The Odyssey—the original poetry and the modern film—is not really about adventure, although it has an abundance of it. It’s also not primarily about virtues in some abstract way, whether the kill-your-enemies or love-your-enemies type. The Odyssey is about home. Odysseus wants to return to his place but comes to see that his obstacle is not merely geographical. He must become a different kind of person, the kind of man who can receive home as gift rather than as trophy. And at almost every step of the path, those who imaginatively walk with him can feel the ache.

Some of us are pulled toward nostalgia, looking to something better in the past. And some of us are pulled toward discontentment, looking to something better in the future. Regardless of where we turn, we all recognize something is missing. And all kinds of people—politicians, marketers, tech lords—are there to say, “You want to get home, and I can get you there.”

But it never works.

That’s because homesickness points in contradictory directions all at once. //

The ancient problem says “I can’t get home.” The modern problem says “I got home—it isn’t home.” One longs for return, and one longs for escape. These are not two problems but one. No matter which way we turn, we don’t know what home is. That’s why Homer still rings true, even in the era of IMAX and SpaceX.

And that’s what makes the Christian story stranger than the pagan ones. Odysseus spends 20 years trying to get back to Ithaca. Jesus has spent 2,000 years (so far) telling us to stop mistaking Ithaca for Eden.

The Bible is full of odysseys: Abraham leaves Ur. The Israelites leave Egypt. The apostles set out to “the ends of the earth” (Acts 13:47). When describing examples of faith, the Book of Hebrews says none of them “received the things promised” (11:13, ESV throughout).

These pilgrimages were not about answering the longing for home with a return to something past. We want a place prepared for us, a place to belong, a place to be known, a place to be loved. But our longing for that can sometimes leave us nostalgic for the wrong thing. The Israelites hungered in the wilderness. They responded to that with nostalgia for slavery: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” (Num. 11:5).

The longing wasn’t wrong. As a matter of fact, God said the hunger was necessary. The emptiness was in order that “he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3). As C. S. Lewis reminded us, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.”

All of that should lead us to ponder: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Identifying the ache is not the end, but it’s a start.

The Odyssey, Homer’s and Nolan’s, assumes the greatest human tragedy is losing the home you once had. The Bible says Abraham was looking for a city he had never seen (Heb. 11:13–14). The Odyssey doesn’t answer the question; it reminds us how to ask it. And that’s not nothing. But once we start asking those questions, we might find a whole Trojan horse full of meanings about which we could never start to ask or even think (Eph. 3:20). Asking those questions just might lead us somewhere else, to a better story than even Homer or Hollywood can tell.

The Genesee Valley Greenway State Park is a 90-mile open space corridor that follows the route of the Genesee Valley Canal (1840-1878) and the Pennsylvania Railroad Rochester Branch (1882-1963) from the Erie Canalway Trail in Rochester's Genesee Valley Park to the Village of Cuba in Allegany County. The Greenway will eventually extend to Hinsdale in Cattaraugus County.

It includes a public, multi-use trail and natural and historic resources. The majority of the trail is an old railway bed that is a straight, level surface consisting of cinders, gravel, and mowed grass. The Greenway passes through woodlands, wetlands, river and stream valleys, rolling farmlands, steep gorges, and historic villages in sixteen towns located in Monroe, Livingston, Wyoming, Allegany, and Cattaraugus counties.

He was offered immortality. He chose home.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey opens this week. We won’t be talking about who plays Helen. We’ll be talking about what the poem actually says – which is so much more interesting.

1. The Odyssey is 2,800 years old and contains one choice that defines everything: a goddess offers a mortal man immortality, eternal youth, and paradise. He refuses. He wants to go home. This is not a minor plot point. It is the entire argument of the poem – and one of the most radical statements in Western literature.

2. Home is not a place. It is the accumulated particular – his wife, his son, his dog, his kingdom, the bed he built with his own hands around a living olive tree. Specific. Irreplaceable. The thing no paradise can substitute for, because paradise is general and home is yours. Odysseus knows exactly who he is for the entire poem. Every island, every temptation, every god is trying to make him someone else. He refuses all of it.

