I completed a short series in the Colorphilia Newsletter about research I’ve done over the past month into the origins of web colors. newsletter.colorphilia.com/borrowed-col...

Based on a wholly unscientific analysis, I write subjectively superior social media posts after drinking a bottle of wine.

Oh look, a blogpost I completely agree with.

I did more research about the origins of web colors. newsletter.colorphilia.com/on-the-origi...

This is tangential to my issue regarding the obsession about the serial comma. At times, it is useful, at times unnecessary. Applying it wholesale disregards the actual content of the list. Sometimes you may wish to subtly suggest a relationship between two items, even by just omitting the comma.

Ok, there were major problems* with the Lisbon Inquisition, but it did inadvertently help introduce tomatoes to the English-speaking “New World”** colonies. And tomatoes are delicious.*** * its very existence, for starters ** this term is an admitted misnomer *** factually speaking

From “Einstein: From Celebrity to Symbol”

In 2020, I researched and wrote 4 essays about #Einstein for an art project I called “the Atomic Einstein Project”. If you read them, you’ll see how pro-human, pro-curiosity, pro-empathy and pro-artist Einstein was. ezrabutler.com/tag/atomic-e...

In November, the History of Science Museum in Oxford was kind enough to let me peruse their collection of Sir John Herschel's experimental cyanotypes. I had found it curious that he mostly made images of young women. Subsequently, I was able to discover the sources of a majority of them.

I say “salve” instead of ”ciao” when I want to sound a little less vulgar.

Carnevale, Urbino

After leaving Twitter, I spent the past few years on Threads and am now, for all intents and purposes, done with that platform as well. I think we need to rethink the whole idea of feed-driven social media, which assigns too much relevance to the new. ezrabutler.com/moneyballing...

As a followup to my newsletter yesterday, I was going through the HLS colors in the 1984 VT-240 programmer reference manual, and I realized that they were using a 120° shifted hue spectrum: with blue (our 240°) being 0°, red (0°) being 120°, and green (120°) being 240°. #color #research #tech

I had assumed that indigo became violet because of ROY G. BIV. I was wrong. It turns out to be so much worse. The co-founder of Netscape, James Clark, was one of the founders of SGI which released a violet-colored computer in 1991 called the Indigo. newsletter.colorphilia.com/how-did-indi...

For the past 8 months, I’ve either been travelling through Europe by train, or living in Vilnius (Lithuania), London (UK), or Urbino (Italy). Besides for my research on the history & language of color for the Colorphilia Newsletter, I’ve been working on founding the Institute for Human Curiosity.

I woke up today with an idea for a thinkpiece* to write for my personal website, but as I was doing my research, I discovered a legitimate color-related topic** for the Colorphilia newsletter to be written, & now I’m trying to decide if I should split it into two separate pieces or leave it as one.

Some personal news newsletter.colorphilia.com/personal-upd...

This has been a very strange week. newsletter.colorphilia.com/some-bizarre...

A different origin story to polka-dots comes from musical notation, polka composers, and Morse code. newsletter.colorphilia.com/semiotics-an...

My 60th Colorphilia newsletter is quite half-baked, in honor of various holidays this weekend. Among other things, I question: - if Moses wore an actual ram's head with horns on his head - if the nickname for Richard is from the Arabic term for rooster newsletter.colorphilia.com/half-baked-r...

I learned a lot more about Newton this week. newsletter.colorphilia.com/science-comm...

The seven colors of the rainbow, according to Sir Isaac Newton, according to Crayola.

Spoiler alert for this week’s Colorphilia newsletter.

I didn’t know it, but I was missing two random pieces of information, and once I had them, the history of the color “indigo” (in English) became crystal clear. And once that fell into place, I suddenly understood the history of color in a completely new light.

#research Idea: A interdisciplinary historical journal in which every paper demonstrates a causal or correlative relationship with the price of tea in China.

A nice Jewish boy wrote about his problems with Matthew 5:13 and the phrase “salt of the earth”. newsletter.colorphilia.com/stardust-and...

