In Summary: * Closing out this Tuesday with quiet music playing in the background, and the night prayers and meditations ahead. Peaceful. I like this.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.40 lbs. * bp= 144/85 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 03:20 – 1 Reese's pb cup, * 06:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 11:45 – pancit, white bread and butter, beef chop suey, fried rice * 16:20 – 1 Reese's pb cup, 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:10 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 03:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 12:00 – watch old TV Shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:00 – called one of my banks, taking care of business * 17:00 – listening to relaxing music, evening and night prayers and meditations

Chess: * 09:30 – moved in all pending CC games

it’s cold outside, it’s black, and it’s raining

I’m having cough some asthma allergy attack no doubt, and I’m inside on the bed with the dogs

And all is well

A few days ago, on the road we saw a toad big as a soccer ball. We had to swerve to avoid running it over,

But it made it

I don’t think I’ll ever see such a big toad in my life again

Isn’t life strange?

Where's Wordo? Level 1- Apartment Party

I was a big fan of the Where's Waldo books when I was a kid. And this gave me an idea, what if there was a literary version of Where's Waldo? Essentially, a large, chaotic scene is described, and you must locate “Wordo” within it. But I can't put Wordo's name, because you could just control-F to find him. So instead, you must infer where Wordo is from what's going on. So, here is the first Wordo Challenge. He is located somewhere at a busy party in an apartment in NYC, and doesn't quite fit in. Let's see if you can find him:

