December 2010
24 posts
“Now that I have a family of my own, we do observe the changing of the calendar...”
– David Bentley Hart (via ayjay)
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“THE CIRCULATION
I
As fair ideas from the sky,
Or images of things,
Unto a...”
– Thomas Traherne, 1636–1674
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“It would be rash to suggest that exaltation of the spiritual life … has...”
– Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God
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Sierpinski Triangle
I ran across this figure again on a design blog and decided to follow up with it. I’m glad I did, as it was enjoyable to learn about another natural triadic pattern, in this case fractal or recursive. It was first described in 1915 and is called a Sierpiński Triangle.
I like this image (found here) for the coloring—appropriate to the Christmas season.
One connection of interest is with...
1 tag
“Goblins?” “Sure. You look: they’re always little pasty-faced...”
– Janet Kagan - Standing in the Spirit
A favorite Christmas ghost story.
“In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all...”
– G.K. Chesterton, ‘Christmas and the Aesthetes’ (1905) in Heretics
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“Writing about science poses a fundamental problem right at the outset: You have...”
– Laurence Krauss, The Lies of Science Writing
As Pavi says, “If only we could all grasp that this is always true of mediated communication in general.”
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“To declare God’s goodness, that hath enabled us to speak, we are bound to speak:...”
– John Donne (via ayjay)
“More disturbing than any of the issues of our time are the many people who...”
– Thomas Sowell
“Mary Shelley had inherited from her mother the world’s frown.”
– Clara H. Whitmore, Women’s Work in English Fiction (1909), The Project Gutenberg Project
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and...”
– C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books” (via ayjay)
“A profusion of smaller sects with little sense of themselves as sources of...”
– Gerald J. Russello, Back to the Woods
1 tag
“Not surprisingly, patients who escaped depression with the help of...”
– The Depressed Age | Wired Science | Wired.com (via ayjay)
“Professors and priests are meant to be the conservators of mankind, to which end...”
– Russell Kirk, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory
“It is not the high summer alone that is God’s. The winter also is His. And...”
– George MacDonald, Adela Cathcart
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“[Vargas Llosa] had sometimes wondered whether writing was “a solipsistic luxury”...”
– from Vargas Llosa’s Nobel address extols political power of literature
(via michaelfunderburk)
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“One can…begin by thinking of [myth] in terms of social imagination and its myths...”
– Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination, p. 79 (via michaelfunderburk)
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“Our literature is full of autobiographical or reportorial or fictional accounts...”
– Lionel Trilling, in his review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy (via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)
One thinks too of Facebook campaigns to change one’s profile picture to make a statement for or against something. My wife calls this “slactivism.”
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“The abstractions of science are too readily assimilable to the abstractions of...”
– Wendell Berry, from Life Is a Miracle (via ayjay)
I love this book. Political sentimentality is a masquerade, though.
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“Her fear vanished; once more she was certain her grandmother’s thread...”
– George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin, ch 21
“Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a ‘good’ book. A book...”
– Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop (1919) via The Project Gutenberg Project
3 tags
“If indeed God spoke to create the world, then the world from its beginning, and...”
– Vern Sheridan Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach 