Which way do you read this image?
People whose native language runs from left to right on the page - English, eg - tend to see, in Hokusai’s iconic image, an enormous rolling wave. The dominant feeling is the relentlessness of nature.
But if your language runs from right to left - like Japanese - you might focus on the human drama: a handful of people afloat in narrow, flimsy boats, at imminent risk of being overwhelmed.
Fairy Tales Teach Adults What Facts Alone Cannot
Chesterton famously observed:
“Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”
Most people think fairy tales exist to entertain children.
G.K. Chesterton believed they exist to educate adults.
In The Ethics of Elfland, one of the greatest chapters in Orthodoxy, Chesterton makes a surprising claim. Fairy tales prepare us to understand reality better than many modern philosophies because they begin with wonder instead of explanation.
Children don’t wake up expecting the sun to rise. They delight that it does.
Adults often do the opposite. We become so accustomed to the world that we stop noticing how extraordinary it is. The sunrise becomes routine. A tree becomes ordinary. The changing seasons become background noise. We explain everything and appreciate very little.
Chesterton thought this was a profound mistake.
Science can describe why leaves change color or how gravity works. Those explanations are valuable. But they do not answer a deeper question: why should a universe capable of beauty, order, and life exist at all?
That question begins with wonder.
Chesterton argues that we confuse consistency with necessity. The sun has risen every morning of our lives, but that does not make it less remarkable. Habit slowly convinces us that the world’s greatest miracles are simply normal.
Fairy tales resist that temptation.
In them, the world is full of rules, meaning, danger, and possibility. A promise matters, courage matters, and choices have consequences. The hero succeeds because he lives within an order greater than himself.
Reality works much the same way.
Music requires harmony just like language requires grammar. Friendships require trust. Freedom flourishes within limits.
Perhaps that is why fairy tales endure long after childhood. They remind us that the world deserves gratitude before it demands explanation.
Chesterton believed philosophy begins with the same question that fills a child with awe.
Why is there something instead of nothing?
The people who never stop asking that question never truly outgrow wonder.
If you see a spider in your home, it usually means your place is clean and dry, not dirty.
Spiders are quiet roommates — no buzzing, no smells, no mess.
Spiders play a huge role in keeping ecosystems balanced, helping forests, gardens, and even cities stay healthy.
Spiders have been around for hundreds of millions of years, quietly coexisting with life on Earth.
Spiders aren’t monsters — they’re just tiny roommates doing their thing.
Do you now see spiders a bit cuter or still scary creatures?
Subscribe for more science and daily facts.🤓 Enjoy the rest of your day.😇
If you’re not an expert and your uninformed personal opinion disagrees with expert consensus on a technical topic:
Please consider that “the experts who’ve spent years studying this know something I don’t” is far more likely than “I alone discovered something that all the world’s experts missed.”
#Spain combination of high solar irradiance, large available land, and aggressive #renewable auction programs has made it one of Europe's fastest-growing solar markets. #Solar regularly sets the marginal price in Spain's electricity market — meaning that when the sun shines, prices fall toward zero.
One of Nova Scotia's largest rooftop solar installations ever was completed a few weeks ago at the Sackville Community Arena. It will reduce energy costs in the building by 85%
This is the kind of project I think we need more of in Nova Scotia.
1,060 solar panels.
Lower power bills, more money can go back into the facility. That's good for the community. And a practical way to make public buildings less expensive to operate over the long term.
A good example for other schools, community centres, businesses, and warehouses across Canada. If more buildings can generate some of their own power, it helps reduce demand on the grid and makes communities a little more resilient when energy prices rise.
Am I alone in being excited to see this? https://www.reddit.com/r/NovaScotiaTimes/comments/1v8hi1a/one_of_nova_scotias_largest_rooftop_solar/
Africa is smashing all the solar records. The continent installed more grid-connected solar in the first half of 2026 than in all of 2025, and with projects under construction the year could finish at triple the previous record.
That’s just official figures too - they don’t account for all the panels going up on roofs, mines and farms.
Source: https://energiafrica.com/article/africas-2026-on-grid-solar-additions-already-surpass-2025-as-costs-fall-and-storage-deals-multiply2026 bar capacity in construction and slated for commissioning this year. Official grid-connected figures exclude most rooftop, mine and community solar. Chart rebuilt at http://fixthenews.com
Silver (reinstated!) Men's 4X100 Meter Relay
- Duan Asemota, Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake, Brendon Rodney and Andre De Grasse
Silver Women's 4X100 Meter Relay
- Sade McCreath, Marie-Éloïse Leclair, Frédérique Chiasson and Audrey Leduc
Scarlett Delgado Silver Women's 54 kg Boxing
Marie Al-Ahmadieh Silver Women's 60kg Boxing
And Team Canada is donating surplus team apparel, information technology equipment and operational supplies used during the Games to Kindness Homeless Street Team Glasgow and Simon Community Scotland, two organizations dedicated to supporting vulnerable individuals and helping people transition to safe, stable housing.
