ABOUT THIS ISSUE: FEBRUARY 22, 2026

Another month, another Federal Holiday. Having President's Day off gave me an opportunity to get a head start on this issue. Our warming weather hit nearly 60 degrees, and I went for another midafternoon walk. With the pathways fully cleared now, I was able to go down to and all around a nearby lake. Coming back I took this shot for contrast with two weeks ago.

Now.... and then....

As you've seen in my Diary article I headed south to spend the rest of the week in sunny Key West, all while another Nor'easter headed toward the east coast and flights got moved or cancelled. As I write this my homebound flight Monday evening is still on time, but we'll see what happens.

Will this fit on a bumper sticker? "I live in the present due to the constraints of the space-time continuum."

Finally, here are some interesting non-numismatic articles I came across this week. The first one discusses the dilemma of online fora such as ours: "the community needs to be big enough where people want to post content. But it can't get too big where people are drowning each other out for attention." We welcome new members and want to grow, but maybe our size is "just right" and we'd never want to have 10 times our number of readers.

5 Famous Figures Who Nearly Made the Olympics (https://historyfacts.com/famous-figures/article/famous-figures-who-nearly-made-the-olympics/)

Time's Second Arrow (https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/time-second-arrow-robert-hazen-michael-wong-entropy)

The online community trilemma (https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/16/fast-good-cheap/)

A volcano scorched hundreds of Roman scrolls — can AI recover their text? (https://www.understandingai.org/p/a-volcano-scorched-hundreds-of-roman)

-Editor

Wayne Homren
Wayne Homren is the founding editor of The E-Sylum and a consultant for the Newman Numismatic Portal. His collecting interests at various times included U.S. Encased Postage Stamps, merchant counterstamps, Pittsburgh Obsolete paper money, Civil War tokens and scrip, Carnegie Hero Medals, charge coins and numismatic literature. He also collects and has given presentations on the work of Money Artist J.S.G. Boggs. In the non-numismatic world he's worked in artificial intelligence, data science, and as a Program Manager for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Garrett Ziss
Garrett Ziss is a numismatic collector and researcher, with a focus on American paper money and early U.S. silver and copper coins. He is also a part-time U.S. coin cataloger for Heritage Auctions. Garrett assists Editor Wayne Homren by editing and formatting a selection of articles and images each week. When he's not engaged in numismatics, Garrett is pursuing a Master's Degree in Quantitative Economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pete Smith
Numismatic researcher and author Pete Smith of Minnesota has written about early American coppers, Vermont coinage, numismatic literature, tokens and medals, the history of the U.S. Mint and much more. Author of American Numismatic Biographies, he contributes original articles to The E-Sylum often highlighting interesting figures in American numismatic history.

Greg Bennick
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

John Nebel
Numismatist, photographer, and ANS Board member and Fellow John Nebel of Boulder, CO helped the ANA and other clubs like NBS get online in the early days of the internet, hosting websites gratis through his Computer Systems Design Co. To this day he hosts some 50 ANA member club sites along with our coinbooks.org site, making the club and our E-Sylum archive available to collectors and researchers worldwide.

Bruce Perdue
Encased coinage collector (encasedcoins.info) Bruce Perdue of Aurora, Illinois has been the volunteer NBS webmaster from its early days and works each week to add the latest E-Sylum issue to our archive and send out the email announcement.