Pylimitics

"Simplicity" rearranged

  • Edward Said

    The situation in the Middle East seems like it’s going from bad to worse, and it’s seemed that way for a long time. Maybe public intellectuals like Edward Said could help — but unfortunately Said, who was born November 1, 1935, passed away in 2003.  Said was a Palestinian-American academic, critic, and activist. He was… Continue reading

  • Leaves

    Humans put leavesIn big crunchy piles.They do it for me,And it gives me a smile. There’s always a somethingIn a pile to find.And the sniffs are a bonusOaked, mapled, and pined. When I see a leaf pileThen a run’s what I makeAnd a jump and a roll —Then the humans must rake. But I think… Continue reading

  • November 1

    The moon is nearly invisible at the moment (it’s a “new moon”) — it’s a nice contrast to Ansel Adams’ most famous photo, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, which he made on November 1, 1941. At the time, Adams said “I think of it as a rather normal photograph of a typical New Mexican landscape.”  The… Continue reading

  • October 31

    As everybody in the US, at least, knows, today is Halloween. But that’s not the whole story. If you live in Cornwall, England, it’s Allantide. Allantide continues into the next day, and locally they quite reasonably identify the difference as Allan Night and Allan Day. Cornish mothers don’t raise any dopes, evidently. The Allan in… Continue reading

  • Robert Stirling

    An exercise in some high-shool physics classes is assembling and operating a Stirling engine. It’s a fairly simple device and can be surprising because it’s a “hot air engine.” All you need is a source of heat (a candle will do for a small engine) and the engine will operate. The Stirling engine was designed… Continue reading

  • Arthur Scherbius

    In World War II, Germany used a mechanical encryption system called an Enigma machine. The Allies mounted a huge effort to figure out how to decrypt messages encoded by the Enigma, and one offshoot from that effort was, in part, electronic digital computers. As for the Enigma itself, the Allies may not have realized that… Continue reading

  • Flutter by, butterfly

    At least in the Northern Hemisphere, the time of year when you can see butterflies is past. But what’s with the “butter” in “butterfly”? Butterflies aren’t drawn to butter; they alight on flowers. It’s regular non-butter flies that would prefer butter.  It could be that “butterfly” is “flutter by” slightly mixed up, like a young… Continue reading

  • October 30

    Angelo Siciliano was born on October 30, 1892 in Acri, Italy. When he was 11, his family emigrated to the US and settled in Brooklyn, where, not to be too blunt about it, Angelo got beat up a lot. He was a scrawny little kid and easy for the bullies to pick on. In his… Continue reading

  • Slow down, you move too fast 🎶

    In 1593 Gabriel Harvey wrote a piece called Pierce’s Supererogation, or a New Praise of the Old Ass. It was basically an extended insult of a fellow named Thomas Nashe, and in part he refers to him as “…a dodkin author, whose two swords are like the horns of a hodmandod…”. In this he was… Continue reading

  • Laura Bassi

    Women and men, in western society, have (or at least are supposed to have) equal access to educational advancement. There’s nothing about a PhD degree inherently advantages one gender or the other. But there used to be. In Europe up until about the 1700s, women and girls were typically not welcome in most educational settings.… Continue reading

About Me

I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.

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