Caustic

caustic:(in optics) The curve or surface formed by the reflection of parallel rays of light in a large-aperture concave mirror. The apex of the caustic lies at the principal focus of the mirror. Such a curve can sometimes be seen on the surface of the liquid in a cup as a result of reflection by the curved walls of the cup. A similar curve is formed by a convex lens with spherical surfaces refracting parallel rays of light.

Quotation from: A Dictionary of Physics. Ed. John Daintith. Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

The Truth is Sometimes Told

An historian must assume that truth is sometimes told. He must, assuming that, argue from probabilities, and, keeping in view the social forces operating in his own time, ask himself what was likely to have occurred in the past. This is what we see done. There are histories of England, of Australia, of the Jews. Now the books of the Bible that relate history are few. And unless we are to believe that all the events recorded as historical are absolutely true, the history books do not seem to me of a very high order. There is a want of philosophical grasp and outlook. In many cases they are dry chronicles of kings and war, and of the efforts of priests and prophets. They lack all the most interesting parts of history the record of the rise and development of the morals, the intelligence, the industry, and the wealth of the nation. But, as it happens, it is only of late that it has been recognised that true history is not wholly concerned about kings and battles.

…

The Bible was not written all at once. With it, as with other things, we behold a growth. It partakes, therefore, of the nature of other works. We do not find anything has happened like the fabled Minerva. Wisdom does not come all at once. The history of the Bible shows that it was only bit by bit compiled, and its history is the history of everything around us.

Quotation from: Address delivered by Robert Stout at the opening of the 1880 session of the Freethought Association.[Dunedin, New Zealand]

Otago Daily Times 21 February 1880

Mrs Bates sat in her rocking-chair

While, for an hour or more, the children played subduedly, intent, fertile of invention, united in fear of their mother’s wrath and in dread of their father’s homecoming. Mrs Bates sat in her rocking-chair making a ‘singlet’ of thick, cream coloured flannel, which gave a dull wounded sound as she tore off the grey edge. She worked at her sewing with energy, listening to the children, and her anger wearied itself, lay down to rest, opening its eyes from time to time and steadily watching, its ears raised to listen. Sometimes, even her anger quailed and shrank, and the mother suspended her sewing, tracing the footsteps that thudded along the sleepers outside; she would life her head sharply to bid the children “hush,” but she recovered herself in time, and the footsteps went past the gate, and the children were not flung out of their play-world.

...

Then she lighted a candle and went into the tiny room. The air was cold and damp, but she could not make a fire, there was no fireplace. She set down the candle and looked round. The candle-light glittered on the lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink chrysanthemums in the room. Elizabeth stood looking at the flowers. She turned away, and calculated whether there would be room to lay him on the floor, between the couch and the chiffonier. She pushed the chairs aside. There would be room to lay him down and to step around him. Then she fetched an old red table-cloth, and another old cloth, spreading them down to save her bit of carpet. She shivered on leaving the parlour; so, from the dresser drawer she took a clean shirt and put it at the fire to air. All the time her mother-in-law was rocking herself in the chair and moaning.

Quotation from: The Odour of Chrysanthemums by D.H. Lawrence. Penguin. 2011

Useless Words

One great drawback to the book is the immense number of new and generally useless words contained in it. Technical words are more or less useful, according to their more or less universal acceptance; but almost every writer now seems to revel in inventing an entirely new set for his own use.

Many scientific men have been abused for a want of classical knowledge, and for introducing barbarous names; but if an intimate knowledge of classics induces the possessor to run riot in terminology, and gives him a fancied right to alter, amend, and invent, with indiscriminate license, then we say, better barbarous words than barbarous confusion.

Quotation from: The History of Creation [Review of] The History of Creation by Ernst Haeckel, Professor in the University of Jena. English Translation (H.S. King and Co., London 1875], by Captain F.W. Hutton. New Zealand Magazine, volume 1, no 3, July 1876, pp 251-263.

Chips and Shavings

The Problem of Poverty is so vast, complex, and many-sided, that its practical solution must be the work of generations for we have found its causation to be co-extensive with that of civilization itself. In the lathe of destiny, the vast amorphous mass of humanity has been slowly and painfully fashioned into a form that even now but dimly foreshadows some Divine ideal. But what of the chips and the shavings, the heaped-up refuse of ages, the myriads of broken hearts and ruined lives into whose very soul the graving iron has entered? Cast forth as refuse, they were condemned to live under those terrible laws which, while they developed their brethren into forms of strength and beauty, chained them down to an accelerating degeneration from age to age. It is manifestly worse than useless to approach such a problem as this as if it were merely one of the questions of the day. It is the mother of them all. From its teeming womb they sprang, and there, like the yelping brood of Sin, they kennel. In tracing its causes, with a view to palliation and cure, we must enter the domains of Physiology, Pscychology, Morality, Religion, and Politics.

In every age, man’s insight into his own nature is the measure of his power to interpret history. The historian can but read into the canvas of the past his own synthesis of the results of contemporary analysis. If, then, History is but Psychology writ large, what clue can she furnish to guide us through the labyrinth of complexities?

…

Luxury, like a canker, emasculates and enslaves the rich; want, ignorance, and vice, brutalize and make desparate the poor; till at length, what was denied to their prayers is conceded to their threats and the fear of revolution. The world, and especially England, whose traditions we have carried with us, has gone on complacently contemplating the increase of her trade and the progress of her upper-story civilisation, regardless of the pandemonium below.

Quotation: The Problem of Poverty in New Zealand, part II by Professor Duncan Macgregor. New Zealand Magazine. 1876.

Duncan Macgregor (1843-1906) was appointed to the inaugural chair of Moral and Mental Philosophy, Otago University in 1871. The potted biography at the New Zealand Dictionary of National Biography makes interesting reading.

Imbalance

Sometimes, gulls misjudge things. Here the post is just a tiny bit too small for the gull's feet.

Ooops, a wing stretched out for balance didn't seem to help and the only solution was to abandon the post.

Memento Ergo Sum

Cogito ergo sum. I close my eyes and go back sixteen years. Mother Marie-Therese writes it on the blackboard. Her arm is bare to the elbow: the sleeve of her habit is rolled up to avoid chalk dust. ‘I think therefore I am,’ she says. Where the Latin was just something to translate, the English jumps and my hand is up (unlike me, that) and when Mother sees me I ask wouldn’t it have been more correct for him to have said, Memento ergo sum?
‘Memento?’ With that winter frost smile of hers.
‘Yes, Mother. I remember, therefore I am.’
She sends her smile searching among the other girls in the class. But no one has a comment. As for Reverend Mother’s smile, it could mean, ‘A silly girl has misunderstood Descartes,’ or ‘See how we have engaged the attention of Mary Dunne.’
‘And why would you say that?’ she asks me.
‘Because’ (I am fifteen) ‘we are what we remember.’

…

I am, always have been, a fool who rushes in, a blurter-out of awkward truths, a speaker-up at parties who, the morning-after, filled with guilt, vows that never again, no matter what, but who, faced at the very next encounter with someone whose opinions strike me as unfair, rushes in again blurting out, breaking all vows.

Quotation: I Am Mary Dunne by Brian Moore. Penguin 2012 (1968)