The Eiffel Tower rises above Paris with such familiarity that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Its lattice of iron has become part of the visual order of Paris, alongside the stone facades, the river, the bridges, and the great monuments created from earlier centuries. Yet, when the tower was proposed in …
Category Archives: History
The Uncanny and the Failure of Order
Let us journey back to the time of Dr. Freud in 1919 – A lamp sits on a table in an ordinary room. The lamp rises, but there is something wrong about the lamp. This is the peculiar force of the uncanny, where it is not an ugly event. It is ugliness of situation, which …
Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism
On ugliness in art – If art seeks beauty, what is it to do with pain, deformity, terror, revulsion, and disorder? Artists should not simply exclude them, because the world does not exclude them if it can be reflected. Lessing saw this problem in Laocoon. Poetry and sculpture, he argued, do not suffer from the …
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Notes from Essays in Idleness by Kenko
I have only copied particular parts…
Kenkō on Modest Living
It is an excellent thing to live modestly, shun luxury and wealth and not lust after fame and fortune. Rare has been the wise man who was rich. In China once there was a man by the name of Xu You, who owned nothing and even drank directly from his cupped hands. Seeing this, someone …
Reclaiming Form During the Renaissance
The Renaissance did not only restart antiquity, it reordered what could be observed and valued. From the margins, the coarse, the bodily, the obscene, moved into the center of cultural life. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, obscenity is no longer a feature of carnival or tolerated disorder. It becomes deliberate, cultivated, and visible within educated …
Compressible Flow Notes
I finally published my compressible flow notes online. They are under classes – comp. flow. They are the result of teaching the course over nine years at University of Florida. I compressed the file a bit to conserve my website bandwidth. Enjoy!
Remembering Family – Photographer Paul Liebhardt
Recently my cousin and family member Paul Liebhardt passed away. He worked at NASA for a time and then became a photographer. While a photographer, he traveled internationally. His work as a photographer is well known. The remembrance celebration (link below) shows nice videos and writing of his students coming together from various paths of …
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Note on Early Medieval Universities, the Scholastic Method, and the Formation of Critical Thought
Early medieval universities formed a distinct intellectual system built around structure, discipline, and the controlled expansion of reasoning. These institutions emerged from cathedral schools and monastic centers and evolved into formal environments where knowledge was not only preserved but interrogated. Their core mechanism was the scholastic method, a systematic approach that treated ideas as analytical …
The Three Pillars of Rocketry Culminating in Human Spaceflight
Below is an article that is upcoming in the NASA Alumni newsletter without images. “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Modern rocketry began with foundational work by pioneers such as Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, and the American Rocket Society. Their theoretical and experimental advances …
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