Did you know that St. Augustine was responsible for infant baptism? In his time (the 4th century AD) baptism was reserved until the last possible instant. You had only one chance to be completely cleansed of sin, so Christians in the 300’s held out until they were close to death, thinking that they had a better likelihood of achieving heaven if they were close to sinless at the time they […]
I’ve been thinking about how to finish up my post on the Fibonacci sequence, and what’s been holding me up is how to illustrate my point. I mean that literally. How am I going to draw a golden rectangle and the spiral that can be formed inside repeated rectangles that corresponds perfectly to certain shells in nature? I can’t find my compass, and I’ve lost my momentum. So here’s a […]
I like pineapples, despite their being a complete PITA* to cut up. They’re tart and tangy and a little bit sweet, which is a lovely combination of flavor. They’re even the secret ingredient in every episode of Psych, one of my favorite TV shows, which you can watch here. But pineapples have their own little secret. Have you ever noticed that the basket-weave look to a pineapple is just spirals […]
Tomorrow I’ll write about what I’m up to on the learning front. Tonight I want to mention a site I stumbled upon called Freerice.com. It is weirdly addictive and purportedly works for a good cause. Good, clean nerdy fun.
It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others. Main Street, a 1920 bestselling novel by Sinclair Lewis* that I finished this week, includes several of these little bon mots, but this particular line leaps to mind today. I know people with bigger troubles, but that’s not taking my […]
I may previously have mentioned that I’m not particularly cultured. For instance, I share in my late grandmother’s opinion of opera. Grandma would hear an aria on the radio and demand, “Whose cat’s dying?” She got a universal laugh with this line until the day when she said it and the feline death wail in question turned out to be sung by her granddaughter Kim, who had presented Grandma with […]
I finished Plutarch’s life of Romulus, which reads a lot like one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. Just as Kipling mythologizes animal history such as how the leopard got its spots or how the camel got its hump, Plutarch explains the beginnings of Roman history, including such tidbits as why fast people are said to have celerity, why lawyer-client privilege exists, and even why the bridegroom carries his new […]
Periodically I’ll pick up Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis and read a few chapters. (Ironically, he wrote the book before being surprised in late life by finding love and marriage in the person of Joy Gresham.) Today I was delighted to find that Lewis’ perspective on getting new books was very similar to my own. He loved to order them and have them arrive in the mail, much […]
I’m a little bit freaked out after this morning’s intellectual endeavor. I’m listening to a Teaching Company course entitled How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by an entertaining Berkeley professor named Robert Greenberg. He describes concert halls as “reanimation studios” where music from the past is brought back to life. In lecture two the discussion centers on music from the ancient world, specifically Greece. Greenberg tells about a […]
I’m enjoying The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs as my bedtime reading. At the age of 35, Jacobs embarked on a “humble quest to become the smartest person in the world,” something he figured he could do by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from a-ak to zywiec. What is it about being halfway to 70 that makes one feel a sudden need to go on a knowledge quest? I don’t […]
Flabby Brain 