3. Immortality is the abstraction. The Form. The Idea. Calypso offers "transcendence" – escape from the mortal, the contingent, the particular, into something eternal and "perfect." This is what Plato promised. This is what every utopia promises. He looks at the offer, looks toward Ithaca, and says no. Written five centuries before Plato – and already containing the correct answer.

4. Every temptation in the poem is a variation of the same offer. The Lotus-eaters give you forgetting – and forgetting is always the first step to losing yourself. Circe turns men into pigs: comfortable, fed, no longer quite human. The Sirens offer pure knowledge – but knowledge that requires you to stop, to be detained, to never arrive. Each one is a different version of the same proposition: stay, be comfortable, become something other than what you are.

5. He defeats the Cyclops — pure brute force — not with strength but with a name trick. He tells the monster his name is Nobody. When the Cyclops screams for help, he screams that Nobody is killing him. Intelligence as the only weapon that works against power. The hero of this poem is not the strongest man in the room. He is the most lucid.

6. Penelope is an underrated figure in Western literature. Twenty years alone, surrounded by a parasitic class consuming everything her husband built, with nothing but intelligence and patience. She holds the line. She tests him at the end with the secret of the bed – not with passion but with proof. She too knows exactly who she is and what she is waiting for. The Odyssey has two heroes. One travels. One stays. Both refuse to become someone else.

7. This week, everyone is arguing about the casting. Helen’s complexion. Representation. Nobody is discussing what the poem says. This is — without anyone noticing — the Odyssey happening in real time. The Lotus-eaters don’t use force. They offer something comfortable enough to make you forget what you were heading toward. The debate about the casting is the Lotus flower – the smokescreen. The poem is Ithaca – home. Odysseus would have recognized the mechanism immediately. He encountered it on every island.

Communism and the Herostratos Instinct – They Couldn’t Build It. So They Burned It.

In 356 BC, a man named Herostratos burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — because he could never build something that magnificent and needed the world to know his name. The Athenians made it a capital offense to speak it. We still know it. The first man to destroy a Wonder of the World. It is the same story as Cain and Abel.

1. Every civilization produces two types in permanent tension. Those who build – who create, who reach, who transmit excellence forward. And those consumed by the fact that others build better than they do. They cannot bear the height. Cannot match it. And eventually decide that if they cannot reach it, nobody should have it. The name for this is envy – the specific, corrosive pain caused not by your own suffering but by another’s excellence. Nietzsche called it ressentiment. Genesis called it Cain. Same wound, every century, different clothes.

2. The lie is the first weapon – not to win the argument but to poison it. Not merely strategic propaganda deployed to seize power, but deployed to corrupt, to stain, to contaminate. To make the great seem like thieves, the builder an exploiter, the cathedral oppression, the excellence privilege. The goal is not to defeat the excellent in open debate. It is to make admiring them shameful and transmitting them suspect – so the child who might have reached toward them never learns they existed. Zakłamanie aimed specifically at height (explained below). Not managing reality – poisoning the wells from which excellence drinks.

3. The targets are never accidental. Always the best – the cathedral, not the barn. The scholar, not the clerk. Colonel Ciepliński, not the collaborator who signed the confession (also below). Excellence is the specific offense. Height is the specific wound. The destruction is always aimed upward – which is how you know it is envy and not justice.

4. Communism is the Herostratos instinct given a five-year plan, a secret police, and a philosophy that makes destruction sound like justice. The most organized mobilization of ressentiment in human history. It gave envy a manifesto, an army, and the moral high ground – the most dangerous combination ever assembled. Previous destroyers burned one temple. Communism burned the concept of the temple.

5. The pattern is unbroken across centuries. The French Revolution scattered the bones of French kings – not military necessity, ideological purification. Mao’s Red Guards burned libraries and killed scholars because five thousand years of Chinese excellence was an implicit rebuke to the revolution’s mediocrity. Today’s version cancels Shakespeare, pulls down Newton, erases Jefferson – not despite their greatness but because of it. Same wound. Same response. Updated vocabulary.

