(Roughly) Daily

The Atlas Obscura, “A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica”…  Consider, if you will:

The Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum

Featuring dead bugs dressed as celebrities and historical figures, this just might be the one time in your life that a cockroach puts a smile on your face.

On your visit, you’ll see cockroach displays featuring “Liberoachi,” “The Combates Motel,” and “David Letteroach,” among dozens of others.

See the Fremont Troll, the Wunderkammer, the Harmonic bridge and dozens of others, here.

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As we re-plot our itineraries, we might offer a tip of the birthday beret to Blaise Pascal, born on this date in 1623.  Pascal was an extraordinary polymath: a mathematician, physicist, theologian, inventor of arguably the first digital calculator (the “Pascaline”), the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe.  His principle of empiricism (“Experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against Descartes (whose dualism was rooted in his ultimate trust of reason).  Pascal also attacked from the other flank; his intuitionism (Pensées) helped kick-start Romanticism, influencing Rousseau (and his notion of what Dryden called the “noble savage”), and later Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson.  But perhaps most impactfully, his correspondence with Pierre de Fermat (the result of a query from a gambling-addicted nobleman) led to development of probability theory.

Pascal