Happy birthday!  It's not my birthday but I bet it's roughly 1/365.25ths of the world's popluation's birthday, so to roughly 20 million people--happy birthday!!

I have a gift: Ten different examples of the styles of classical composers, deployed in the service of a common song, "Happy Birthday."  From Bach to Cage.

Fascinating little blog post on why it took role playing games like dungeons and dragons so long to be invented:

Physically, there was nothing that actually stopped the invention of such games centuries or even millennia earlier. It required no special level of science, skill, or materials. So why did it take so long? Rather than there being any constraints, soft or otherwise, I think it’s simply because innovation in general is so extremely rare. It’s a matter of absence, rather than of barriers. The reason we have had so many low-hanging fruit throughout history is just because very few people ever bother to think of how to do things differently. We are, most of us, quite set in our ways.

A nice brief introductory piece to the thought of Immanuel Kant.  You think you know everything, or at least enough, about Kant and then you read this, and you realize there's a lot more to know:  “His prose was couched in the forbidding jargon he inherited from the tradition of Wolffian scholasticism in which he was educated.

I tell my students that they should be grateful for this, because that jargon is what connects Kant’s often highly original ideas to the Western philosophical tradition going back to the Greeks. Kant himself was not knowledgeable in that tradition. He came to philosophy from natural science – physics, astronomy, geology: what would then have been called “natural philosophy”. Kant became a “philosopher” in our sense of the word only when he began reflecting on the foundations of these emerging and changing departments of knowledge. It was not until relatively late in life that Kant’s interests shifted to include ethics, politics and religion (though his final decade of philosophical activity was concentrated on them). The remarkable thing about Kant, to those who study him, is the striking originality and insight present in what might to casual readers seem to be the dark corners of his obscure and forbidding prose.

Ooh, Larry McMurtry's home library, which looks from these pics mostly like a bunch of bookshelves (I don't see the logic of it, so I'm complaining like Churchill that the pudding has no theme). 

A review of a book about student dorms, and what the differing approaches to student residences across time tell us about how we have imagined the student experience at college.  

How old are the aboriginal oral traditions in Australia?  Some research suggests that they may contain references to volcanic activity that happened tens of thousands of years ago--and if true, that means they are probably the oldest known oral traditions in humanity.  

I love living today, when we're finding so much out about prehistory.  I do wish we could live a hundred more years into the future, to discover how much more we will then know.  It's weird, but a good number of my reasons for wanting to live a long time have to do with knowing more about the past.  Why am I weird like that?  Maybe you are too.  We can be weird together.  Be well!