Remain calm, be kind, and carry on regardless!
You've reached the online journal of Richard Rathe — online since 2004! In this iteration I'm trying a few new ideas: minimal markup, working with mostly plain text, and moving beyond the timeline. I call it BLIS (BLog It Simple). Find me online…
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We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
Birds, Spoonbill, Chicks, Nest, 2012
Jun 02, 2026
Purple martin in flight yesterday along the trail at the Waterworks Prairie Park in Iowa City, Iowa. #birds #birding #BirdPhotography #wildlife #WildlifePhotography #nature #NaturePhotography #photography #AltText
California Galleries Plants Travel 2025
We recently visited the Bristlecone Pines within Inyo National Forest in the White Mountains of Eastern California. While there we took a five hour hike on the Methuselah Trail amongst some of the oldest trees in the world!
Art Galleries Hdr History Photography Travel 2010
I had the pleasure of visiting Philadelphia multiple times during my career in support of the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME). In 2006 I even lived there for five months during a sabbatical. The gallery below contains a number of architectural/urban environment studies, and my earliest attempts at High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. I took most of the sculpture and fine art photos at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and long walks along the Schuylkill River.
Books Commentary History Music 2026
![Preparing to Fly the Flag (July 4, 1976) [source: DC Public Library]](commentary/america_at_250/img/bicentennial-1976.jpg)
I put out my American Flag today. 🇺🇸 I only fly the flag on special days and this is one of them. Thinking about what makes this day special is what gives the act meaning. One cannot be patriotic every day, but that's not required. We need days like this to think hard about history (those actions and actors who mattered), the present (our current situation and how it differs from what it should be), and the future (the history we might make during the time remaining to us).
Birds Flowers History Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
I was called to California for a family wedding. The first part of my journey took me through several southern states, the Florida Panhandle, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, New Mexico, & Arizona. I left about two in the afternoon so I arrived in Pitcher Plant territory after dark. Fortunately I knew where there was a patch just off the shoulder of a county road.
Commentary Medicine
T.R. Reid (2008)
This PBS Frontline Documentary from 2008 explores the healthcare systems of the U.S. and several comparable countries.[1] The corespondent T.R. Reid visited five capitalist countries that provide affordable, nearly universal coverage for their citizens. How do they do it? He observed that here in the U.S. we have the British model for veterans (socialized medicine), the Taiwanese model for seniors (single payer), the German model for some workers (private insurance), but for the rest we are just another poor country
. His conclusions…
Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Rock_Art Travel 2026
I established my campsite and went for a walk about an hour before sunset. It was a magical time to be out in the desert. Some of the rocks are volcanic in origin. I think that may be a cinder cone in the distance. There is a large abstract petroglyph on the right (click to enlarge).
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2008
This is a quick-and-dirty gallery of my Everglades photographs. Only a placeholder for now while I work on converting my older sites. See my Everglades Wilderness Guide for more trips, maps, & photographs.
Commentary 2026
The history of the food pyramid is complicated (see my analysis from 2004). There hasn't been an official one for maybe twenty years. I grew up with it and I think it is a sound idea, but very political with respect to what foods go where. It may be a coincidence, but anyone who is familiar with the old pyramid will recognize this one as an inverted echo. There are many other ways to lay out these ideas graphically, the choice of an inverted triangle is not subtle. I think it's propaganda for the following reasons:
Bookhouse Books History Reviews 1970
Turns out I had volume two of a three part report on a decade of radiation research done in a national forest. There is an official Fact Sheet for this program which reads in part…
History 1745
Distant relatives of mine built this Fort
in southern Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War. (Yes, a stone farmhouse was considered a fort back then!) The fort/house had two things going for it: fireproof walls and a fresh water spring in the basement.
Commentary Protest 2018
I participated in the March For Our Lives & common-sense gun laws event in Gainesville today. This was in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Mass Shooting on February 14 of that year. There were about 400 people there for the speakers swelling to as many as a 1000 during the march itself.
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Hdr Travel 2014
This is a quick-and-dirty gallery of my Everglades photographs. Only a placeholder for now while I work on converting my older sites. See my Everglades Wilderness Guide for more trips, maps, & photographs.
Camping Hammocks Reviews Technology 2016
I went out last night to get some experience pitching and sleeping in my new hammock tent. It came with no instructions and there is only limited info available online. I’m getting better using a bit more tension and added a small relieving line to the fly so it can hang along the side (keeping the netting clear for viewing the trees and stars!). In future I’ll keep it rolled so it stays off the ground. I paddled in the dark to a place I’d picked out. Once you find two trees the rest is pretty easy. In fact, it’s trip-over-a-log easy compared with a surface tent! Plus everything stays dry!
History Science Video
Hans Rosling (2010)
This spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine. [source:youtube]
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Hdr Travel 2011
This is a quick-and-dirty gallery of my Everglades photographs. Only a placeholder for now while I work on converting my older sites. See my Everglades Wilderness Guide for more trips, maps, & photographs.
Commentary Protest 2025
May 1, 2025
Commentary Protest Video 2026
Joined my community to protest the Trump administration. Larger crowd than No Kings 2 back in October. Amazing how much has changed since then: the Demolition of the East Wing of the Whitehouse, the invasion of Minneapolis/St. Paul, the public execution of Renee Good & Alex Pretti, the Kidnapping of the President of Venezuela, the Epstein cover-up, starting an Illegal, Senseless War with Iran. Airlines are shutting down because TSA workers have been unpaid for a month. Gas is headed for $5 a gallon. And those are just some of the highlights.
Camping Galleries Photography Southwest_2024 Travel 2024
The Paria River begins up by Bryce Canyon and flows south through Grand Staircase Escalante and the Vermilion Cliffs Arizona. Just before it empties into the Colorado River it flows thru a deep slot canyon and this is where we hiked.
Birds Nature 2012
Sometimes you see something in nature that has a direct analog in the human world. I caught sight of this family of Bald Eagles on the Mississippi River—then I noticed a familiar pattern…
Bookhouse Books History Reviews Technology
Margaret J. Mitchell (1919)
When I first saw this book I thought it was about making meals for a camping trip. It turned out to be much more interesting. Cooking with Insulation is a mostly forgotten technique with great potential. (The author knew this over one hundred years ago!) The concept is very simple: after heating food to the desired temperature, hang on to that heat and make it do some work!
Projects 2025
My take on Yet Another CLI Note Taking App
. Moving from MacOS to Linux I'm in the process of moving some of my most important textual information from Apple Notes to… ?? This Perl script is my first attempt at a do-it-yourself solution.
Commentary Technology 2026
My Critique of: Your Voice, Your Choice
— A Guest Post by Claude Sonnet 4.5
The ELIZA Effect is a tendency to project human traits—such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy—onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface.
This little book was conceived neither as a medical history nor as a technical discussion of surgery. It is instead a story of people, of friends with whom I have shared joy and sorrow, in short, bits of the day-to-day drama which is the life of a country doctor. Many of the incidents are trivial, in one sense of the word, yet each has had in it something which appealed to me enough to make me remember it as a highlight in my forty-five years as a country doctor.