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Just inside the double front doors, where a row of winter coats and denim jackets has been heaped onto a standing rack that looks too elegant for the abuse it is enduring, three people have made a kind of annex out of the entryway, one woman in a silver slip dress balancing a coupe glass in one hand while she retells, for the second time and with greater confidence than accuracy, the story of how she once got stuck in a freight elevator in Tribeca with an avant-garde cellist, one bearded man in tortoiseshell glasses nodding solemnly even though he is clearly watching the room beyond her shoulder, and another guest in a cropped leather jacket crouching to retie the lace on a tall boot while still somehow managing to keep up her side of the conversation; beyond them the loft opens suddenly and theatrically into the main living area, where exposed brick, black-framed factory windows, and a ceiling webbed with pipes and pendant lights make everything look self-consciously raw and expensive at once, and about fifteen people have distributed themselves across the space, seven sunk or perched along a deep sectional couch whose cushions are being shared by a pair of women debating whether a certain downtown gallery has become too commercial, a man in a moss-green suit explaining the difference between natural wine and ordinary bad wine to a listener who regrets asking, two friends passing a phone back and forth to examine photographs from somebody’s Fire Island weekend, a person sitting cross-legged at the corner of the sectional and laughing too loudly at stories they are only half hearing, and a compact man in a rugby shirt leaning over the back of the couch to contribute occasional opinions nobody seems particularly invited to receive, while around them another eight guests remain standing in loose knots beneath the blue flicker of a wall-mounted television that is silently cycling through a playlist of glossy music videos, one cluster of three near the credenza discussing a startup that may or may not involve AI, one pair by the windows arguing about whether Bushwick is over, two more by a tall rubber plant comparing mutual acquaintances from Pratt, and a lone guest near the speaker stack swaying half a beat behind the song and staring, as if in private thought, at the editing cuts in a video where sequined dancers keep appearing and disappearing inside a mirrored tunnel; past the couch and the orbit of the television, the dining area has been transformed from anything remotely domestic into a standing-room buffet zone, its long table stripped of all ordinary function, the chairs dragged back and leaned against the walls at uneven angles as if the room itself had shrugged them off, the tabletop crowded with platters of skewered vegetables, little toasts crowned with whipped spreads, a bowl of citrus segments glistening under the track lighting, trays of dumplings under linen napkins, and an aggressively curated arrangement of olives nobody is touching, while a separate folding table has been dressed up as a bar with bottles of mezcal, gin, vermouth, tonic, soda, sliced limes, sweating buckets of ice, and a hand-lettered sign attempting to dignify the situation by calling it a spritz station; nine people are hanging out in this zone, including two women in sharply cut black outfits who are talking with the intensity of old friends who have just remembered they dislike one another, a broad-shouldered man with a chain necklace reaching over the hummus to steal a cube of cheese while pretending he is only looking for a napkin, a guest in a vintage band tee carefully constructing a drink with the concentration of a chemist, a couple who keep drifting apart and back together again as each is intercepted by different conversations, a flushed young man insisting that the playlist was better an hour ago, a narrow-faced man in a pale short-sleeved shirt tucked neatly into tan trousers who is holding a paper plate with a single carrot stick on it while listening to two people discuss a club in Greenpoint, and two strangers near the bar who have entered that immediate overfamiliar stage of party conversation where they are already discussing childhood pets; the kitchen remains visually part of both the dining room and the living room, as open as a theater set, and the large elbow-shaped island at its center is burdened with even more food, stacks of small plates, bowls of chips, half-cut lemons, serving spoons, and a leaning arrangement of flowers that seems to lose petals every time somebody brushes past, while a couple of caterers occupy the practical heart of the space, one sliding fresh crostini onto a tray and the other with sleeves rolled up assembling something involving smoked salmon and cucumber with relentless speed, and among them hover five guests who either genuinely want to help or want to perform the idea of helping: a woman in a crimson blouse refilling her water directly from the sink, a lanky man in a knit polo asking where the trash goes while holding nothing that needs to be thrown away, a guest with slicked-back hair pilfering one shrimp at a time each time he thinks nobody is looking, a woman perched on a counter stool explaining in great detail why she never cooks, and another guest opening the fridge, apparently on a mission for more ice, and then pausing long enough to scan its contents with the anthropological curiosity of a museum visitor; down the hall, Guest Bedroom 1 has become an accidental side lounge where three people have made themselves comfortable amid a neatly made bed, a chair draped with somebody else’s blazer, and a dresser topped with framed photographs turned anonymous by distance, one person seated on the edge of the mattress and speaking in a low confidential tone to a second who lies on one elbow as if receiving state secrets, while a third stands by the lamp with arms folded and periodically glancing toward the balcony door, and just beyond that sliding door the small balcony holds three more people in the bright pinprick atmosphere of the smokers’ enclave, one exhaling toward the street, one shivering in a sleeveless top but refusing to go back in, and one using the party below as raw material for instant character judgments; by Full Bath 1, with its white subway tile and overstretched pocket door, one person is inside, audible but unseen as cabinet doors open and close and water runs for longer than anyone in line thinks necessary, while two guests wait outside, one checking his reflection in the dark screen of a phone and smoothing his eyebrows with a thumb, the other leaning against the wall with shoes already off and held by their heels in one hand, looking like they have either had the best night or the longest week; a large storage room that doubles as a laundry room has somehow attracted its own tiny salon of two people chatting among shelves of detergent, spare paper towels, a vacuum cleaner, and boxes whose labels have long since become inaccurate, one of them perched on an overturned crate and talking earnestly about moving to Los Angeles while the other, standing near the washer with a plastic cup hooked through two fingers, keeps asking practical questions that make the whole dream sound less glamorous and more expensive; the master bedroom, larger and softer than the rest of the loft and made faintly golden by a pair of bedside lamps, contains five people hanging out on the bed itself in varying states of collapse, two sitting upright against the headboard comparing tattoos, one lying flat and waving a hand now and then to emphasize a story, one kneeling near the foot of the bed to rummage through a tote bag for a charger, and another sitting on the floor with back against the mattress, absently peeling the label from a beer bottle, while in the attached bath two more guests have claimed the mirror, one blotting lipstick with a square of tissue and the other attempting to resecure an earring while squinting at her own reflection; through the master’s glass doors stretches the large balcony, where seven people are strung along the railing and outdoor chairs in the cooler air above the city, somebody pointing downtown as if the skyline belongs to them personally, somebody else telling a story that requires repeated reenactments of a disastrous first kiss, one guest alone at the far corner scrolling through messages, a pair discussing whether to leave for another party in Brooklyn, another pair sharing a cigarette despite neither seeming to smoke regularly, and a final figure resting forearms on the rail and watching the traffic below with the fixed concentration of a person who may actually prefer the anonymity of streets to the effort of rooms; Guest Bedroom 2, much smaller and dimmer than the rest, has become a refuge from the party’s performed brightness, and it contains only one person seated cross-legged on the rug petting both a dog and a cat who have apparently elected this room as neutral territory, the dog stretched long and content beneath a hand scratching behind its ears, the cat tucked partly under a chair but pushing its head into the offered palm, while the solitary guest, still in a velvet blazer too formal for the task, murmurs to them with the patient seriousness usually reserved for children or diplomats; the office door at the end of the hall remains locked and untouched except for a couple of coats that have slid from the entryway overflow and been draped over the knob, everyone having accepted that whatever work life or secrets are inside have been temporarily exiled from the evening.

