Refractions and Reflections

---1--- Over the last few weeks I have been reading the two-book series of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children . (I took a break this past week because I needed to focus on midterms.) But the books were inspired by old photographs found in bins at thrift stores and flea markets...you've probably seen them. I thought it was a great idea!! So today I went to a thrift store and finally found some here in town (I found some in the town I previously lived in, too, but these are the first I've come across here.) I found a few gems. I'll show you below!    This is the one I found the most striking. ---2--- I also found the following two intriguing.    What are they hiding behind their backs...? ---3--- And this one here?? Yeah. It looks all normal and everything....   But turn it around, and... ..."sort of a druggist" [druggist?]. Hmm. ---4--- The thrift store I went to was a new one to me, and I thought it was...

Occaaaaasionally (read: often), I stalk my professors online...not so much in a scary way as to see where/what they studied, what they have written, etc. This semester I found some papers by one of my professors via Academia.edu. One of the papers caught my attention as being right up my alley. It was an analysis of a debate between two Arabic intellectuals in the late Ottoman period, concerning whether science or religion was more likely to yield truth. Note: I did not read the debate myself; I only read my professor's analysis. For the more in-depth and knowledgeable analysis of the debate, read his paper (linked above). Here, I will summarize the debate as he presented it and discuss it in my own way. The debate took place between Celal Nuri and Sehbenderzade Ahmed Hilmi in 1913. Nuri, a prominent public intellectual, posited (through a whole book!) that nothing metaphysical exists, so any philosophy not founded on scientific revelation is basically nothing more than an abs...