Richard Rathe's Reflections

Where I've been and what I've learned along the way…

Welcome!

Remain calm, be kind, and carry on regardless!

id photo 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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Food for Thought

Nature has beneficently provided that throughout the world you may find something to imitate.
Leonardo da Vinci

Featured Photo

Photo by Richard Rathe Panorama, Bartolome_Island, Pinnacle_Rock, Galapagos

Panorama, Bartolome_Island, Pinnacle_Rock, Galapagos

Social Media (Mastodon)

Jen Sorensen (@jensorensen@mastodon.social)

Jan 31, 2026

See original post on mastodon.

Latest comic: Hollowed out shells #cartoon #comic #uspol #media #authoritarianism #minnesota

Badlands National Park

Galleries Nature Photography Travel 2018

Bison in Badlands National Park

My brother-in-law Rick flew out from Colorado so we could go on a road trip together across South Dakota and beyond. We entered the Park via the Northeast Entrance (extreme right on map) and spent most of our day slowly moving west, stopping frequently—sometimes to take photos, sometimes due to bison migrating across the road. We ended up at the Sage Creek primitive camping area (upper left).

Bicentennial Thoughts on the Semiquincentennial

Commentary History 2026

Preparing to Fly the Flag (July 4, 1976) [source: DC Public Library]

I put out my American Flag today. I've decided to 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).

Black-Bellied Whistling Ducks

Birds Nature 2026

Black-Bellied Whistling Duck

Consider the Black-Bellied Whistling Duck! (One of the better bird names IMO.) Larger than average ducks, longer neck, pink bill & feet, used to be called tree ducks. I see these very early in the morning and occasionally a pair on a nearby dock. Only learned recently that they are mostly active at night, which is why I wasn't aware they were around.

The March of Folly

Books History Reviews
Barbara Tuchman (1984)

Audiobook Cover

With America “at war” [2006] on several fronts, I was stimulated to recall this wonderful and important book by the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman. The first line says it all…

Road Trip West 3, Petrified Forest

Birds Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026

Big Tree in the Crystal Forest

The next day I had a three hour drive to my next destination—Petrified Forest National Park. The southern entrance is less used than the north but two of he major hiking trails are there: Crystal Forest & Blue Mesa. Unfortunately there is no trail to Newspaper Rock—a major Petroglyph site. It was cold and windy, but apparently I came at a good time to see the many desert flowers in bloom. 🙂

Everglades Trip 2015 (Solo)

Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Travel Video 2015

Lake Ingraham Canal, Middle Cape in the Distance

This was my Eighteenth Everglades Journey and a collection of firsts for me: first Solo Trip, first en-route rendezvous, first exploration of the River of Grass, first time around Cape Sable, first time sailing beyond the horizon, first time camping in Florida Bay, and first major equipment failure (rudder). This was probably my penultimate trip! With the exception of bug problems at one site, it pretty much came off without a hitch. 🙂

Electronic [Medical, Patient, Health] Records (2006)

Medicine Medinfo 2006

Impossible Task vs Redefine the Problem

…the biggest complaint — with potentially dangerous implications — involved the automatic alerts that flashed on the screen every time a doctor made an out-of-the-ordinary request. Designed to catch errors before they occur, the alerts became an unending series of questions, reminders and requests on fairly basic decisions.

Fire Ecology Simulator

Projects Video 2022

Simulator Screen Shot

Fire is a necessary feature of many ecosystems. It helps clear out old growth and often prevents dominance by one or more climax species. Some plants even specialize to exploit the ecological opportunities created by fire. This simulator attempts to capture some of these dynamics.

Notewell - Command Line Notetaker

Projects 2025

Notes Query Example

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.

Telegraph Codes (1914)

Bookhouse Books History Reviews Technology
C & B Johnson (1914)

Cover

Back in the days when long distance telephone calls were very expensive, families had various ring codes to let their loved ones know that they got there safe but avoided paying for an actual call. Ours was to let it ring twice and hang up (if I remember correctly).

All in the (Eagle) Family!

