Before I forget: there's a moment in life of a category when functions have to become functors, and vice versa. We can think about it as if an object is being "expelled" from its mother category and has to become its own category. Alternatively, a category can be "sucked" into another category and become an object. (the video below describes how ( Read more... )

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Another good graphic from "A history of commerce, 1907" - before and after the age of explorers (mid-15th century).


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Then through suitable emissaries who shared his secret, it was rumoured that Agrippa was alive, first in whispered gossip, soon, as is usual with forbidden topics, in vague talk which found its way to the credulous ears of the most ignorant people or of restless and revolutionary schemers ( Read more... )

During the times of Augustus and Tiberius, Romans paid 1% sales tax to support the empire's military expenditures.
When the people of Rome asked for a remission of the one per cent. tax on all saleable commodities, Tiberius declared by edict "that the military exchequer depended on that branch of revenue, and, further, that the State was unequal ( Read more... )

And had not Agrippina prevented the bridge over the Rhine from being destroyed, some in their cowardice would have dared that base act. A woman of heroic spirit, she assumed during those days the duties of a general, and distributed clothes or medicine among the soldiers, as they were destitute or wounded ( Read more... )

Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the ( Read more... )

ANTONYFriends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under ( Read more... )

Proclus believed that mathematics was intrinsic to the fabric of things, and that its language enabled one to articulate the knowledge of reality: the relation between whole and parts could be expressed in terms of divisibility; the bonds between disparate parts of the same universe could be seen as proportions; the generation of beings from the ( Read more... )

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