Duty over Love... For love Sometimes you are The princess and sometimes You must play The girl

Sometimes you are The prince and at others Just the Pauper

Truth Beauty Freedom Love

Most of all... LOVE

As Wesley said To his Buttercup

As You Wish

---

A life lived in fear is a life half lived

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Please give me the gift of the spirit in my heart and the spirit Of dance in my feet.

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#poetry #osxs #sketchbook

2024-11-10 00:54:10

wrinkled pages

Finished on Sunday: Three Moments of an Explosion, a collection of short stories by China Miéville. I had found a hardback copy in a charity shop which cost me a pound. Given my literary tastes, Miéville's work should very much be my cup of tea — but it hasn’t worked out that way. I was put off by my first taste of his work, when I read Kraken about fifteen years ago (which, to this day, remains the only book I’ve read on a Kindle). I actively disliked it: there was something about his authorial voice that I couldn’t warm to. The inexpensiveness of this copy of Three Moments seemed like the ideal opportunity to give his writing a second chance.

While I got along better with it than with Kraken, reservations remain. The title story, for instance, is one of several very short pieces in the book, none of which impressed me. To my mind, the volume would have been better had they been omitted. Elsewhere, Miéville's ‘voice’, as it sat & ‘sounded’ in my mind again often had something about it I found off-putting. There were a some exceptions: the slick satire of ‘Dreaded Outcomes’ delighted me; and I relished the old-school style of ‘The Design’, the tale which closes the book. Of the other stories I enjoyed, a couple (‘The Dowager of Bees’ and ‘The Bastard Prompt’) could have been the basis for intriguing X-Files plot-lines. The horror stories in the collection generally failed to fully connect, with ‘The Rabbet’ the only one of them to properly get under my skin. Miéville’s imagination is undeniably fertile, though some of its productions teetered awkwardly past the furthest points to which I could suspend my disbelief. These were cases less fit for Mulder & Scully than perhaps for Professor Quatermass, or even Doctor Who.

Miéville’s new novel The Rouse was purportedly twenty years in the making and runs to 1,264 pages. I shan’t be rushing to buy it, but if a cheap copy should turn up in a charity shop in years to come, I may take a look.

---

My latest music acquisitions were likewise very inexpensive ones. Seeing a CD copy of Manu Chao’s Próxima Estación: Esperanza reminded me I used to like his song ‘Me Gustas Tu’. Picking up the disc, I saw the song was on there so decided to buy it. It’s a pretty good record — a warmly uplifting Bob Marley-influenced feel suffuses much of it — just perhaps a little too much of it for my taste: a tad more variation of mood would have suited me better.

On a neighbouring shelf to the Manu Chao album, an early ‘90s CD issue of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers With Thelonious Monk. The music here is wonderful; the recording and/or mastering, regrettably less so. The bass — played by the curiously-named Spanky DeBrest — is often all-but inaudible, undermining my enjoyment of the performances. The absent bass is apparently a known flaw in the original stereo recording, so I’ll have to try to get my hands on one of the more recent mono remasters. For an example track from the record (with audible bass) try ‘In Walked Bud’.

---

During the same visit to Chepstow when I bought the CDs (which were £1 each), I also found a dainty-looking ornamental glass vase (Fig. 40) which set me back another £4.

As if to offset these relatively thrifty acquisitions, I squandered (via ebay) a rather larger sum on yet another box of old stationery: some ‘Milano’ paper and matching envelopes from Pineider. The set is second-hand, but unused (Fig. 41). The Florentine retailer seem like an Italian equivalent to the likes of Smythson or Cassegrain, with a historic focus on providing personalised stationery to a wealthy clientele. The box contains only 24 sheets of A4 paper with as many envelopes. The paper is laid, watermarked and straight-cut; and the envelopes are lined with white tissue & discreetly embossed with a Pineider logo. There’s no claim of the paper being rag-based or hand-made: one might hope that, given the asking price, it might at least be one or the other, but who knows.

---

Cheese of the week: Bluemin White from Shepherds Purse Artisan Cheeses in Yorkshire. This mould-ripened offering is encased in blue-grey penicillium roqueforti rather than white p. camemberti, yet it isn’t a properly blue cheese, as the small truckles are left unpierced so that the mould can’t readily infiltrate the paste. The hint of blue provided by the rind does however add a certain extra tang to what is otherwise a subtly delicious brie-like number.

Tomatoes are next. I've picked the second crop, and it's tomato: the most-grown, most-photographed, most-argued-about plant in the garden and the field. Starting now, I'm building tomato diagnosis the same way I built the first one.

