In 1622 Captain John Mason was granted the land between the Kennebec River and the Merrimack River and the territory was named New Hampshire. The border with Massachusetts wasn’t the middle of the river, but a distance three miles north of the river’s shore. This made for an interesting, zig-zagging border that meanders along as…
“To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.” – Heraclitus Heraclitus seems to be trending on the blog, coming up a couple of times in the last 24 hours of writing. Purely coincidence, but then again maybe…
“We are carried along by our thoughts, “now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm … every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather.” It is no wonder that the mind is like this, since even the apparently solid physical world exists in endless…
“For any GNSS survey campaign, a proper benchmark is essential to preserve measurement location and elevation. Historically, leveling field operations for second and third order geodetic leveling, provided in the topographic instructions of the USGS, distinguished survey benchmarks as either monumented or non-monumented benchmarks. Monumented benchmarks have a tablet consisting of identifying information surrounding a…
“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” – Joseph Campbell The last 4000 foot peak on the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire before entering Maine is 4049 foot Mount Moriah. Hiking it as a single day out and back, it became…
“Walkers pass tight lipped, eyes avertedOnly dogs tugging on leashes want to collapse the space between us”– Ken Burns, In the Social Distance A couple of days ago I had the audacity to post an opinion on Facebook and immediately faced the crush of for and against dialog that’s lasted far longer than the typical…
“Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade,Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.”– Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall Orion and Taurus, the hunter and the hunted, have a long-standing adversarial relationship in the skies above us. If the Hyades are the face of Taurus turned towards Orion,…
“A man who lives an intellectual life is like a man who carries a lantern in front of him to light his way. Such a person will never come to a dark place, because the light of his intellect moves before him.“ – Leo Tolstoy I suppose I haven’t reached the intellectual level just yet,…
There’s a statue standing on the rocks at the edge of the tidal range in the remote and sparsely populated town of Mikladalur in the Faroe Islands. It depicts a Kópakonan, or a “seal woman”, who would shed her seal skin to walk amongst the humans on land. When she wanted to return to the…
“Make sure you’re not made ‘Emperor,’ avoid that imperial stain. It can happen to you, so keep yourself simple, good, pure, saintly, plain, a friend of justice, god-fearing, gracious, affectionate, and strong for your proper work. Fight to remain the person that philosophy wished to make you. Revere the gods, and look after each other….