plato (history of philosophy 3)

while socrates likely wrote nothing despite teaching the world (leading to his own death) a lot about its hypocrisy and stupidity, plato made up for it....

inflection for non-idiots

every language has patterns of vocal tone. some (mandarin, cantonese) are explicit. others (korean, french) are minimalist. english has patterns and they’re unwritten. but they’re very simple and...

matters of black wood

sometimes you just want things to be dark. and i don’t mean the middle of the night. we’re talking about wood —which we often do here. whether...

fearlessly pointy

when it comes to sharpening, woodworkers fall loosely into two groups — those who aren’t getting sharp and those who spend an inordinate amount of time getting sharp far...

socrates (history of philosophy 2)

having left the pre-socratics, we come to the obvious next step — socrates. you probably already know three things about socrates. he was an ancient greek...

in the beginning (history of philosophy 1)

history, as we know, isn’t true. it’s just the most popular opinion about what happened in the past. it’s not what actually happened. nobody...

just plane flat?

while i’m on the subject of frequent woodworking questions, the first one that always comes to mind is this. i’ll give you a little background. if you’ve ever...

underwear for your tools?

about thirty years ago, i saw a trick for the first time to make flattening the back of a plane iron far easier if it was badly...

guides aren’t just for cookies

the cookies are pretty sweet, though. literally. you know, sugar.

anyway, guides have a bad reputation and aesthetic reception in western woodworking. people have spent hundreds (perhaps...

in search of patterns

the most important skill you will ever learn as a human is pattern-recognition. it’s what you’ll spend your entire life doing whether it’s speaking and hearing language...

you don’t need a japanese chisel

but you might want one. what’s the difference between a western and japanese chisel? my facetious answer is usually that a japanese chisel cuts on...

say it in french

french pronunciation is a mystery to those outside the language. it looks a little like english, a lot like spanish, more like italian and sounds like —...