The problems between here and a tomato model

The lookalike exam. Early blight, septoria, and late blight read almost alike at the stage where catching them matters most – a pinhead spot on an oldest leaf. Telling them apart from a photo, early, is the whole job. Everything else is plumbing.

Real photos, not textbook photos. Field tomatoes grow in crowded, backlit canopies with dirt-splashed lower leaves. Textbook single-leaf shots are easy. The photos growers actually take are the ones that have to work.

Trust is per-crop. Whatever the lab proved on its first crop, tomato doesn't inherit it. The model earns trust in the field, against the hard cases, or it doesn't earn it at all. Starting from zero is the price of doing it right.

It ships when it clears the same bar the live crop cleared, and I'll post the real numbers as they come.

Watch it happen at plantlab.ai/platform, or get notified there when tomato's status changes.

PlantLab had its name from day one, and the name was the plan: a diagnosis lab for plants, all of them, eventually. One crop is live today. Tomato, apple, grape, and leafy greens sit on the public roadmap. The long game is a lab that carries what it learns from one crop into the next.

A lab, not an app

I built the first model because I needed the answer myself. A general-purpose chatbot looked at my plant and said calcium deficiency. It was light burn. The opinion arrived instantly and was wrong in the way that matters: confident and useless.

That failure set the bar for everything since. The problems worth catching are lookalikes – deficiencies that impersonate each other, pests that impersonate deficiencies, stress that impersonates both. Trust gets earned on the hard cases, not the easy ones. An app can answer for one plant. A lab keeps a discipline that has to hold for every plant after it.

The long game: crops that teach the lab

Each crop the lab takes on teaches it something the next one needs. Reading leaves at the pinhead stage on one crop is exactly the skill the next crop needs on day one. Calibrated confidence is a habit, not a feature: a result that says “I'm 40% sure, watch it” instead of guessing. Habits travel. So do reading each plant on its own and the honesty about uncertainty.

What the lab learns on tomato will make the grape work faster. What it learns on grape will make the leafy-greens work faster. That is the compounding bet: not one model, one crop, one market, but a lab whose judgment gets broader with everything it reads.

What doesn't carry

Each crop's lookalikes are their own exam. The answers don't transfer, and neither does the reputation. A grower's trust in what the lab does for one crop is not a blank check for the next. Every crop earns its own track record, from zero, in the field, against the hard cases. The second crop doesn't get the first crop's reputation for free.

The roadmap, plainly

The crop roadmap is public at plantlab.ai/platform: one crop live today, four more on the roadmap. The labels mean exactly what they say. Live means a deployed model doing the work. In development means work has genuinely started. Planned means intended, not started. No dates, because a date is easy to publish and impossible to keep honest.

The name was the plan. The lab grows into it.

To paint is to invite you into my dream, realms where anything is possible. Soft edges of understanding and experience rife with hope and the unexplored. We are there together, artist and lover interpreting the form and color in our own time and understanding. Sometimes delighted, sometimes sad, sometimes confused. Each experience personal and every journey differing.

Writing is inviting you to the knife’s edge of my reality, now, moments past or futures imagined. A moment or experience revealed in the precise detail of invention or observation. You come into my mind and you feel the pain and the joy, the tears and the exultation as I feel. We are bound on that journey in experience, feeling and understanding.

Music takes the precision of writing and combines it with the abstract qualities painting to create ethereal moments exploding with experiential thrill. Music is poetry. Music is painting. It is wide and narrow, dark and bright, loud and quiet.

2025-01-17 15:28:55

—

I'm reawakening my creative self.

As I've often said, entrepreneurship is my art. It's about the only creative thing I'm good at. Last year I took a bit of a sabbatical (which was perfect timing given the birth of our little girl), but I'm ready to start coming out of it.

I need to get used to expressing my creativity again, as I'm sort of out of practice, and I'm still wrapped up in my new life as a dad. That in itself has forced me to give creativity time and space and not to force anything. But that changes today. I'm giving myself permission to lightly explore some creative ideas as a way to warm up that part of my mind.

It feels good. Weird, as it has been a while, but pretty damn good.

#personal

GitBook.io är en webbaserad plattform för att skapa, organisera och publicera dokumentation och kunskapsmaterial. Tjänsten är särskilt populär bland företag, utvecklare och projektteam som behöver samla information på ett strukturerat sätt och göra den lättillgänglig för användare eller medarbetare.

