I read a history of how our modern world work arose, as it appeared to the author (Stolzoff, 2023): This brings us to 1500, where "the new profession of the…
A counterexample to Sider's argument for temporal parts
Sider famously argues for the existence of arbitrary temporal parts by arguing for the existence of arbitrary minimal diachronic fusions. A minimal diachronic fusion of a function f from times to…
Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]The idea is simple: If there’s a fire in a tall building that blocks the main stairwell, people need an alternative way to…
The Nature of Time
I find two concepts deeply mysterious and puzzling. One of them is the nature of consciousness, and the other is the nature of time. Both have been investigated by philosophers (particularly by sages…