Bilbo’s underground riddle contest with Gollum became the archetypal Dungeons & Dragons scenario—a lone adventurer solving puzzles to escape danger. We also see Tolkien’s pre-scientific worldview with Lamarckian evolution (“the more you use it the bigger it gets”) and Platonic light-emitting vision.

Goblin Town mirrors the chaotic Victorian Birmingham of Tolkien’s youth—a dark maze where inhabitants love machines and inventive cleverness but create only weapons and torture devices. The bow-legged, squint-eyed goblins resemble rickets-ridden factory workers who rarely saw sunlight. Their rhythmic songs echo industrial machinery.

Rivendell introduces Elrond’s crucial moon-map revelation — divine intervention or “you create your own luck by taking action.” The dwarves started their quest without complete information, yet moving forward allowed essential details to emerge naturally.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an employer with a job to fill is in search of a candidate with a diploma in exactly the skills he is looking for. But is this in fact the case?
Why are coders out of work and what should they do about it?

Can I memorise the 2000 most used French verbs? I watched a YouTube video yesterday by a Spanish professor who made assertion the that you both can and should learn languages quickly. He dismissed ideas like immersion and recognisable input. His suggestion was that the most important thing was to learn vocabulary, and learn it

An intriguing YouTube video set me off on an experiment to see if I could improve the way I read.