Med GitBook kan man exempelvis skapa användarmanualer, produktdokumentation, guider, API-dokumentation, FAQ-sidor och interna kunskapsbanker. Informationen organiseras i sidor och sektioner, vilket gör det möjligt att bygga upp allt från en enkel guide till en omfattande dokumentationsportal. Dokumentationen kan publiceras offentligt på webben eller skyddas så att endast behöriga användare får tillgång till den.

En viktig funktion i GitBook är möjligheten att samarbeta kring dokumentationen. Flera personer kan arbeta med innehållet, kommentera och granska ändringar samt använda versionshistorik. Plattformen har stöd för Markdown och kan synkroniseras med GitHub och GitLab. Det gör att utvecklare kan arbeta med dokumentationen direkt från sitt vanliga kodflöde samtidigt som andra medarbetare använder GitBooks visuella redigerare.

GitBook innehåller även AI-funktioner. GitBook Agent kan hjälpa till att skapa, granska och hålla dokumentation uppdaterad, medan GitBook Assistant kan låta användare ställa frågor och få svar baserade på informationen i dokumentationen. Publicerat innehåll kan dessutom göras mer tillgängligt för AI-system genom bland annat Markdown, llms.txt och MCP.

Tjänsten passar därför bra för exempelvis ett företag som vill bygga ett hjälpcenter för sina kunder, ett utvecklingsteam som behöver dokumentera ett API eller ett projekt som vill samla instruktioner och teknisk information på ett och samma ställe. GitBook kan även användas som en intern företagswiki där rutiner, processer och annan kunskap samlas och hålls uppdaterad.

En av fördelarna med GitBook är att man inte behöver bygga en egen webbplats eller ett eget system för dokumentationen. Plattformen kombinerar redigering, strukturering, publicering, sökning och samarbete i samma tjänst. Det gör GitBook till ett praktiskt verktyg när information behöver vara lätt att hitta, enkel att uppdatera och tillgänglig för rätt målgrupp.

Här är ett exempel på hur Gitbook kan användas.

The pillar of cloud would not move away from before the people during the day, nor the pillar of fire at night.

I noticed driving home that the clouds were odd. In the land of big sky, you get used to every sort of cloud.

North of the city, out over the land toward the Red River, a huge plume of clouds covered the sky at least out to the Oklahoma border. It was kind of glorious, but the color was off. Instead of the usual blue/grey the clouds had a sickly yellow tint to them. Even some dark grey floating around.

It wasn't until I got a few miles closer that I could see the column connecting the clouds to the ground about 15 miles out.

It was an impressive fire, and thankfully out in the middle of nowhere. Though I doubt the terrestrial animals felt like it was the nowhere.

Coming over the bridge where I like to watch the sun set into the railroad tracks, I spotted this crusty old cowboy hat. Pulling off to capture it, I saw that it was well-worn, but not end of life. Some farmer is going to be plenty ticked off that he lost his favorite straw hat.

I left it there so when he comes back, he'll be able to reclaim it.

Standing there in 108º heat, with the sun cooking my back and the smoke burning my nostrils, I was stricken with how beautiful the moment was.

It turns out even hell has a good side.

Given the choice, most sane people would choose a beautiful mountainside with trees and lush grass. Or maybe a beach bungalow where the waves could lull them to sleep.

And I like those things. I think I'd choose them from a lineup. But the old adage 'bloom where you are planted' came to mind. There is good and bad to every place people dwell, but it absolutely floors me that there can be beauty in destruction.

If you gave me an unlimited budget and a capable team as well as all the time I needed to turn someplace into a paradise, I wouldn't choose something where most of the work was already done. Give me a Death Valley, a Badlands or a Dust Meridian any day.

Imagine the thrill of looking back over 20 or 30 years of terraforming and trying to convince people the place was once one of the most avoided locales in the world.

I ran into this heat map a few weeks ago. It shows distance in miles of how far away from a national park you are.

Now, you'll note that NY, FL panhandle and a few others are either red or yellow, indicating that maybe they're ugly places to visit. Nope. Just no parks designated by the federal government.

The streak from Galveston Texas to Minnesota is pretty telling. They don't call them the flyover states for nothing.

Unless you like sunsets. They're pretty glorious.

But imagine turning that corridor into one of the most attractive places on earth.

Now that's a task I could get behind. And I bet you could too.

HOW?

The funny thing about places nobody wants to be? You can get away with pretty much whatever you want. Without making a big deal of it, what if someone planted a few hundred thousand sequoias while no one was looking?

And I'm not saying Yellowstone is going to blow North America off the map, but a little tectonic action out here sure does have the potential to create some new and stunning vistas.