6. The lie does not stop at winning. It keeps working before and after victory – corrupting memory, rewriting history, staining reputations across generations, demoralizing and poisoning the souls. A civilization that cannot point to its greatest achievements and say — this is what we are capable of — is a civilization that has been successfully poisoned. The envy wins not when it tears down the statue. It wins when the children no longer know what the statue was.

7. You cannot build from envy. Which is why every revolution driven by it produces the same result: the heights are not replaced by new heights but by the flat, the administered, the carefully mediocre – the Idiocracy, the Last Man blinking. Not a failure of implementation. The intended output of the Herostratos instinct at civilizational scale. The Temple of Artemis was rebuilt twice before the destroyers finally won. Western civilization has been rebuilt before. The question is whether enough people understand what is being burned — and why — before the last stones are gone.

The Thousand Years We Lost.Not because it burned.

In 240 BC, a man named Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth in a library in Alexandria. He was accurate to within 1%. Euclid worked there. Archimedes studied there. Hero of Alexandria built a working steam engine there. Aristarchus proposed that the earth orbits the sun – 1,800 years before Copernicus. The question nobody asks about the Library of Alexandria is not who burned it. It is: what happened to all of that? Why did we spend over a thousand years rediscovering things already known?

The answer has nothing to do with fire.

The Library didn’t burn in one dramatic catastrophe. That is the myth – Julius Caesar’s fleet accidentally igniting the greatest repository of knowledge in the ancient world in 48 BC, everything consumed in a single night. It makes a good story. It is mostly wrong. The Library was damaged, partially, by Caesar’s fire. It continued in diminished form for centuries afterward. What finally ended it was not flame but the slow withdrawal of the resources and attention that any living institution requires to remain alive. It was administered to death. Budget by budget. Scholar not replaced. Wing not maintained. Political priority shifted. The most consequential loss in intellectual history was not an act of destruction. It was an act of indifference.

What the Library contained mattered less than what it made possible. Eratosthenes, Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus – these were not isolated geniuses working alone. They were the product of an institutional ecosystem: scholars from every civilization gathering in one place, arguing about the same texts, cross-pollinating disciplines that had never been in the same room before. When the scholars dispersed — to Rome, to Constantinople, to Persia — they took the texts but not the conversation. What was lost was not the inventory. It was the living intellectual culture that gave the inventory meaning.

Think about what that means. The steam engine existed in Alexandria in the first century AD. The heliocentric model existed in the third century BC. The circumference of the earth was known. If the Library had survived and transmitted continuously, the Industrial Revolution might have happened a thousand years earlier. What humanity lost in the slow death of Alexandria is not a collection of scrolls. It is twelve centuries of compounded progress – every discovery that would have followed from the discoveries that were made and then forgotten, every generation that spent its intellectual energy rediscovering what the previous civilization already knew.

The parallel is precise and uncomfortable. The Western university was the Library’s successor – the institution that gathered, preserved, and transmitted the accumulated knowledge of civilization across generations. It is currently being emptied. Not by fire. By ideological capture, administrative indifference, and the replacement of open inquiry with approved conclusions. The scholars and the books are still there. The conversation is being shut down – not dramatically, not visibly, but in the same slow way the Library’s conversation ended: one cancelled course, one retired professor not replaced, one field of inquiry made professionally dangerous. The Library of Alexandria didn’t need an arsonist. Neither does the university.

Civilizational memory doesn’t burn. It is defunded, dispersed or erased until nobody notices it’s gone. The most dangerous threat to what we know is never the barbarian at the gate. It is the administrator at the budget meeting, the ideologue in the curriculum committee, the funding body that decides, for entirely reasonable institutional reasons, that this particular conversation is no longer a priority. We know how this ends. We watched it happen once already, in Alexandria, across three centuries of entirely reasonable decisions. We called what followed the Dark Ages.
We are still deciding what to call what comes next.

Reinventing Nixie tubes through design, research, and craftsmanship.

We are a small team dedicated to restoring historical nixie tube-making techniques and crafting modern timepieces —by hand, in our Czech workshop.

