Things that fascinate me
Fruity Cube, you complete me.
Kinkless Desktop Leopard icons.
Space stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation. - By Neal Stephenson - Slate Magazine
How playing with gunpowder in China, plus a couple of far fetched coincidences, allow us to send SMSes. Fascinating read.
(via Instapaper)
“ Ah! I wish I had never seen you!” cried d’Artagnan, with that ingenuous roughness which women often prefer to the affectations of politeness, because it betrays the depths of the thought and proves that feeling prevails over reason.
Gregory of Tours’ declaration of faith
I stumbled upon Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks while reading The Inheritance of Rome, and find his opening declaration of faith fascinating.
Some background is necessary, but I won’t go into that too much right now.
Suffice it to say that at the time he was writing two of the main thoughts of Christianity were Catholicism (in the west) and Arianism (in the east), and their main point of dispute was whether Jesus, as the son of God, was separate from the Heavenly Father, came later, and was somehow therefore inferior (Arians), or whether he along with the Holy ghost had always existed and all three of them were one and equal (Catholics).
To establish himself firmly in the Catholic camp, Gregory firmly opposes anyone who disagrees with him on this hot topic.
But as for those who say: “There was a time when he was not,” I reject them with curses, and call men to witness that they are separated from the church.
He goes on to say that the end-times are surely coming, but no one knows when. He quotes a passage from the bible that seems to directly contradict everything he has said. The amount of semantic wiggling is extraordinary:
“But of that day and that hour knoweth no one not even the anger in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father alone.” Moreover we shall here make answer to the heretics who attack us, asserting that the Son is inferior to the Father since he is ignorant of this day. Let them learn then that Son here is the name applied to the Christian people, of whom God says: “I shall be to them a father and they shall be to me for sons.” For if he had spoken these words of the onlybegotten Son he would never have given the angels first place. For he uses these words: “Not even the angels in heaven nor the Son,” showing that he spoke these words not of the only-begotten but of the people of adoption.
This is from the relative infancy of christianity, written in the mid-500s, and already they’re debating the undebatable. Nice to see how well the “Us-vs-them” attitude has survived, though.
“ Since Dutch traders had been coming to Japan for centuries, a number of educated Japanese spoke that language – so communications with English-speakers usually required two interpreters: one of them Japanese-to-Dutch, the other Dutch-to-English.
From the great Disunion series from the New York Times.
(Source: mypantsareonfire, via merlin)
