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…
Click or tap on any Article or Social Media Post to see more. You can also Search by key words.
Reason, like art, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
Panorama, Sunrise, Sacandaga_Lake, Adirondacks, New_York
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
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Nature Travel 2026
This was my 30th trip to the Everglades—different from all the others in several respects. First I was trying out new equipment (a sit-inside folding kayak). Second, I planned to just camp on a desert island, read, and take it easy. Third, I left from the Smallwood Store on Chokoloskee Island because the actual Ranger Station was closed for long-awaited hurricane repairs. I was also alone as there were no takers to join me this year.
Camping Hammocks Reviews 2026
I recently bought a Ridgerunner Hammock from Warbonnet Outdoors. These are my first impressions. I'd been aware of this type of hammock for a few years and I was curious about them. Online descriptions and 2D photos don't really help much. This design makes much more sense when you actually lie in one.
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).
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.
Birds Flowers Galleries History Panoramas Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
We entered Arches National Park about 8am the next day. This was a great time for photographing the rock formations in the southern part of the park (near the entrance). Our plan was to take a leisurely drive north—exploring along the way—until we reached the Devil's Garden area. This is where the majority of the notable arches are. You might also like to view photos from My November 2024 Trip.
Critters Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Rock_Art Travel 2026
We decided to get a room in Green River Utah for two nights so we could: visit nearby Dinosaur Track and Rock Art sites that day, return to have a real cooked dinner, head out early the next day for Arches, then on to Nine Mile Canyon the next day.
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2016
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.
History Technology 2010
Anthropologists Steven Churchill & Jill Rhodes recently wrote a fascinating article on the development of projectile weapons by early Homo sapiens and subsequent effects on large carnivores (extinction!) and human evolution.
Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
My original plan was to find a BLM campground in the Sierra Foothills and have an easy first night. This became untenable due to a Pacific storm blowing in that would deposit snow on Donner Pass. So the plan became a quick up and over the pass and on into northern Nevada. We drove until we could leave the I-70 and got a motel in Fallon.
Medicine Medinfo 2017
The History of Present Illness (HPI) has not changed appreciably since the introduction of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record in 1968. Until recently most medical documentation was created via dictation or handwritten notes. Narrative was the natural format for the HPI. This is no longer true in the era of online forms and computer-generated text.
Panoramas Photography Technology 2016
I've always been fascinated by 360° spherical photographs (sometimes called mirrorballs, planets or wormholes
). These are some of the first photos I took with a Ricoh Theta S (basically a black slab with two 180° fisheye lenses pointing in opposite directions.
Books How_To Projects Technology 2026
I first encountered this delightful self-publishing format while visiting family in Sacramento. The city has many older neighborhoods with small houses and small yards. The locals take great pride in their sidewalk-facing gardens, including pro-social embellishments like little library
boxes and such. One house had a dispenser with these little pamphlets. I was impressed and intrigued.
Camping Canyonlands Galleries Hdr Panoramas Travel 2019
It would be hard to top our 4WD/bike trip to the White Rim in Canyonlands last year, but entering the isolated subunit called The Maze was a strong contender! This immense National Park is divided into three major areas that are completely isolated from each other. The Maze lies mostly on the western side of the Green River with the southern-most Dollhouse area just below the confluence with the Colorado. As we did last year, we stopped at Fisher Towers and Moab along the way (see photo gallery below).
Birds Bwca Galleries History Travel Video 2011
Just back from a challenging trip to the BWCA with my friend Ross. We had intended to start on the Sawbill Trail, but were told to evacuate just as we got to the entry point due to the rapidly expanding Pagami Creek Fire. (Satellite photos show this plume forming in less than two hours!)
Music Reviews
Imogen Heap (2010)
I’ve been a fan of Imogen Heap for several years. Her latest album Ellipse
has one of my all time favorite songs—Earth
[listen]. It describes how a frustrated Mother Earth deals with her rambunctious offspring, homo sapiens. [lyrics]
Commentary Video 2016
Most are familiar with the concept of FUD—short for Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt. It summarizes a strategy often used in marketing and political propaganda. Its effects are pernicious, divisive and lead to exploitation. Examples abound. Fear is a strong motivator! To resist FUD one must understand how it is practiced using the principles of Deception, Obfuscation and Misdirection.
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.
Critters Nature 2023
I was recently walking through a dense hemlock forest in upstate New York where I came across some chewed-up mushrooms and several little orange critters crawling around them. I instantly thought a) salamanders? and b) they must be eating the mushrooms. Turns out I was right on the first point and only half-right on the second.
Kist Projects 2026
Kist.pl renders documents as plain vanilla
HTML by default. Generated pages will degrade gracefully
to the degree possible. These pages contain a minimal set of CSS styles and javascript in the <head> element. (This helps make each kist-generated document self-contained.) Authors are free to override these styles with their own custom styles (using the -s flag).
Birds Bwca Camping Galleries Hammocks Travel Video 2019
This year we returned to the Gunflint Trail. Our party of four became just two due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. This was exacerbated by horrendous wind and cold rain on the drive up. Fortunately we had a place to stay (a family cabin) and waited an extra day for the weather to improve. Ross and I took off on a cold, windy morning from the entry point on Poplar Lake. Crossing Poplar turned out to be the hardest part of the trip. We started with a cold headwind and couldn’t find the portage at first.
Camping Reviews Tents 2024
This One Person Tent from River Country Products is a clever hybrid of single and double layer designs. The head of the tent has generous mesh panels for ventilation. The foot is completely enclosed in waterproofed nylon, allowing the rainfly to be much smaller (saving weight and volume). This is a unique design I have not seen elsewhere.
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.
