Don’t get me started on René Descartes, the seventeenth-century midget philosopher and vivisectionist. Descartes had very little common sense; he died one Swedish winter, after going outside in his pyjamas at four a.m. to meet Queen Christina. The drawing shows that, though he was good at algebra, he could easily have been mistaken for a smallish saluki.
A Bad Guide 
Thanks, Dearie. That clears up what they did when they weren’t philosophizing. A musical accompaniment always helps me learn.
How Descartes fits in:
I must say there are some really great drawings here, do you do them all yourself?
Yes, as a matter of fact I do. They are all my own work.
Oh yes, AJP, we forgot to ask about the drawings. They remind me of an urban planning course I took once. Something tells me they weren’t done with Paint and Irfanview.
I don’t know those but no, they’re ink. I’ve never taken any planning courses. When I was in architecture school the planners all used magic markers for their diagrams. I was never any good with markers. Some of the more craft-obsessed planners could lay down a flat tone of colour over an irregular shaped area covering most of a sheet of paper, without leaving any streaks, but I suppose photoshop has buried that skill and now they all do it. Photoshop is the best ‘application’ — or program as it used to be called — in the history of computing.
They’re ink… as in paper and brush, …then… photographed? They look like they’re built on modified photographs.
I can’t afford photoshop even in its cheaper incarnation, but I have an old free version of serif.
Paint is a program that comes with operating systems like windows. The way to tell if you have it is to go to a file where you have images and right click on an image. You will get a box with a list of functions including “Open with”. When you mouse over the “open with” function you will see a list of programs that the OS can use to open the image, like Paint– and Irfanview, if you’ve installed it.
Irfanview is free and you can use it to crop, resize, turn color into B&W and all kinds of other stuff, like convert between file extension types, like changing -.jpg files to -.png files.
Paint can be used to put lines, dots, blocks or color, and captions on images.
blocks of color
What I probably did was ink line drawings from photos, on paper with some ink shading, and then photographed them (I’ve given up scanning) and added more black stuff in Photoshop.