St Petersburg, Russia, October 2025

By Dmitri

At least part of the original intent behind creating this blog site was to keep a travelogue—somewhat brief trip reports with selected photos, to help preserve the memories. Well, good intentions pave the road to you know where. Turns out I am…

Wisdom vs knowledge

By Dmitri

I had a thought this morning that seemed profound, or at least worth writing down before I forget. The thought was simple: gaining knowledge means adding something, while gaining wisdom means subtracting something. This is easy to illustrate. When you learn something…

Finding a name for human connection

By Dmitri

This is a brief linguistic essay following up on some thoughts and conversations I had while visiting my home city of St. Petersburg, Russia, two weeks ago. As usual, I had just one week and too many things to do. Therefore, I…

Does free will exist?

By Dmitri

This is another topic of interest to me, closely related to the topic of freedom in general. Bound by the rules of society and by our personal limitations, are we at least free to make simple choices? Can we freely choose ice…

What is freedom?

By Dmitri

This is just a short note for today. I am very interested in this topic and plan to write a book about it one day. But one has to start somewhere, right? Before discussing freedom, it seems helpful to define it. Although…