(1) open door due to hearing loud bird (2) fail to see bird entering the door underneath one's feet (3) see the bird hanging out by the fireplace

wren chick (it was in human hands only long enough for us to construct a makeshift nest in a warm box)

A wren chick invited itself into our apartment last night (it sneaked in the door while we were looking up in the trees to see where the racket was coming from). Its nest had been destroyed by some tree-trimmers, so we gave it a warm box, kept it alive overnight, and it's now at a wildlife rescue.

"Tolstoy’s phrase 'the snare of preparation,' which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals."

"Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand....." - Jane Addams

And of course college students are in the best position to appreciate the titular concern of Addams's chapter, which alludes to...

twenty years at hull-house : hane adams : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

My students have always had lively debates after reading the chapter "The Snare of Preparation" from Jane Addams's book Twenty Years at Hull House:
archive.org/details/twen...

wildflowers in Collin County, Texas

Wildflowers relaxing under a tree

wildflowers who don't know what alt text is

wildflowers who have never voted

wildflowers shaking off the rain

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science (Yale University Press, 2025)

Interesting intellectual history or genealogy of the intertwined development of "religion" and "society" as explananda / explanantia c. 1890-1910 in the work of Tylor, Durkheim, Simmel, and Webber.

This painting, a 1927 piece by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, is called Limits of Reason (also known as Grenzen des Verstandes, or The Bounds of the Intellect).

"At present, however, we are a long way from there, though we fancy that we stand on its border: for what I know of a thing is only an external and detached symbol thereof, wrapped in a different arbitrary symbol."

~ J.G. Herder, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, tr. G.M. Moore

"If we thought with things instead of abstract marks, and expressed the nature of these things instead of arbitrary signs: then farewell to error and opinion, for we should find ourselves in the land of truth."

Increasingly essential reading: editions.flammarion.com/le-monde-con...

Yellow wildflowers

Ladybug

Trees

Gazebo

Happy Easter!

Project Hail Mary (film): Ok let's cut from the book narrative 90% of the biology, 99% of the math, & 99.7% of the chemistry, then focus on how STEM PhDs teaching middle school have a questionable sense of humor, have probably eaten more ramen than is good for them, & can't find any (human) friends

Project Hail Mary (novel): Hey isn't it fun watching me solve math problems & ace science lab? Oh snap, now I'm in outer space and my audience is dead. Ah, but what have we here? My own alien auditor who's handy enough to make my experiments work but computer-illiterate enough to be impressed by me

a footpath through yellow wildflowers and stubby trees

it's probably this way

Plato's mirror metaphor in the Republic helps us think about screens wherein AI mimics phenomena without the artist's mediating hand. Menander's theatrical machine, which resolved narrative tensions through divine intervention, parallels how machine learning short-circuits human creative processes.

Plato's mirror metaphor in the Republic helps us think about screens wherein AI mimics phenomena without the artist's mediating hand. Menander's theatrical machine, which resolved narrative tensions through divine intervention, parallels how machine learning short-circuits human creative processes.

Thank you! You're welcome

Livestream this Friday/Saturday. Keynotes and invited speakers. YouTube.com/@NTPAMedia Keynotes: Peg Birmingham, DePaul; Alejandro Vallega, University of Oregon

Spring in Tyler State Park
(northeast Texas)

"He is no longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person." (7/7)

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

"may become almost a full-fledged citizen because of a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully." (6/7)

"The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living," (5/7)

"As long as his trial and his sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which there are no lawyers and no appeals." (4/7)

"As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else. Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it." (3/7)

"For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law." (2/7)

"The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights." (1/7)

In a sense, the ongoing DHS/CPB/ICE attempt to disappear people into detention facilities without making any formal criminal charges is an attempt to close a door to the legal recognition of one's personhood identified by Hannah Arendt:

(The following quote is from The Origins of Totalitarianism):

(If you're ever in Oklahoma City, you can see the steamboat Heroine at the OKC Historical Society's museum)

Challenges of Steamboat Operation | Oklahoma Historical Society Steamboats faced many challenges from securing wood, to log jams and fires.

"If a [river] steamboat could run for five years or more, it was considered old, its survival rare, and its crew and operators, lucky. The steamboat Heroine ran for five years before sinking in 1838, thus making it a veteran boat and a rare vessel."
www.okhistory.org/learn/steamb...

A Peregrination in Gabriel Marcel’s Phenomenology of Hope

A paper presented that the South Carolina Society for Philosophy & North Carolina Philosophical Society Joint Conference (Furman University, 13-14 March, 2026) As the “existentialist wave” gradually faded into the popular memory of the…