Birds Nature 2012

Two Teenage (Juvenile) Bald Eagles

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…

Sandhill Cranes in the Neighborhood

Birds Nature Video 2023

Young Sandhill Resting in Tall Grass

We’ve had a family of four Sandhill Cranes lounging around our neighborhood for the past few weeks. These birds are endemic to Florida and do not migrate. Apparently there are two other non-migratory subspecies found in Mississippi and Cuba.

Everglades Kayak Trip 2023

Everglades Galleries Hammocks Travel Video 2023

Rabbit Key at Sunset

This year we returned to the northern part of the park. The original plan had been a grand tour loop with two beach sites and two chickees. However, the forecast was calling for high winds on the last two days where we would be exposed out on the Gulf of Mexico. On the drive down I called and amended our permit to camp at Lopez River on the last night.

Fort Clinch State Park

Galleries Hdr History Travel 2015

Fort Clinch Magazine (HDR)

This fortification along the Florida/Georgia border dates from the era of the Second Seminole War (1847) and served the needs of both the Confederacy and the Union in the Civil War. It is a asymmetric pentagon built out of red bricks with gun emplacements on the top of four walls. There are several lovely internal architectural features such as arched ammunition magazines and spiral stairways, No shots were ever fired here!

Clair Cameron Patterson, The Age of the Earth, & Environmental Lead

History Science 2010

Clair Cameron Patterson (source:nap.edu)

I’m currently reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. About a third of the way in he introduces Clair Cameron Patterson who could be the model of the modern citizen/scientist.

Everglades Kayak Trip 2025

Everglades Galleries Photography Travel Video 2025

Entering the Park

Just back from my 29th (!) wilderness trip in the Everglades! This year I went with my younger brother who is a veteran of a similar canoe trip in 2009. We made a tour of the four single chickees in the southern part of the park with an option to boomerang out to the Gulf of Mexico on the tides. The trip pretty much came off without a hitch. Only downside was the nightime temps were in the upper 60s with little or no wind… so we had bugs!

Self-Organizing Hypertext Notebooks (Jrju)

Medicine Medinfo Projects 1997

Hypertext Notebook with Inverse References

Jrju (Chinese for spider) is a Perl program that weaves hypertext 'notebooks' from plain text files. An author creates notebook pages using the JTX markup format. Jrju will process a directory of JTX files into a cross-linked collection of HTML pages. Jrju rebuilds the entire notebook each time so there are no broken links or orphan pages.

Panhandle Pitcher Plant Expedition

Galleries Nature Photography Plants Travel 2020

White-Top Pitcher Plants

The last time I went hunting for Pitcher Plants was 2017. This year I went about two weeks earlier and learned more about their distribution and lifecycles. I visited six sites in all, moving from Florida into Alabama. I saw mostly pitcher plant flowers as I moved west, apparently the flowers emerge days to weeks before the funnel-shaped leaves.

The Demon in the Freezer

Books History Reviews
Richard Preston (2002)

Book Cover

This is one of the scariest books I've read in a long time—and it’s not fiction! Published in 2002, it chronicles the strange tale of Smallpox, its world-wide eradication, and the lingering threat of its return. Millions are alive today thanks to the efforts of D. A. Henderson (who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002), the World Health Organization, and an army of public health workers. Smallpox is probably the worst disease the human race has ever known, and now it’s gone—well almost… The demon lives on in at least two freezers, one at the CDC in Atlanta and one in Russia. But there is no way to know how many other caches exist. In a cruel twist of fate, the fact that smallpox no longer exists in the wild makes it well suited for bioterrorism. It is the biological equivalent of an atom bomb. This New Yorker article by Preston summarizes the major themes of the book.

The Brimson Forest Fire

History 2025

Cabin (Looking SW)

In the late 1970s two friends and I invested in a three room cabin on thirty acres embedded in Superior National Forest in Northern Minnesota. That cabin and other buildings are no more after the Camp House Road forest fire swept through.

Everglades Trip 2000

Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2000

Everglades

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.

There is No ‘I’ in AI

Commentary Technology 2026

Tales from the Claude Crypt (from original post, uncredited)

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.

Good Morning Doctor!

Books History Medicine
W.A. Rohlf (1938)

W.A. Rohlf ~1910

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.

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