On Thursday mornings, Michael Scurr flips through pages . . . very, very carefully. He volunteers at the United Kingdom’s National Archives. In May, he made a discovery. He found an original copy of the Declaration of Independence!

At the time, Mr. Scurr was sifting through letters. A Royal Navy captain wrote them. Mr. Scurr found a report. It told of Brits capturing an American ship called Dalton. That took place on Christmas Eve in 1776.

Attached to the report? Something labeled as “another paper.” Mr. Scurr gingerly unfolded the document. Then he spotted the word “Declaration” printed across the top. He stopped.

“I thought, oh, right, OK, this is definitely a Declaration of Independence,” he says. “How exciting is this?”

Researchers agree. Before this find, people thought only 10 early copies existed. Now Mr. Scurr has upped that number to 11. The Founders signed the original document on July 4, 1776. This copy was printed days later. The document spread the news. Thirteen American colonies were breaking away from Great Britain.

So, yes, it’s old. But it’s important for another reason too. The ship on which it was captured was sent by the brand-new Continental Congress. John Hancock signed the ship’s orders. (John Hancock also famously signed the Declaration in BIG letters.)

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The hand-written parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence showing historic script lines and signatures.
✦ ✦ ✦
56 SIGNATURES,
ONE REVOLUTION
✦ ✦ ✦
On July 4, 1776, representatives from the 13 colonies gathered in Philadelphia to declare independence from Great Britain. The Continental Congress had voted two days earlier to make the break and to write a Declaration of Independence.

John Hancock signed the Declaration first on that Fourth of July. Many of the others signed over the ensuing days and weeks. Their signatures — 56 names added to the official parchment copy — transformed a revolutionary decision into a public pledge.

These are the stories of the people behind the signatures.

United States
of America

Reichinstein also wrote a biography of Einstein, "Albert Einstein sein Lebensbild und seine Weltanschauung" (which roughly translates as Albert Einstein: His Life and Worldview) that came out prior to 1936. Apparently it was written and possibly self-published in 1932, which led to Einstein writing to Reichinstein that

Wenn Sie dieses Manuskript irgendwo und irgendwie veröffentlichen, dann ist es zwischen uns für immer aus.

Google Translate renders this as:

If you publish this manuscript anywhere, in any way, then it's over between us forever.

i.e. strongly asking him not to publish the manuscript. Reichinstein then proceeded to publish the book in Prague in 1934. The relevant letter from Einstein to Reichinstein is dates May 26, 1932 and has been made available by the ETH Zurich Library's "Einstein Online" collection, specifically in the section on The Time in Berlin (1914-1933) along with several other letters to Reichinstein, Hermann Weyl, and others.

Old film rolls from flea markets, scanned and put online. Someone's vacations, birthdays, random Tuesdays — forgotten in a drawer for decades. I don't know where or when these were taken. Help me figure it out.

These are the photos nobody thought were worth keeping — and they're the most honest record of how people actually lived. A roll of Agfa from 1968 could only be from 1968. Putting these online is the only shot at getting a photo back to the people in it.

Old Glory: The History of Our Nation’s Flag is an illustrated American flag history poster that follows the growth of the United States through the changing designs of its national and colonial banners. This educational poster presents notable flags from the 13 Colonies through the present 50-star U.S. flag.

The ferry broke down at exactly the wrong moment for everyone except Henry Ford.

On June 8, 1909, two stripped-down Ford Model Ts rolled onto a little wooden ferry at Glasgow, Mo., and crossed the Missouri River. The cars were filthy, the men inside them were running on fumes, and a Boston-built Shawmut was closing fast behind them in a cross-country race.

Then the ferry quit. The boat that’d just carried the Fords to the western bank suddenly couldn’t return for the Shawmut or the Acme, another trailing car. The official explanation was mechanical failure, but the timing looked almost theatrical. //

The Shawmut crew, stranded on the wrong side of the river, had a choice. They could lose hours searching for another crossing. Or they could aim the car toward the railroad bridge looming above the water, a half-mile of ties, gaps and terror, with no guarantee a train wouldn’t come roaring through. They chose the bridge.

