Though it is an unhealthy attitude, I admit, I find that meals and eating really are the most annoying interruptions to my daily schedule. The options are many (making food, eating out, pizza delivery, etc.) but everything, including the eating takes time and money. I wonder when home delivery of food (in the US, pizza [...]
Early last year I tried to work out a convenient and simple way to incorporate footnotes into blog entries. The solution I settled on didn’t work well and I quite using it. I looked into it again today and found an excellent piece of coding over at Brandspankingnew for Footnotes with CSS which I think [...]
Nicolas de Fer, geographer to the French royal court had this to say about Scandinavians in 1708: “The Swedes are an honest and courageous folk and fond of the arts and sciences. The air of their country is clear, keen and salubrious; their forests are the haunt of numerous wild and ferocious animals. The Danes [...]
Again, studying in the library together, my friend Brendan pointed out an unusual word in one of our readings for our Early Modern European Intellectual History Class. Here is a sentence from Trever-Roper’s “The Religious Origins of the Englightenment”: It is interesting to observe the continuity…between the political radicals of yesterday and today: to see [...]
As we were studying together in the library one afternoon my friend and fellow historian Brendan pointed out a wonderful little passage from the Essays of Montaigne that he was reading at the time: Do you ask me whence comes the custom of blessing those who sneeze? We produce three sorts of wind: that which [...]
As most foreigners who have been to Korea know, it is infuriatingly difficult to use a lot of Korean websites or order products online unless you have a Korean citizen’s registration number. The fact that unless you are using Internet Explorer and Windows many useful websites hardly function doesn’t help either, but the registration number [...]
My playlists in iTunes are a complete mess. I don’t have time to sort them out. Recently there are have been a variety of postings at various places online suggesting ways to incorporate tagging for songs of the sort used at places like the wonderful link management site del.icio.us (My tags are here by the [...]
Ok, I’ve had it. I have been quietly putting up with this nonsense since at least elementary school and what I thought was silly back then, I still think is silly now: Why do we have to use that stupid system whereby the 1900s is called the 20th century, the 1600s is called the 17th [...]
In Harvard’s “university daily since 1873,” the Harvard Crimson we find an excellent example of the general lack of geographical knowledge often attributed to the United States. Here is the opening paragraph of a provocatively entitled editorial, “The Clash of Civilizations” discussing the current cartoon crisis: When it comes to problems with free speech about [...]