ART met her sister NATURE late,
And seeing her at ease,
Inviting her to take a seat
At her Androides;

Dame NATURE went—was pleas’d at first,
And warmly praised her sister;
Then laughing, till she nearly burst,
In seeming rapture kiss’d her.

But as the wond’rous figures work’d
She look’d a little serious,
Whilst envy in her bosom lurk’d—
Her brow became imperious.

“How’s this!” to ART she loudly said,
“How’s this! ungrateful creature!
Profanely thou hast dar’d to tread
Thus in the walks of NATURE.

“I prithee, base, usurping wench,
No more these freedoms take;
If thus my province thou intrench
Thou’lt men and women make.”

Anonymous poem published in the Bath Herald, Saturday, 28 January 1797, on the occasion of “Mr. Haddock’s Exhibition of Androides.”



In the study of automatons, I found a clockwork monk that was designed as a votive for a young prince that nearly died and was saved when he touched the Monk’s still-sweet-smelling remains. System theory has been helping me understand what it is specifically that makes me love mathematics so.

On suspicion of demonic possession, the Spanish Inquisition briefly imprisoned Pierre Jacquet-Droz and his automaton son that wrote the following phrase, "I don't think, therefore I am not?", parodying "Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)" by Rene Descartes.

“The Turing Machine, a simple mathematical model of a computer. Despite its simplicity, the Turing machine models the cimputing capability of a general purpose computer. The Turing machine is studied both foe the class of language it defines (called the recursively enumerable sets) and the class of integer fuctions it computes (called the partial recursive functions). A variety of other models of computation are introduced and shown to be equivalent to the Turing machine in computing power.” (Introduction to automata theory, languages and computation, Hopcroft, Ullman; 1979, p. 146)

I sat on a porch the other day and watched the sun set while I sang. I gathered a great many books of 16th century writing samples and practiced my hand, and I’ve taken to writing nearly exclusively with ink and quill. A friend was rather sick with pneumonia last month, and I brewed her a few droughts using my herbs from the last gathering season:
Internal:
If the ailment is due to overeating, use of alcohol, exposure to wet, damp, cold or excessive activity, use sweating therapy. For this a tea is made with equal parts of:

• Elder flowers


• Burdock seed


• Mugwort


• Vervain

Simmer for 20 minutes, drink as hot as possible.

Take one of more cups of the infusion and follow immediately with a hot bath. Then go to bed with several covers to provoke perspiration. If ailment is caused by blocked food in the stomach, a lobelia emetic might be beneficial to clear the stomach through vomiting. If the ailment is accompanied by weakness, emaciation, paleness, low fever, clear or white discharge or is occurring in a person who has a deficient diet, low in protein, use a tea of equal parts:

• Dandelion root


• Burdock root


• Chicory root

Today is the third day of Pesach I believe. It seems like a lifetime ago that I observed such a day, it is now a strange sort of event that seems to be something I did not experience myself but only read about.

Unfortunately, I don’t yet understand how Plato’s dialogue Theætetus offers the discovery that the square root of 2 is irrational.