Natural Philosophy

Thanks to a mention in the Fortean Times of May 6th about James Price, the alchemist who commited suicide in front of the Royal Society when he could not reporduce his transmutation experiment, I spent much of that day studying some of the lesser known works of Sir Isaac Newton, who being a natural philosopher of the 17th century was also an alchemist. I found a recipe for ink which I'd like to try out except for that one of the ingredients is hard to come by, and a section on estimating the height of the clouds amongst other interesting things. The breadth of his learning was staggering, though reading more about him in various biographies it seems less the surprising given the background of the times and his particular habits.

The ink experiment would make a nice essay, so I'll pop that onto the stack of things to potentially write, along with a study of Watkins's original ley lines which I performed a while ago but didn't complete and write up. As well as writing a drecky tract that's grown to a considerable size, I've been working on the changesets system for inamidst, hoping to make the diffs more transparently public. All this inbetween golf with Morbus and Cody, and various other things. For some annoying reason, my Ctrl+Up function to move a line up in emacs doesn't work when it's the last line in a file and the file doesn't yet end with a newline. The ability to have that be optionally added as savetime is a nice benefit of emacs over, say, nano, which can only add it automatically or not at all.

For some reason, the name John Wooton came to me just before writing this post. I found that it's the name of a millwright who drowned himself in 1764, but it appears that I was thinking of John Clopton, aliases John Clapton and John Wooton, in connection with a search for Thomas Nashe which, my search history tells me, I performed on 10th January. With further research, stopping to correct Wikipedia about a work wrongly ascribed to Nashe along the way, it seems from my keylogs, which say "2006-01-10 18:46. Nashe Wooton | Cotton", that Wooton was my misremembering of William Cotton, the man to whom Nashe wrote in the only surviving manuscript in his hand.