Iris on science · June 15th

Early in the 11th century, a young Benedictine monk named Eilmer jumped from the 150-foot tower of his abbey in the small English town of Malmesbury, wearing a pair of crude wings he’d fashioned from willow wood and cloth. Eilmer managed to glide a good 600 feet, passing over the city wall before crash-landing in a small valley near the river Avon. The fall broke both his legs, crippling him. Malmesbury Abbey still boasts a stained-glass window in honor of Brother Eilmer. This legendary experiment in medieval aviation comes to us via 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury in an account written circa 1125, although William neglected to provide future historians with an exact date for the feat. But William does mention another key episode in Eilmer's life when the monk was "advanced in years": Eilmer witnessed Halley's comet in 1066, commenting, "It is long since I saw you." Some historians have interpreted this to mean that Eilmer saw Halley's comet on an earlier fly-by in 989, when he would have been a young boy. Assuming Eilmer was at least five years would in 989, he would have been born no later than 984. This would make Eilmer in his 80s in 1066, with his attempt at flight—which occurred when he was "in his first youth"—likely falling between 1000 and 1010. However, it's an estimate that is based on a lot of assumption, according to James Aitcheson of the University of Leicester, who argues in a paper published in the journal Notes and Queries that Eilmer may have seen a different comet altogether in his youth—the comet of 1018. If so, he would have been born much later and the date of his flight would have occurred between the 1020s and 1040s.

Early in the 11th century, a young Benedictine monk named Eilmer jumped from the 150-foot tower of his abbey in the small English town of Malmesbury, wearing a pair of crude wings he’d fashioned from willow wood and cloth. Eilmer managed to glide a good 600 feet, passing over the city wall before crash-landing in a small valley near the river Avon. The fall broke both his legs, crippling him. Malmesbury Abbey still boasts a stained-glass window in honor of Brother Eilmer. This legendary experiment in medieval aviation comes to us via 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury in an account written circa 1125, although William neglected to provide future historians with an exact date for the feat. But William does mention another key episode in Eilmer's life when the monk was "advanced in years": Eilmer witnessed Halley's comet in 1066, commenting, "It is long since I saw you." Some historians have interpreted this to mean that Eilmer saw Halley's comet on an earlier fly-by in 989, when he would have been a young boy. Assuming Eilmer was at least five years would in 989, he would have been born no later than 984. This would make Eilmer in his 80s in 1066, with his attempt at flight—which occurred when he was "in his first youth"—likely falling between 1000 and 1010. However, it's an estimate that is based on a lot of assumption, according to James Aitcheson of the University of Leicester, who argues in a paper published in the journal Notes and Queries that Eilmer may have seen a different comet altogether in his youth—the comet of 1018. If so, he would have been born much later and the date of his flight would have occurred between the 1020s and 1040s.

I’ve been thinking about how we all need those uninterrupted stretches where we can chase a curiosity rabbit‑hole until it leads us somewhere unexpected. The piece argues that protecting that time isn’t about hitting a specific goal; it’s about letting the process itself fuel our creativity. When we let the “real” world intrude, the flow breaks, and the frustration feels almost physical.

The author leans on a few classic thinkers—Lispector’s idea of “grace,” Weil’s notion of empty attention, Monet’s advice to forget the name of what we’re looking at—to show that this state of ego‑less immersion has been described for centuries. It’s less a mystical breakthrough and more a practical condition: we can’t force insight, but we can set the environment for it to appear.

In practice, that means carving out space, turning off distractions, and allowing ourselves to play without a deadline. The “nothing” they talk about isn’t emptiness for its own sake; it’s the mental room where new connections can surface.

So, if you want that deep, flowing creativity, treat it like any other essential habit—schedule it, guard it, and let it unfold on its own terms.