3 comments:
Cap
said...
Please consider that “the experts who’ve spent years studying this know something I don’t” is far more likely than “I alone discovered something that all the world’s experts missed.”
While this is generally true, it's also a logical fallacy known as appeal to authority. It's dangerous to assume that an expert is necessarily correct, especially when there is significant disagreement among experts on the subject. As well, experts can be wrong, may be speaking outside their area of expertise, or may have biases. Finally, scientific advances have come from outsiders questioning basic assumptions that insiders take for granted, such as when the germ theory of disease replaced the miasma theory.
True. Although I think there have generally been a fair amount of signs when some scientific consensus is due for a shakeup. There is this accumulation of stuff that doesn't work about it. It's failing to get the job done in some significant way. So for instance, the miasma theory of disease couldn't explain a WHOLE LOT about when people were and weren't dying of disease.
Similarly, mainstream pro-market economics fails to predict pretty much everything that happens, can't explain why higher minimum wages don't reduce employment, can't explain why the highest growth period in modern history was associated with very high taxes on the rich, can't explain why industrial policy works, can't explain why statistics show higher inequality has negative effects on practically every measure of societal health, et cetera et cetera. It's not fit for purpose and so it doesn't surprise me when some ordinary bloke using some common sense gets it righter than an economist.
But most areas of real science are pretty good right now. There are areas of dispute, places at the edges where the theories point to possible breakdown, but that's all at levels average non-experts don't even know exist--ancient galaxies at the edge of megatelescope detection not acting quite as expected, or stuff like that. At the level of stuff people are aware of, the vaccines work, the satellites stay up as long as expected, the superconductors superconduct. People thinking they know better in most fields are probably wrong.
One area we see this is with techbros. And not even with science. Some techbros do know about software, a lot of them don't even know that but pretend to themselves they do, but both kinds are under the impression that because they know that one thing that is generally agreed to be hard, they know everything. So then they start talking about politics as though they understand political philosophy and they sound like complete fucking morons. I don't even have much respect for the state of the field of political philosophy, but when techbros start talking about it they make the academics look like geniuses.
3 comments:
Please consider that “the experts who’ve spent years studying this know something I don’t” is far more likely than “I alone discovered something that all the world’s experts missed.”
While this is generally true, it's also a logical fallacy known as appeal to authority. It's dangerous to assume that an expert is necessarily correct, especially when there is significant disagreement among experts on the subject. As well, experts can be wrong, may be speaking outside their area of expertise, or may have biases. Finally, scientific advances have come from outsiders questioning basic assumptions that insiders take for granted, such as when the germ theory of disease replaced the miasma theory.
True. Although I think there have generally been a fair amount of signs when some scientific consensus is due for a shakeup. There is this accumulation of stuff that doesn't work about it. It's failing to get the job done in some significant way. So for instance, the miasma theory of disease couldn't explain a WHOLE LOT about when people were and weren't dying of disease.
Similarly, mainstream pro-market economics fails to predict pretty much everything that happens, can't explain why higher minimum wages don't reduce employment, can't explain why the highest growth period in modern history was associated with very high taxes on the rich, can't explain why industrial policy works, can't explain why statistics show higher inequality has negative effects on practically every measure of societal health, et cetera et cetera. It's not fit for purpose and so it doesn't surprise me when some ordinary bloke using some common sense gets it righter than an economist.
But most areas of real science are pretty good right now. There are areas of dispute, places at the edges where the theories point to possible breakdown, but that's all at levels average non-experts don't even know exist--ancient galaxies at the edge of megatelescope detection not acting quite as expected, or stuff like that. At the level of stuff people are aware of, the vaccines work, the satellites stay up as long as expected, the superconductors superconduct. People thinking they know better in most fields are probably wrong.
One area we see this is with techbros. And not even with science. Some techbros do know about software, a lot of them don't even know that but pretend to themselves they do, but both kinds are under the impression that because they know that one thing that is generally agreed to be hard, they know everything. So then they start talking about politics as though they understand political philosophy and they sound like complete fucking morons. I don't even have much respect for the state of the field of political philosophy, but when techbros start talking about it they make the academics look like geniuses.
I lean towards Purple LG's stance.
" when there is significant disagreement among experts "
aye, there's the rub
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