Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
It's been some time since I've had an original post, and posting may be sparse for a while longer. There are some important changes afoot for this site: Two of the features of this site: the Palm Beach Experience and The Island Chronicles--are moving to Chet Aero Marine. The reasoning for this is complicated and …
Continue reading "Holy Week Wishes, and Some Announcements for This Site"
Werner Herzog has his idea: It is a utopia, and you do not need to be a scientist or expert researcher [to understand what will pass]. You just sit back, twiddle your thumbs, enjoy your beer, and wait until it fails. [Space colonization] will fail. My explanation is a little more mundane in explanation, if …
Continue reading "The Real Reason Space Colonization Will Fail"
It's not often that someone else does a write-up about me, but where I teach (at the University of Chattanooga's College of Engineering and Computer Science) they did a profile of me in their series "Getting to Know You." You can read it all here.
It’s exactly 20 years since I stood in line to see a film I had dreamed about since I was a little boy. Ever since I had first turned the pages of J.…This is Tolkien’s world
Now the latter is under investigation: Dr. James Clinton Oleson, an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Auckland, turned up this fascinating nugget of information after conducting anonymous surveys and interviews with 465 members of a high IQ society, who possessed an average IQ of 149. He compared their levels of self-reported criminality …
When Marie Hall stepped on to the stage at the Queen’s Hall in London to give the first full performance of a new piece from Ralph Vaughan Williams, few could have imagined that exactly a century later, this apparently unremarkable piece would have turned into a political football. The Lark Ascending; Romance for Violin and…Why …
In the early 5th century the Roman legions abandoned Britain, and the sceptered isle fell off the pages of history. When it reemerges two centuries later Celtic Britain had become the seedbed for the nation-state of England. The Christian religion, newly-established on the island at the time, had given way once again to paganism. Brythonic …
On a family holiday in Yorkshire in 1925, J. R. R. Tolkien’s young son Michael lost a beloved toy on a large stony beach. A long search by Tolkien, and Michael’s older brother John, proved fruitless; to console the boy, Tolkien made up a story, Roverandom. It’s an odd tale, featuring a small dog, wizards,… via …
Continue reading "Tolkien’s mythic plan for England — UnHerd"
Originally posted on Books & Boots: Memorandum on revolutionizing the Islamic territories of our enemies (Title of a paper written in October 1914 by German archaeologist and Orientalist Max von Oppenheim which argued for enlisting the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to call on the world’s Muslims to engage in a Holy War or jihad …
It's fair to say that it's been a spring for the record books. COVID-19 has upended our country in general, but for those of us in academia it's especially bad. For my part the jolting transition to online has been easier on me than my students; I think that the academy has a rough road …
Positive Infinity 