A man asked this morning if I was saying the Textus Receptus is without error. No. That is the wrong trap. Here is the part almost nobody says plainly, and I mean on both sides. The history is messy no matter which pile you are standing in. Erasmus printed more than one edition. Stephanus did too. So did Beza. Those printed editions do not all read the same in every place. So when somebody thinks he has cornered you with, "Are you saying every printed Greek edition is flawless," he is swinging hard at a man who is not standing there. I am not asking you to crown Erasmus. I never was. Erasmus was not a prophet walking down from a mountain with stone tablets under his arm. He was a scholar working inside history, with tools, pressures, limits, and decisions in front of him like every other man God ever used. The question is not whether Erasmus became the final authority. The question is whether anybody did. Watch how the modern argument usually runs. They tell the Christian that the Bible in his hands has problems in it. Then they tell him the real authority is back in the original autographs. Then he asks the obvious question: where are the autographs? Gone. Every one of them. So now the authority he was just pointed to does not exist anymore. Into that empty space they hand him a lexicon, a critical apparatus, a stack of footnotes, and a man with a wall of letters after his name. And somehow the ordinary believer is supposed to look at all of that and call it confidence. It is not confidence. It is custody. Somebody else is holding the keys and letting you visit the Book on supervised terms. What you have in that system is not a settled authority at all. You have a process. A committee. A thing that gets revised whenever the next preferred reading becomes fashionable. And if the process can overrule the Book whenever the apparatus shifts, then be honest about what is really on top. It is not the Book. It is the process. Or more plainly, it is the man standing there explaining the process to you in a voice that says you would not understand it without him. Now let me say the thing that keeps this from becoming a cartoon. I am not anti-Greek. The King James translators were not anti-Greek. Those men worked from the original tongues. They weighed earlier English translations. They knew grammar, history, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the old arguments better than most of the people sneering at them from a comment box. Study is good. But study serves the Book. It does not sit on top of it. Greek can help you understand a word. A Greek apparatus does not become the final court that the word has to stand trial in front of. That is where the sleight of hand happens. A man says, "the Greek says," and the whole room is trained to drop its head like the bishop just walked in. But which Greek? Which edition? Which reading? Which committee? Which editor? And when those scholars disagree with each other, as they constantly do, who walks up and breaks the tie? Nobody wants that last question asked out loud, because the second you ask it, the fog starts to thin. This was never really a fight about loving the Greek language. I know men who love Greek and still hold their King James Bible with both hands. The fight is about whether the final printed authority stays in the hands of ordinary Christians, or gets quietly moved back behind the desk. That is why the lazy swing never actually lands. "You worship Erasmus." No. "You worship a translation." No. "You think English is magic." No, and you know that is not what I said. What I believe is that God made a promise about His own words. The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. And then He went further than purity. He claimed responsibility for keeping them. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever. That is Psalm 12. It is not a mood. It is a claim God put His own name behind. So the real question on the table is not whether I can personally account for every scrap of vellum in every European library. The question is whether God is able to do the thing He said He would do. If He gave words, and He swore to keep words, then those words have to land somewhere a person can put his finger on. Not float around in a doctrinal statement about preservation in the abstract. Land. In a Book. On a table. In a house. That is what people are actually fighting. They say they are fighting bad arguments about Erasmus, Beza, or the year 1611, but that is not the heart of it. What they cannot stand is the possibility that God already finished it. That He left English-speaking people a settled Bible they can hold up and rule from. That He did it without asking the academy for permission. If there is no final authority, every man becomes his own little court of appeal. The pastor has his preferred Greek. The professor down the hall has another one.

The audio is a short love note from Warrior Heart Ranch, a small community tucked in New Mexico. The speaker simply sends warm hugs and a friendly “hey” to anyone listening, letting you know they’re thinking of you.

They reference a photo by Jen Holga that shows the new moon in Gemini—just a quiet visual cue that ties into the moment’s theme of fresh starts and open conversation.

All in all, it’s a brief, heartfelt check‑in, a gentle reminder that someone’s sending good vibes your way.

Welcome back to our philosophy of technology book club. This month’s book is The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor. Here is the reading schedule: June 8: Chapter I-III (approx. 30 pages) June 15: Chapters IV-VI (approx. 40 pages) June 19: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern June 22: Chapters VII-VIII (approx. 22 pages) June 29: Chapters IX-X (approx. 30 pages) July 5: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern I pushed the final Zoom call to July 5, as I’ll be in New York the last week of June for a workshop with the Marc Sanders Foundation. In July, we’re reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and in August, we’ll read (selections from) Mumford’s Technics & Civilization. For the next week, I’m offering a discount on annual subscriptions. If you become a subscriber using this link, you’ll save 15%. Nearly all of my work is made freely available, but I rely on your support. If you are able, please consider taking out a subscription. We saw last week that Taylor is attempting to explain the ‘modern malaise.’ This is a sense that something has been lost, which Taylor attributes to (1) individualism, (2) disenchantment, and (3) restricted choice in an institutionalized society. He has chosen to investigate this malaise by investigating the first, which is what brought us to authenticity in the first place. Taylor thinks that a spirit of authenticity, along with a presupposed subjectivism, has run rampant through our culture, but that the correct response is to reclaim authenticity. He refuses to side with the critics of, say, the culture of college campuses who suggest we throw out authenticity altogether. What we instead need is a better idea of what authenticity is, what it entails, and what it requires. Taylor provides a helpful contrast between his view and the critics' at the beginning of Chapter VI: This contrasts with two other common ways of looking at this culture. These see it either (a) as indeed powered by an ideal of self-fulfillment, but this ideal is understood as being just as self-centered as the practices that flow from it; or, (b) as just the expression of self-indulgence and egoism, that is, views not actuated by an ideal at all. What Taylor believes is that authenticity is an ideal worth striving for, but we must understand the need for others in our pursuit of individual authenticity. This brings us to this week’s reading: Chapter IV (‘Inescapable Horizons’), Chapter V (‘The Need for Recognition’), and Chapter VI (‘The Slide to Subjectivism’). The question Taylor begins with this week: how do you reason with someone who has adopted a ‘soft relativist’ worldview? If someone is a committed relativist, especially if they are a committed subjectivist, then it would seem that reasoning with them is impossible.1 Taylor writes: A person who accepted no moral demands would be as impossible to argue with about right and wrong as would a person who refused to accept the world of perception around us be impossible to argue with about empirical matters. The problem is that reasoning takes place on top of a set of assumptions, a background. And if we do not share this background with our interlocutors, then what reasons could we muster to convince them? Suppose you’re talking to someone who is a committed egoist, who recognizes no good except for what personally benefits them. How do you convince them to care about the welfare of others, to refrain from ruthlessly pursuing their self-interest? It would seem that you cannot. But Taylor says that we are ‘not left with just the bare facts of [the relativists’] preferences.’ We know that the people we have in mind have an ideal toward which they strive: self-realization. We can take this adopted ideal, flesh it out, and then reason together from there. In that way, we can (hopefully) convince them on their own terms as to what they should do. That is Taylor’s project in Chapter IV and in much of The Ethics of Authenticity. We can begin by making a simple observation: we are all human beings. As such, we share some features in common. So, we can appeal to these shared features of the human condition – there is no need to pursue an analysis of human nature here – when speaking to the relativist. Taylor wants to stress the dialogical character of human life. What we take to be significant (this is a keyword for Taylor) is not even available for self-articulation without the introduction of language, which we learn from others. (Taylor has a broad view of language, including art, gesture, emotion, etc.) Our means of self-conception are socially derived. But it is not only a point about the acquisition of the tools of self-definition: It’s not just that we learn the languages in dialogue and then can go on to use them for our own purposes on our own…We are expected to develop our opinions, outlook, stances to things, to a considerable degree through solitary reflection.

