Ghulf Genes

It appears to me that the Department of Defense will soon be engaged in a redefinition exercise, this time relating to footwear. In George ...

It took us some time before the contrasting spelling of Brazil—always rendered with a Z on the Canadian Broadcasting Company, whose coverag...

Strikes me as interesting, if nothing else, that just days after a general called SISI was sworn in as President of Egypt a group called I...

Tinker, Tailor Manager, Dealer Merchant, Trader Monger, Manger. Eight I hold here in my mitt But one of them just doesn’t fit. ...

In the now accepted version, the Western Roman Empire ceased in 476 when a 16-year old emperor, Romulus Augustus, ruling the West, more or ...

The cyclical character of life in this dimension is so well known we do not notice it at all—say day and night—unless, in the more complex ...

How can we ever hope to understand very large aggregates of anything? The first step, in any such venture, is to collect statistics. Once s...

A story this morning in the Wall Street Journal tells of a seeming squabble in Japan. There the head of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) is pressur...

The cover story of the Christian Science Monitor Weekly for May 19 is titled, on the cover, as “Can parenting be taught?” This being the C...

The word was disparate , uttered without conscious thought, simply because it fit the context of our morning’s discussion—triggered by a Ne...

Sooner or later in a series on the Middle Ages, the prospect of looking a little more closely at the Byzantine Empire approaches, causing ...

Roughly coinciding with the partition of the Roman Empire in 293, a new dynasty began to rule Persia (beginning in 224). The Sassanids, nam...

Herewith a cultural note. I was looking for what looked like a rather nice product, a Staedtler 5-nib Calligraphy Set—intended as a gift. T...

This post is what might be called the low down on the Greek prefix, in Latin format, usually referred to as cata- . The background was pla...

In an op-ed in the New York Times this morning Alan Lightman speaks of Nature. The article is “Our Lonely Home in Nature,” and its themati...

Although a rush of business has diverted time from this blog—and it looks as if it will continue to do so for some time to come—I wished to...

I came across a piece of Baby Boom Babble in the Business Section of the New York Times today. On the lead page is this headline: “Taking ...

Present consensus appears to be that the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) extended in time from the coronation of Otto I, Duke of Saxony, as Emper...