Pylimitics

A dulcarnon used to mean a difficult or impossible puzzle. But where that came from is quite a story. Chaucer wrote more than just The Canterbury Tales, and some of his other works are nearly as famous. He wrote “Troilus and Criseyde” around 1385 or so, for example. It’s a long poem that retells the… Continue reading

It’s common to almost everyone that they figure out what they see, coming up with an explanation that seems reasonable, at least given what they know at the time. Before things like germs, viruses, and some of the actual processes operating in your body were discovered, people dreamed up any number of explanations for why… Continue reading

English is probably the worst of all modern languages in terms of inconsistent spelling. In many languages words are simply written the way they sound. In Italian and Spanish it’s considered so simple there isn’t even a word for “spelling.” But in English, a sound can be represented all sorts of ways. The vowel sound… Continue reading

When you’re just waking up, you’re often in a unique mental state. You’re still half asleep, and whatever nutty thing you were just dreaming about is starting to slip away, but for a little while it still makes a kind of sense.  There’s also a mental state you might enter as you fall asleep; you’re… Continue reading

A couple of thousand years ago, while some Romans were debating in Senate proceedings, others were busily conquering whatever nation they stumbled into, and still others were creating a form of concrete that’s vastly more durable than anything we know how to make today (Roman concrete — no steel reinforcement involved — has withstood seawater… Continue reading