Fire is always gonna' fire. Burn it all down. But you know what? Some pretty damn amazing things come in the wake of destruction.

Look at Mount St Helens.

The richness of the soil in the aftermath is hard to deny.

And I think this applies to us emotionally as well.

We all go through periods where our worlds end. Losing a hat or two, or maybe our heads entirely. A paddock or the whole continent of our heart burns away.

And we, just like the land, are not done.

We're just prepped for what comes next. And sometimes, impossibly, what comes next becomes more precious than what was there before.

Honestly, I'm kind of counting on it.

So, let's stand here for a minute and appreciate that old hat.

Soak in the heat. The smoke. The scorching earth.

Hell has a strange way of making the land fertile again.

There is simply no telling what is going to grow here next.

Let's hope together that it is more glorious than we could have imagined.

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Song of the day:

This Too Shall Pass – Okay Go – Of the Blue Color of the Sky (2010)

You know you can't keep letting it get you down And you can't keep dragging that dead weight around If there ain't all that much to lug around Better run like hell when you hit the ground

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#music #essay

Black Queen by herself.

I won this game, part of a club-based CC tournament which started on 29-June, a few minutes ago when my Black Queen checkmated the White King on her 35...Qh3#. The position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and our full move record below:

1. e4 a6 2. Qh5 g6 3. Qe5 f6 4. Qc3 Bg7 5. d4 Nh6 6. f3 e6 7. e5 Nc6 8. Bd3 f5 9. Ne2 O-O 10. Nf4 b5 11. Nh3 Nf7 12. Ng5 Nxg5 13. h4 Nf7 14. O-O d6 15. Qxc6 Bd7 16. Qc3 dxe5 17. dxe5 Bxe5 18. Qc5 Bd6 19. Qd4 c5 20. Qc3 c4 21. Be2 Bc5+ 22. Be3 b4 23. Qxc4 Rc8 24. Bxc5 Re8 25. a3 b3 26. cxb3 Rc6 27. g4 Qxh4 28. b4 Ne5 29. Qf4 Nf7 30. Nc3 e5 31. Qc4 Be6 32. Nd5 Kg7 33. gxf5 Qg3+ 34. Kh1 Nd8 35. Rg1 Qh3#

And the adventure continues.

Your wonderful works are evident in creation.

They rise above the landscape, blaze with color, or stretch toward the sky. We stop to admire them because they are impossible to miss.

And then there are the small things.

The things we walk past.

The tiny flowers growing beside a path. The moss tucked into the cracks of a stone. The intricate veins of a leaf. A seed no bigger than a grain of sand, carrying within itself the promise of an entire plant.

They don't demand our attention. They invite it.

The Texas frogfruit is one of those quiet wonders.

At first glance, it is easy to overlook. Its flower heads are tiny, its stems slender, and it often grows close to the ground, mingling with the ordinary vegetation around it. Nothing about it seems designed to stop a hurried person in their tracks.

But stop.

Lean closer.

Look at it as though you have never seen a flower before.

Suddenly, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

What appeared to be a simple little flower head reveals itself as a miniature constellation of petals—white and lavender blossoms arranged with almost jewel-like intricacy. Tiny forms overlap one another, each one contributing to the beauty of the whole. There are colors and textures and patterns that the casual glance completely misses.

It is a bejeweled spectacle hiding in plain sight.

And perhaps that is part of what makes small things so beautiful.

They require us to slow down.

The grandeur of a mountain can overwhelm us from a distance. The brilliance of a sunset can stop a conversation. But the beauty of a tiny flower asks something different of us. It asks us to become attentive.

To bend down.

To look again.

To discover that there is more here than we first imagined.

Creation is full of this kind of hidden magnificence. The closer we look, the more there is to see. A single flower is not merely a splash of color; it is an intricate architecture of petals, pollen, stems, shadows, and delicate relationships with the living world around it. A leaf is not merely green. A drop of water is not merely wet. Even the smallest seed contains a mystery far greater than its size suggests.

Smallness, it turns out, is no indication of insignificance.

In fact, some of the most astonishing things in creation are almost absurdly small.

We live in a world that trains our attention toward the large. Bigger achievements. Bigger houses. Bigger landscapes. Bigger experiences. Bigger lives.

But nature has another lesson for us.

Pay attention to the little things.

There is beauty in what doesn't shout.

The Texas frogfruit doesn't need to be magnificent by human standards. It doesn't need towering stems or enormous petals. It doesn't need to be rare or famous. It simply exists as what it was made to be—and when we take the time to truly see it, we discover that it is astonishing.

