Every Sunday, I share a few of my learnings, reflections, and curiosities from the week. Things I stumbled upon, things I questioned, things that made me look twice. It’s not about being right or complete… it’s about noticing, wondering, and learning out loud.

Thanks for reading. I hope it sparks something for you too.

Pillars of the Earth

I’m currently reading Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. It’s one of those epic novels where you disappear into medieval life. The story is full of ambition, rivalry, and survival… but at its heart is something surprising: the building of cathedrals.

What I love is the obsession with the craft itself. Builders in the book don’t just stack stones: they argue about arches, dream about light, and measure beauty in proportions. I learned that churches often follow simple ratios, height against width, tower against nave, that make them feel “right” to the human eye. Harmony hidden in numbers.

Some examples of these proportions:

• A nave that is twice as high as it is wide (2:1) feels elegant and balanced.
• Towers often follow a 3:1 ratio, three times as high as the base is wide, to give them a sense of slender grace.
• Even windows used simple numbers: 1:2 or 2:3, shapes that feel natural and timeless.

It looks effortless, but behind it is centuries of learned geometry and intuition.

And then there’s the engineering genius. Romanesque churches, with their round arches, could only go so high before gravity won. The Gothic builders changed the game: pointed arches channeled weight down instead of sideways, ribbed vaults spread the pressure, and flying buttresses carried the load outside the walls. Suddenly churches could soar upward, with vast stained-glass windows flooding them with light. Heavy stone, made to look almost weightless.

So… where do these names actually come from? The search continued.

• Romanesque (roughly 10th–12th century):
  The style came first, and it’s called “Romanesque” because it borrowed heavily from ancient Roman architecture: round arches, thick walls, heavy stone. The word literally means “in the Roman manner.” These churches look solid and fortress-like, built for stability more than elegance.
• Gothic (from the mid-12th century onward):
  “Gothic” was actually coined later, as an insult during the Renaissance. Critics thought the pointed arches and soaring structures looked barbaric, like something the Germanic “Goths” would have made. But the builders themselves saw it differently: it was about reaching upward, filling space with light, and pushing engineering to new limits.

After Gothic came the Renaissance style in the 15th and 16th centuries. Where Gothic aimed for verticality and light, Renaissance builders turned back to the ideals of classical antiquity: symmetry, proportion, domes, and columns inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. Think of Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Here’s a rough flow of the big styles in Europe:

• Romanesque (10th–12th c.): heavy, fortress-like, round arches.
• Gothic (12th–15th c.): soaring, pointed arches, stained glass, buttresses.
• Renaissance (15th–16th c.): harmony, domes, columns, balance, classical revival.
• Baroque (17th–18th c.): drama, curves, ornamentation, designed to impress and overwhelm (check these 8 churches)
• Neoclassical (18th–19th c.): a cooler, stricter return to Greek and Roman simplicity.

It’s funny. I used to pass churches without even looking. Now, thanks to a novel, I see them differently: as experiments in proportion, lightness, and height. Silent lessons in how curiosity and craft can shape even stone into something that lasts for centuries.

Sharks are old

Sharks existed before trees. What!? Yes!

In fact, if you line things up on a timeline, it looks something like this:

• Sharks — ~400 million years ago
• Trees — ~350 million years ago
• Dinosaurs — ~230 million years ago
• Flowers — ~130 million years ago
• Humans — a tiny ~300,000 years ago

So the shark has been gliding through oceans since long before the first tree sprouted, long before dinosaurs thundered across the land, long before the first flower opened.

It makes you wonder: when we call something “ancient,” we often forget just how deep time really runs.

Plus: check out how freaky some of those ancient sharks looked.

Hahahahaha… ha

This Wednesdaynight, just before bed, I was tickling my daughter. It is our little ritual. Then, when the giggles faded, she turned serious and asked:

“Why do people laugh when they’re tickled?”

I didn’t have an answer. So I went looking. And this is what I learned:

• There are actually two kinds of tickling:

  • Knismesis — the light, itchy brush, like a feather on your skin. It doesn’t usually make you laugh; it just makes you want to swat it away.

  • Gargalesis — the deeper, playful kind that explodes into laughter. That’s the one parents know well.

• Tickling as protection. The most ticklish spots (ribs, armpits, neck) are also some of the most vulnerable parts of our body. Ticklishness may have evolved as a defense mechanism, sharpening our reflexes. This is a theory… nobody is certain.

• Tickling as play. Another theory is that it’s nature’s training ground. Rough-and-tumble play teaches kids to anticipate, dodge, and defend. Tickling turns that into a game.

• Tickling as communication. The laughter it triggers is unique. So unique that people (and even computers) can tell a “tickle laugh” apart from any other kind. It’s one of the oldest social signals, shared not just by humans but also by chimpanzees… and even rats, who squeak when tickled.

And of course: you can’t tickle yourself. Why? Apparently your brain is too clever. It predicts your own touch and cancels the surprise that makes tickling work.

That makes me wonder: so… does it really tickle at all?

If something can vanish simply because your brain anticipates it, how real is it? It feels intense in the moment (squirming, laughing, begging someone to stop)but it’s also strangely fragile. Like a joke that stops being funny once you’ve heard the punchline.

Maybe that’s the point. Tickling isn’t about the sensation itself. It’s about the surprise and connection. Maybe it is purely a social thing. A game meant for connection, not for solitude.

So my daughter’s bedtime question turned into a small revelation: tickling is part defense, part play, part social glue. It’s an ancient reflex that somehow still works, even on a modern Tuesday night at home.