Why is there no outcry from small businesses regarding @Postvox postal increases today? It's not just 5c on a domestic stamp, they have increased international post by 20% and domestic 100g large envelope by 50c. Small businesses struggling already this is an outrageous attack

As we approach the 10th anniversary of his death, here is my favourite #Heaney poem, Postscript: And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other ..
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The unreinforced concrete dome of Rome's Pantheon - a miracle of ancient architecture that survived the fall of an empire. Nearly 2,000 years later, nobody has ever built a bigger one. The mighty dome, built by the Emperor Hadrian between 119-128 AD, measures 142 feet in diameter - still the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. Its most striking feature is a 27-foot wide oculus, completely open to the elements and acting as the building's only light source. Many believe the oculus once functioned as a giant sundial. Every year at noon on 21 April, traditionally the birthday of Rome, the sun’s rays light up the entrance - the Emperor entering the building on such occasions would have been bathed in sunlight in dramatic fashion. Most remarkable is the secret to the structure's longevity, itself a fascinating recent discovery. Roman concrete includes calcium carbonate lumps called "lime clasts" - these were previously thought to be the result of poorly mixed concrete, but are now understood to provide "self-healing" properties. Water seeping in through cracks in the concrete has been shown to dissolve the calcium carbonate, creating a solution which then recrystallizes to plug the gaps. It also boasts several other architectural innovations. The coffered ceiling was intended to reduce the weight of the dome (as did the oculus itself), and the mix of concrete used was exceptionally light by design. It also decreases in density moving from bottom to top, making greater use of lighter volcanic material. The result is one of ancient Rome's best preserved monuments that will likely stand for several more millennia. It inspired countless architectural feats over the ages since, notably Brunelleschi's dome of Florence Cathedral (1436), although that was built from brick - the ancient formula for concrete being long since forgotten. It stands today as a testament to the ancient Romans' unparalleled mastery of engineering. It even won the resounding endorsement of Michelangelo, architect of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, for which he undoubtedly took cues from the Pantheon. Seeing it for the first time in the early 1500s, he called it "an angelic and not a human design".

How old were you when you first noticed the "8" in the middle of the 8 of diamonds card?

What the hell is an ampersand and why does it look like that?! The first thing you need to know is that "&" used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet... But there are three parts to this story. And the first begins over two thousand years ago in Ancient Rome with a single word: et. It's the Latin for "and". At some point Roman scribes started combining the two letters of et into a single symbol, which was the ancestor of our modern &. The earliest example of the "et" symbol is actually from graffiti in Pompeii. In any case, it did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire. Latin survived as the language of the Catholic Church and of scholarship in Medieval Europe. Scribes during the Dark Ages continued to use the & symbol. It evolved down the centuries, in places losing any semblance of the letters e and t whatsoever. The second part of the story is that during the 18th and 19th centuries, as education and the teaching of literacy spread, & was added to the end of the alphabet as a sort of 27th letter. On a related note, although "et cetera" is now usually just abbreviated as etc., for a long time it was instead abbreviated as "&c". The & was for et and the c for cetera. The third and final part of the story is about how the alphabet was taught to children — and how it was read out loud. As this 1822 Glossary of Words and Phrases explains, it had been normal during the Renaissance, when speaking the alphabet, to add "per se" before any letter which could also be a word on its own — "per se" means "by itself" in Latin. Take the letter A, which can also be a word of its own. When reading out the alphabet people would say "A, per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, per se I..." and so on. O was also considered a word of its own. Which means, when people got to the end of the alphabet, with & being the 27th letter, they would say: "S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, and per se &." When this old way of reading the alphabet was taught to children in the 18th century and they were reciting it aloud, they would garble "and per se " into what eventually became... ampersand. A Dic­tion­ary of Slang and Col­lo­quial Eng­lish from 1905 relates some of the many other pronunciations school children apparently came up with: "Am­persand. The sign &; am­persand. Vari­ants: Ann Passy Ann; an­pasty; an­dpassy; an­parse; aper­sie; per-se; am­passy; am-passy-ana; am­pene-and; am­pus-and; ampsyand; am­pazad; am­siam; am­pus-end; ap­perse-and; em­per­siand; am­perzed; and zumzy-zan." Well, of all the many pronunciations that might have stuck, it was "ampersand" which came to be accepted and is now the official name for &... rather than zumzy-zan. So, from hurried Roman scribes to unruly school children, that's where "&" came from.

I love when I read a line in a book that’s just so perfect that I have to close the book and process what I just read before continuing.

I've come across A LOT of good 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names over the past 3.5 years, as I've worked on my thesis. Now that my thesis is done and submission is near, it's time to share the more than 90 wildest early Quaker names I've found (in alphabetical order):