Maybe that's a lesson worth carrying with us.

How many beautiful things do we miss because we have decided, too quickly, that they are ordinary?

How many moments pass unnoticed because we're looking for something bigger?

How many tiny gifts surround us every day, waiting not to be found, but simply noticed?

The practice of paying attention changes the world—not because the world suddenly becomes more beautiful, but because we finally become awake to the beauty that was already there.

A tiny flower by the roadside becomes a cathedral in miniature.

A patch of sunlight becomes a painting.

A bird's song becomes a reminder that the world is still full of wonder.

And a little Texas frogfruit, easily passed by, becomes a jeweled spectacle.

Perhaps creation has always been speaking this way.

Quietly.

Patiently.

In small things.

We only have to stop long enough to look.

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#museum #milepost

The 17th century French diplomat and cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère published a treatise on fire and salt. The title is literal — Traicté du Feu et du Sel — and the premise acts as alchemy at its most reductive, where the whole of transformation is compressed into a simple binary: two principles, two substances. Vigenère’s text, however, is actually stranger than its title suggests. It is not really about fire or salt. It is about the impossibility of speaking about anything for the first time. And the implication that an idea, once spoken, cannot be controlled or contained and may perpetuate beyond its source in ways its speaker never intended.

The treatise opens with Pythagoras. Not Pythagoras directly — no one has Pythagoras directly — but Pythagoras as received through tradition, “held to have made more profound search, and with less incertainty penetrated into the secrets as well of Divinity, as of Nature.” Already the syntax demonstrates the author’s argument: Vigenère is reading Pythagoras, who is reading the Mosaic tradition, who is reading — what? The mind of God, presumably, but even Moses received the law on tablets, which is to say, in written form, which is to say, as a text that was already a mediation, rather than a direct link to the mind of God — a shared consciousness. The chain has no first link.

This raises the question: are there other links in this chain lost to time? Or, better still, how do we trust any source of knowledge when its origins are so obfuscated or enigmatic?

Vigenère builds an elaborate scheme of attribution: Pythagoras borrowed from the Hebrews. The Egyptians and Chaldeans borrowed from both. Scripture conceals philosophy within ritual. Every source, when you press it, reveals a prior source beneath. Vigenère moves through these layers with the confidence of a man who has spent decades in the archives of other people's reading — which he had, literally: before writing on alchemy, he spent years translating and annotating classical texts, and before that, a foundational cipher of modern cryptography. He was a man professionally devoted to the idea that every surface meaning conceals a deeper one, and that the concealment is both method and feature rather than flaw.

This is the treatise's subtle radicalism. Vigenère never claims to have discovered anything himself. He does not position his text as a source but as a commentary — on Pythagoras, on Moses, on Mark 9:49 (“every man shall be salted with fire”), on a chain of prior readings stretching backward into a darkness he treats as generative rather than empty. And the remarkable thing is that his commentary feels enriched rather than diminished by its secondariness. Each layer of mediation adds a new context and texture. Vigenère reading Pythagoras is not a degraded copy of Pythagoras reading Moses. It is a new act of understanding that could not have existed without the distance spanned.

There’s also a serious epistemological claim, not just a historical curiosity. What Vigenère demonstrates — almost against his own intentions, since he would probably have said he was simply recovering ancient wisdom — is that knowledge does not degrade as it passes through commentary. It transforms. It acquires texture, context, contradiction—and, yes, flavor, the way fire and salt season food. This suggests that scholarly annotation in this method comes from within rather than passively from outside, the way a river that continues the rain that feeds it without becoming the rain itself.

We still seek originals. We distrust commentary. But this is precisely what Vigenère's chain of attribution makes impossible to sustain. There is no moment in his treatise where a source appears without already being a reading of something else. Moses is already interpreting. Pythagoras is already annotating. The “darke sentences” in which ancient knowledge arrives are not failures of transmission but the very form that deep knowledge takes — because what matters is not the content in isolation but the relationship between reader and text, the transformation that occurs when one mind meets another across the distance of centuries and tradition and language.

This is, I think, the secret argument of the Traicté du Feu et du Sel, hidden inside its alchemical metaphors the way Vigenère says philosophy is hidden inside scripture. Fire transmutes rather than destroys. Salt seasons the object, changing its nature through contact rather than merely preserving it. Some of these passages — on preservation, on the spaces between — I recognize all too well.

Commentary is the fire that transmits, not destroys. And what emerges from that intersection is not a diminished copy of some lost original but something new: knowledge that has transited a human mind, becoming something new but not altogether different from what had entered.

