-
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
-
October 29
It’s only two days until Halloween, which primes our psyches for tales of witchcraft and ghosts. But nowadays most of us (at least around here) see these things in a lighthearted way. It hasn’t always been that way. Witchcraft — even though people weren’t all that sure what it was — was something you could… Continue reading
-
October 28
The best response to discovering you’ve awakened on October 28 is to shout Yahoo! Since you just woke up, of course, you might first need to clear your throat by going houyhnhnm a couple of times. When you settle down with some coffee and check the morning business news, take note of that startup company… Continue reading
-
Not as much or many
If you’re fond of both language and math, you surely already know that in the phrase “5 minus 3” the number 5 is the minuend and the number 3 is the subtrahend. Since that’s not news, it’s a good thing that 5 less 3 is not really the subject of this bit of trivia. No,… Continue reading
-
October 27
Dylan Thomas, who was born on October 27 in 1914, would have found it dramatic and moody that the Boston Red Sox won their first world series since 1918 on this day in 2004. Do not go gentle into that doomed championship series, he might have said. When the Red Sox committed four errors in… Continue reading
-
October 26
October 26 is notable for several things, but in the US in the early 1800s the most notable might have been the completion of the Erie Canal in 1821. It was a very big deal back in the day; a 363-mile-long waterway connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. It meant that you could… Continue reading
-
October 25
Today is the birthday of John Francis Dodge, one of the founders of the Dodge Brothers Company — you can still see their name on cars today. But their first efforts in the automobile industry weren’t in building cars. When they started the company in Detroit in 1900, they only made parts. They were pretty… Continue reading
-
Annie Edson Taylor
It was October 24, 1838 that Annie Edson Taylor was born in Auburn, New York in the US. She grew up to become a schoolteacher. She married, but her husband died fairly soon afterward, and she never remarried. As a widow, she moved around the US for years, working in various cities. In Bay City,… Continue reading
-
Things are not as they were
Family is a word that’s often invoked in service of things like tradition and stability. At least in recent years. But it’s not as old a word as you might think, and it hasn’t always meant what it means now. “Family” showed up in English in the 1400s, adopted from French. What it meant at… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- The Cycles within the Arc
- I’d rather have a taco
- 20-something Hubris
- You can’t be a leader without followers
- Candy Trees and Handkerchiefs
Categories
Artificial Intelligence
Chocolatiana
Essays
History, sort of
Immorality
Incompetence
Quotations
Resistance
Stories
Tales from the Forest
Technicalities
Tragedy
Unanticipated Consequences
Privacy policy
No trackers, no ads, no data collected or saved.
Contact
peterharbeson@me.com