Category Archives: Cool Stuff

The death of blogs has been greatly exaggerated, or more likely falsely assumed. Geoff Manaugh’s blog is always worth reading, and since he’s been posting more regularly, I was able to read several good posts in a row.

First, I read this amazing description of his high school Latin teacher’s classroom:

To this, I’ll briefly add that I studied Latin in both Middle and High School, where our teacher actually lived in his room—a story for another day—a wood-paneled chamber lined with floor-to-ceiling book shelves and marble statues everywhere, including a stained glass window overlooking our school’s back quad. But, amongst all those books, from Catullus to Ovid and beyond, was a shelf devoted to vampirism, lycanthropy, and witchcraft—including titles by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (translator of the book seen here). I used to spend hours reading through that stuff—witch trials, premature burial, people cursed to wander the Earth alone for eternity.

It wasn’t till later in the post I realized that my wife taught at this school for a few months when we lived in Philadelphia.

He also wrote a fascinating description of the many layers of Berlin. My favorite part of the post, however, is the phrase “The SCUBA divers of the Potsdamer Sea.” Sounds like the title of a short story.

And then there was this post about liquid computers, which Geoff very sensibly connects to magic pools, ancient and medieval. The barrier between science and magic grows ever thinner.