Talk about an embarrassment of riches, but if I meet an attractive guy named Matthew in the near future, should my pickup line include a reference to the mistranslation of “lilies” in Matthew 6:28, “gall” in Matthew 27:34, or the “salt of the earth” in Matthew 5:13? Is this why I’m single?

Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30. I read his letters last year, and somehow it frustrated me even more when big banks support van Gogh installations and shows, and not living artists. Sunflowers had become an obsession or a symbol to him. He identified with them. He lived with them.

It happened to me: I was sitting at a bar, minding my own business, sipping a delicious, refreshing cocktail, when, in a moment, a line in an essay by Susan Sontag reduced me to tears.

For this week's Colorphilia newlsetter, I wrote about Venus, profanity, pornography, and the color blue. There are also two delightful stories about Mary Anne Disraeli, 1st Viscountess Beaconsfield in there. newsletter.colorphilia.com/50-shades-of...

The Vatican just dropped a new 12th century Ovid?!?!???!!!??!???!????!

Watching Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure for the first time, and finding it very anachronistic.

I researched the etymology of “amarilla” (yellow) for this week’s newsletter. newsletter.colorphilia.com/an-ephemeral...

somehow, irish forests are kelly green instead of forest green, this checks out

The word Kelly simply comes from a corruption of the Irish word “coille” meaning grove / wood / forest. Kelly Green basically means “Forest Green”.

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the floral drawings in medieval translations of Dioscorides may not be completely accurate.

There should be a word for when two completely unrelated things you are researching have a cross-over episode.

Last night, the weather was so nice, I sat in the park and read an English translation of Machiavelli.

Before February began, I was under the impression that tulips had existed for less than a millenium, so I figured that 28 days was more than enough time to sufficiently cover their history. - Ancient Egypt - Greco-Roman Architecture - Illuminated Manuscripts newsletter.colorphilia.com/oh-susana/

This morning, while trying to organize my research notes, I accidentally started reading Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath”, which logically led to Dante’s “Vita Nova”, when Virgil began pulling me down a rabbit-hole of perusing his bucolics and eclogues, while listening to the “Head Over Heels” cast album.

For the final week of Tulip month, i discovered that not only have tulips been around for 3 millennia, the shoshana (commonly translated as lily) seems to have been a red Persian tulip. newsletter.colorphilia.com/tulips-the-f...

I just stopped someone on a street corner and started explaining a mistranslation in the Gospels, which is basically a form of preaching.

This is the second time in a week that I’ve unsuccessfully spent more than an hour trying to find an image or a text on the internet that I’m certain I had seen during the previous week. The problem was that I had not realized its significance the first time I saw it.

It happened to me. I just opened up a package of used books, and I didn’t remember ordering one of them. It’s a book I would read, about a subject in which I’m interested, and my email tells me that it was on my receipt, but I have no recollection of its existence.

I feel as if I’m on the precipice of another insanely incorrect theory, and I can’t do anything but fall in.

For week three of Colorphilia Tulip Month, I examined what Tulipmania was all about. newsletter.colorphilia.com/tulipmania-w...

On 17 Feb 1673, the French playwright & actor Molière died after playing a hypochondriac in a performance. While his contributions to the modern French language are many, there are two fun examples I came across while researching his work last year: the 1st, well-known & the 2nd, a new discovery.

Writing about Tulipmania this week and I think that vanitas is very relevant to understanding it. Newsletter coming out Tuesday (think).

I’ve decided not to go down a rabbithole about how Victor Hugo’s English translator (Charles Wilbour) mistranslated Fantine’s lullaby: « Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses son roses Les bleuets sont bleus, j’aime mes amours. » “Violets are blue, roses are red Violets are blue, I love my loves.”

#rabbithole #language #color #etymology I just spent an hour in bed wondering about the etymology of cock. I could see the argument about it originating from the imitative onomatopoeia of a rooster, but I could equally argue that it is derived from coccinus / κόκκινος, because roosters are red.