I've been fascinated in recent years watching dynasties move through European history, the Habsburgs chief among them.

As always, everything in medieval Europe is prefigured in miniature in Italy. I just watched a documentary series on the Medici of Florence. They were a banking family whose success left them with an excess of money. They then set out to turn money into prestige by an incredible program of patronage of the arts; and more or less bankrolled the Italian Renaissance on the way.

Over the course of 200 years, the Medici were the patrons of the largest brick dome ever constructed, the first use of central-point perspective, the first free-standing nude statue since end of the Classical Era, the first book of art history, arguably the first book of popular science, the second (and oldest surviving) opera, and the first ballet. Also, in the middle of that, a Medici pope was the last straw which sparked the Protestant Revolution.

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I'm starting to get back to reading a lot, what with all these library books. So i'll probably be posting lots in response to them.

Went to bed and decided not to take the Martin's Mammoths or Unwin's Pterosaurs as too likely to get me thinking/working as opposed to sleeping. So I took Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. As always, Quammen has wonderful lines that deserves remembering. But i could pass up journaling Quammens rhetorical flourishes, it was his discussion of Darwin and Copernicus I couldn't pass up, it mirror so closely my own thoughts (i'm nearly positive i didn't get them from Quammen; i think they're largely in response to The Five Ages of the Universe).

"Copernicus [...] is th one whose impact most closely resembles Darwin's, in that Darwin continued the revolution Copernicus began, alerting humans to the fact that we don't occupy central position [sic] in the universe. [...] I say 'continued' rather than 'completed' the Copernican revolution against anthropocentrism because the battle is still going on."

For years one of my bumper-sticker-type slogans has been "Fight the Good Fight! The Copernican Revolution Never Ends!"

Okay, back to trying to sleep.