My one consistent quality as a guitar player is that I'm stubborn as f... I'll never be good as such, but I'll always be just a little better. And that's ok. I'm in it for the fun. And somehow being stubborn is a lot of fun.

#Guitar #GuitarToots #StubbornAF

My sixteen-year-old Chilean nephew was curious about what’s going on with ICE.

In Chile, the word “conservative” is associated with capitalism, and the word “liberal” is associated with communism. He observed that Donald Trump says he’s a capitalist but doesn’t act like one.

I told him things are different here and labels have different meanings because we have a different history.

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There seems to have been a long-standing connection in mediaeval Islamic thought between calligraphy and geometry.

The scholar Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (c.930–1023) wrote that ‘handwriting is spiritual geometry by means of a corporeal instrument’. Much later, Aḥmad Ibrāhīmī Ḥusaynī Qummī (b. 1546) wrote in his treatise ‘Calligraphers and Painters’ (c.1606) that ‘writing is the geometry of the soul’. Al-Tawḥīdī attributed the idea to Euclid; Qummī pointed to Plato, so both undoubtedly thought that the idea was long-standing and respected.

Calligraphy was codified by Ibn Muqla (885/6–940/1 CE), a vizier at the ʿAbbāsid court. Ibn Muqla's system can be only tentatively reconstructed from later sources, but it is plausible that he founded his reformed Arabic script on geometry.

The basis was the rhombic dot that a reed pen produced. The ʾalif [ا] was to have a height equal to a certain number of dots. Its size defined a circle, which was then used to shape the other letters. The attached images illustrate a later geometric specification.

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#calligraphy #geometry #MathArt #Arabic #aesthetics

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