Trust in government continues to bump along at around 20% and has dipped again recently. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to matter who is in office, Republican or Democrat. We feel they are ALL taking advantage of us. And as a result, we trust none of them. It took us awhile to figure out that it’s all a farce, but now we know. Specifically if it seems too good to be true or just plain crazy, it is. He are a few of the issues in South Dakota that have recently eroded trust: We (the taxpayers) are paying at LEAST $300 million - $400 million more than necessary for a maximum security prison building we don’t need and got absolutely nothing to address our recidivism problem (repeat crimes) which is creating major issues with crime and costs. Our recidivism has increased from 44% to 50% and our two largest cities, Rapid City and Sioux Falls, have F crime ratings. The Future Fund payroll tax appears to be a taxpayer funded slush fund for whomever is in the governor’s office. That money seems to go to reward large companies and individuals that are big campaign donors. The Covid-19 “vaccine” that was rolled out by the military was neither safe or effective. Many people have long term side effects and a good number have died. A significant number of companies in South Dakota forced the injections on their employees and there have still been no consequences. How is it possible for Toby Doeden to get the most votes, but to have almost all his legislative supporters lose? Many of the legislative contenders that lost walked door to door to the homes of every voter that had voted in the last 3 or 4 primaries and had signs all over their districts. I personally watched a number of them interacting with voters. They were very well received at the doors. The result defies logic. What was/is really going on? The TIF (tax increment financing) tax impact analysis appears to be a complete farce. If a property in a TIF district changes use (goes from unused commercial to high density residential, for example) the city and schools see more costs. When a developer/company gets a multi-million dollar handout and has a 10-20 year tax holiday, regardless of the smoke and mirrors, the taxpayers have to cover those costs during the tax abatement period. Sanford is a very profitable, non-profit that doesn’t pay property tax like the rest of us. Since Sanford has non-profit status, the majority of the citizens would rather see reduced healthcare fees and insurance costs rather than zoo additions, operations in Africa that some people say are foreign worker employee screening centers, and donations so an industrial site (Smithfield) can be converted to a high density development (and developers can make bank). Saying that we are filling jobs with foreigners, because U.S. citizens don’t want jobs appears to be a total falsehood. U.S. citizens don’t want jobs with such low wages that they cannot support themselves and their families. Bringing people in from overseas at highly suppressed wages (checkout Tyson Foods - Dakota Dunes Smithfield, Schwan’s, Sanford, Avera, Turner County Dairy) creates systemic poverty not only for the foreign workers and their families but also for citizens that have to pay their food, housing, medical care, and schooling costs. To add insult to injury, these workers depress the wages for everyone, including citizens. When elected officials and government workers repeatedly do the wrong things and people see through the deception they lose trust. Will things ever change?

Electra has provided a glimpse of the airliner of 2050 with its hybrid aircraft concept capable of carrying more than 100 passengers while using electrification, advanced aerodynamics, and integrated airframe-propulsion design to improve efficiency and reduce emissions.

When my neighbor wanted a vision of what his fence could look like, I didn't hesitate to ask ChatGPT to create a mock-up. I took a photo of the fence and asked it to overlay a potted Jasmin espaliered to it, after a couple of tweaks, and all of about one minute later, it gave me this: Category: AI and Humanoids, Technology

What if the best-tasting morsel isn’t on your plate, but the one you steal? New research suggests “forbidden food” really may taste better. Continue Reading Category: Biology, Science Tags: Psychology, Food, Hunger, Taste