Ornamental turning is the process of making art objects on a rotating axis with great care and precision, using a variety of materials, shaping tools and techniques. These objects can be elegant and refined, simple and spare, baroque and elaborate, or, occasionally, bizarre, as the taste and skill of the designer and maker dictates. //

Ornamentally turned objects are most often created from very dense hardwoods. During the Renaissance and into Victorian times, ivory was also a popular material; but now, of course, it is no longer used. To work these difficult materials, new and complex tools were developed. When early mariners were just beginning to use clocks to calculate longitude, the equipment and skills used in ornamental turning had already matured. The craft was using complex gears, precisely made polished steel parts, and accurately threaded screws that would only become common in industry much later. Wondrous, and previously unimaginable forms became possible because the tools became possible. //

The stellar machine in ornamental turning’s catalog of equipment is the rose engine. A rose engine is an advanced form of lathe with a rocking headstock mounted on pivots. The headstock’s motion is controlled by a complex set of cams, called rosettes, which revolve on the lathe’s spindle. The shapes created on the rose engine are derived from the patterns cut into the rosettes. It can be used to turn and decorate both wood, and metal, and, in centuries past, ivory as well. The rose engine’s name is derived from the observation that many of the patterns created on it are reminiscent of flower petals. Early records indicate the rose engine first appeared in the early 1500’s.

Japan uses both 50Hz and 60Hz power frequencies due to historical and logistical reasons that date back to the early days of electrification in the country. In the 19th century, early power companies operated locally, leading to the establishment of a dual-frequency system.

Japan’s power grid is divided into two regions: Eastern Japan operates at 50 Hz, while Western Japan operates at 60 Hz. This division originates from the 1880s, when Tokyo imported 50 Hz generators from Germany, while Osaka chose 60 Hz equipment from the United States. //

The Fujigawa River and the southern border of Niigata Prefecture form the boundary between the two frequencies.

Holtzapffel No.1636 - Plumier
Holtzapffel No. 1636 is considered by many to be the finest rose engine ever built. John Jacob Holtzapffel, II delivered that judgement in 1886, some 48 years after his father had built the lathe, stating that it was the last of three rose engines...

Est. reading time: 9 minutes

Many other fine pictures of the complete lathe and tools may be seen there.

This 1838 lathe cost 1850 pounds, or about $250,000 in today’s money. The chuck acts like a 3D Spirograph for ornamental turning.

Ornamental Turning, also called Complex Turning, is executed on a lathe with attachments which convert a plain circular section to variants of outline; these range from a simple series of cuts taken at intervals around the work (so producing grooves or bumps on the surface) to non-circular movements whereby the whole of the circular shape is removed to give a completely different form. Enjoy this wonderful history of Ornamental Turning.

Such shapes are achieved by various means, primarily thru the used of fixed or revolving cutters being introduced to the work in radial and non-radial paths. Movement of the work and cutters individually and or separately can achieve a nearly endless variety of patterns and shapes.

The Great Lakes Ships of Frank E. Kirby: America’s Greatest Naval Architect,” by Richard Gebhart, Michigan State University Press, May 2026, 231 pages, $59.95 (Hardcover), $29.10 (Paperback), $29.95 (E-book)

From the 1870s through the 1890s most of the world’s ships not built in British shipyards were built on the North American Great Lakes, a vast interconnected yet isolated inland sea system. Of these Lakes vessels built during that period and for the first two decades of the 20th century, many, including the best designs came from the mind of naval architect Frank E. Kirby.

“The Great Lakes Ships of Frank E. Kirby: America’s Greatest Naval Architect,” by Richard Gebhart, is a biography of the man and a history of his ships. It charts his career, and follows the course of the shipyards he ran and the ships he built.

The British motor industry has always been brilliant at producing two types of people: engineering geniuses who could design a world-beating chassis on the back of a beer mat, and businessmen who couldn't sell water in a desert. John Tojeiro was a textbook example of the former. He was a quiet, back-shed wizard who built the skeleton for one of the most famous cars ever made, and in return, he got... well, not very much at all. This is the story of the man who did all the hard work, while someone else got all the glory.