Month: May 2026
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Unto This Last: Introduction
I immediately bought a copy of ‘Unto This Last’ – four essays by John Ruskin – when I read that it had changed the course of Mahatma Gandhi‘s life. I hoped for soaring arches of brilliant thoughts constructing a great cathedral of vision but instead, I found dense thickets of long Victorian sentences and rambling…
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Hypothecation
Hypothecation is a fancy word for offering security on a debt; thus hypothetically (sic), a bank owns a house until a lender repays the mortgage. Stretching this definition, if a Government wants to persuade private investors (rather than call on their hard-pressed Treasury) to support the building of new roads, they can hypothecate on the…
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A Pig Under The Roof
In ancient China, it was customary to divine the future and seek counsel on the present through reference to the I Ching; the Book of Changes. This oracle is a text that goes back to the earliest writing forms of ancient China and makes use of ideograms; compound symbols that have multiple meanings. For instance,…
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Avalanche
The sudden, drastic appearance of an avalanche with enormous destructive potential is neither a random nor spontaneous event. Many factors cause them. These include climatic changes, types of snow, the sliding surface, slope, height and type of failure that triggers the change of status quo. Slab avalanches are responsible for 90% of fatalities. These typically…
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The Rose Bowl
Ancient philosophies teach that light, laughter and love each enable us to transcend difficulty. The light refers to knowledge and to wisdom, derived from undeniable certainty, gained either intuitively, directly through one’s own experience, or indirectly through study, observation and concentration.
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Insults
Andouille is a spiced sausage made from the stomach and large intestine of a pig. It’s also a term of insult in France and roughly translates as “imbecile” which, medically speaking, is halfway between “idiot” (IQ of 0-25) and “moron” (IQ of 51-70).