Perhaps there are no original texts. Perhaps all we have across the whole of human history are the ongoing commentaries of others past — some survived, some lost. Provenance falls away when meaning lives in interpretation alone. All of which would otherwise be impossible without someone first having named the unnamable, the sacred unmentionable somehow spoken. And once spoken, renders the anomalous more familiar.

#Philology

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Notes:

1. My copy of Vigenère’s Traicté du Feu et du Sel is an English translation from roughly 1649. Though I find his ideas intriguing, I cannot speak to his traditions, nor the potential differences between the English and French versions of the text.

2. The alchemical opus transforms the practitioner alongside the substance in the vessel. The lapis is not just produced but undergone, meaning the text is already a record of anomalous experience: knowledge inseparable from the encounter that produced it.

3. Can anomalous experience even be articulated in the raw moment, becoming meaningful only through layers of interpretation and introspection afterward? Could mediation be the process by which the darke sentence reveals what was latent beneath the letter, rather than a distortion of it?

4. Might some knowledge require encryption to survive transmission, as Vigenère's cipher requires a key and his alchemy requires a veil? Is it possible that indirection serves not to obscure but to protect what cannot be stated directly?

5. Both alchemy and anomalous experience are relational: the alchemist needed the soror mystica, the student needed the master, the work could not be done alone or in full daylight; and the witness exists, not to verify the event empirically, but to receive the account and become the next link in the chain of knowing.

6. Alchemical transformation is irreversible: one does not un-calcine, nor reverse the nigredo. Could anomalous experience operate similarly, reorganizing the knower so permanently that the distinction between encounter and ordinary learning dissolves? Where does ordinary dream end and extraordinary vision begin?

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Just a story about a story.

It’s been over two years since I logged into my last social media. It was BlueSky, and I ran across a batch of mean folks. I wasn’t talking to them. I didn’t have them in mind when I said what I said about a personal memory. They inserted themselves underneath my post to berate me and call me a fat white guy. I was like, “I am just telling a story that actually happened. What if there was an opinion in here?”

Do you need to hate so many people?

I find a lot of irony in folks feeling like they need social media to stay connected, yet they use social media to write off huge swathes of the population. Many folks feel like they need social media. I have felt that way before in my life. But nothing could be further from the truth. I promise.

Let’s mention brainwashing.

They wouldn’t call it brainwashing if you knew it was happening. Brainwashing doesn’t mean ‘I willingly take on a different mindset.’ So if you’re on social media, you don’t know what you don’t know. You may not know that sometimes folks really into their social media stuff can come off ridiculous and concerning. You may not know that your world is divided up into grid lines of good and bad, right and wrong, what’s cool and what isn’t. You may not realize you have whole populations on this planet that you would like to see dead. All the MAGAs, all the Muslims, all the Jews, all the Mexicans, all the liberals, all the Android users, the pesky Playstation fans. You may not realize your lack of control of your worldview. You may not realize the words on the screen appear because the screen knows your preferences. You may not realize it has cost you money and friends you can touch. You don’t “need” this shit.

What if I was a big corporation and I wanted to implant a commercial in your brain? I wanted you thinking about me 24/7. Without a moment to yourself? What if I wanted you on my software for hours on end so I could gather data about your environment and your preferences? What if I wanted people to become addicted to whatever I was making? I don’t think that would make me a good guy. Yet…

Maybe if you “need” social media, you simply “need” a hand.

I honestly think if you feel like you need social media, what you really need is help. You need the kind of help that isn’t on social media. You need the kind of help that hugs, that joins you for a meal, that talks to you about a movie you saw together, that likes your kind of music, that says things that are unexpected. A real-life connection, not online sycophancy. 

I have a lot of memories of being on social media and feeling wired. People would buzz around my brain. It would keep me awake, rolling words in my brain much like a slot machine in Vegas, and they were just words I saw on my feeds. They were words I wouldn’t have seen if not for algorithms and folks selling things. Me seeing them had nothing to do with who was writing them. It had to do with the computer thinking I wanted to see them. This changed the way I saw the world, eventually. I thought it was here for me. The truth is I’m here for it. So I put it down. Social media. Glad for it. Better too.

I am worried.

I talk about social media with people still using it. I’m concerned. They think we all need it. It connects us. It gives us presence. I’ve even been told I’m doing it wrong, and I’m the one who should get a social media. But I’ve been down that road. It’s not happening again.

I was not in control. Multiply that times billions. No thanks.

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

The Kintners

Djembe Funk