Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Letters of Note
The following letter was written exactly 100 years ago. It’s a remarkable piece of writing that never fails to move me. And because you deserve it, above the transcript I’ve included audio of the letter being read by the lovely Juliet Stevenson, taken from the Letters of Note: Music audiobook. Born in Alabama in 1880, Helen Keller
On this day in 1876, shortly after making history, Alexander Graham Bell wrote the following letter to his father. To read his diary entry from that same day, visit Diaries of Note. And don’t forget to sign up for the Letters of Note newsletter. Born in Scotland in 1847, Alexander Graham Bell hailed from a
Dear all, On 1st January of this year, after what feels like centuries of preparation, I launched Diaries of Note, and though incredibly difficult to plan, the premise is simple: every single day, on the Diaries of Note website, I am featuring a single diary entry from history, published on the same day and month
Although they only existed for seven years and released just three albums, Nirvana were a band of immeasurable influence in the music world thanks in no small part to Smells Like Teen Spirit, a single track on Nevermind, their second album. It was this song that brought them out into the open, going on to sell millions
Born in Cambridge in 1952, Douglas Adams was best known for creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a wildly successful project that began in 1978 as a science-fiction comedy radio series and eventually evolved to become something much larger, in many formats and in many languages, adored by many millions of people around the world.
More in programming
A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good. And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well. So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
