Aug 7, 2025
The Ancient Dignity of Education
In 1595, Emperor Rudolf II of the Holy Roman Empire granted a title of nobility to Thomas Arundell of Wardour. The document, composed in Latin, begins not with a list of military…
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Archive page 6 of 73
Aug 4, 2025
The Gini Mean Difference
Everyone learns the mean. Some make it to the variance. A few even get standard deviation tattooed on their soul. But almost no one meets the Gini mean difference. And that is…
Jul 30, 2025
How Local Zoning Appeals Influence Development
Development doesn't happen in a vacuum. At every step, local planning commissions, zoning boards and courts regulate what can be built, where, and how quickly. These systems are designed to protect public…
Jul 22, 2025
No, the Sun Should Not Have Burned Out
Someone recently wrote, "If it was billions of years old, the sun should have burned out long ago."" It was offered in support of a creationist argument, though without much elaboration. I…
Jun 3, 2025
The Railroad Was There All Along
Harry Lee Williams was born in August 1885 in Honey Creek Township, White County, Indiana. The son of Thornton Robert Williams and Ida May Adams, Harry was raised in a small rural…
May 28, 2025
A New Tartan
There is a special joy in designing something new that still feels old. A coat of arms has this property: rooted in tradition, yet reinterpreted through the choices of its bearer. A…
May 26, 2025
The Electoral College was Designed to Disenfranchise
Every four years, Americans are reminded that they do not elect the president directly. They vote for electors, members of something called the Electoral College, who cast the real ballots for president…
May 15, 2025
How to Design a Tartan
Tartans carry the weight of tradition. They are imagined as ancient patterns, clan-bound, Highland-tested, and restricted to those who can trace their ancestry back to some moor or glen. The popular image…
May 12, 2025
Seventy-Three Cents of Civilization
The United States Postal Service is one of the most quietly extraordinary systems in modern life. It is not magical or divine. It works because hundreds of thousands of people make it…
May 8, 2025
Using Median Polish
Exploratory data analysis often faces challenges due to outliers and skewed distributions, which can distort underlying patterns. Many conventional statistical methods depend on means, making them highly sensitive to extreme values and…
Mar 30, 2025
The History of the Vidames
Among the half-remembered titles of the medieval world, few are more peculiar than the vidame . A word no longer in currency, even among most students of nobility, the vidame occupied a…