Here’s an interesting entry from The Writer’s Almanac of July 20, 2015 — “It was on this day 140 years ago, in 1875, that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. It was a swarm about 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, from Canada down to Texas. North
Did you know Margaret Sanger was an inspiration for Wonder Woman? I’ve just finished reading The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, and it really was a complicated tale bound in secrecy. “The story of Wonder Woman’s origins wasn’t a neglected history, waiting to be written. It was a family secret, locked in a
This is a short story I wrote last year that is also available on the Internet at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue571/index.html A Fateful Evening Hello. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Fate. Perhaps you have heard of me? Maybe by another name. Some people call me Luck, others Good Fortune. Occasionally it’s Irony. But it’s all
We take so much for granted in the world. Like why we scream. I hadn’t given this a thought until I saw this discussed in a Time magazine news brief. Time reported on new research in the journal Current Biology that suggests hearing a scream may activate the brain’s fear circuitry. Normally, your brain takes
Here is an original poem in preparation for Fall — APPLES Do you like apples? Johnny Appleseed came to me in a dream and told me to plant apple trees. (Not really, but it makes more sense this way.) So I planted three apple trees in my yard. Now they
I just got back from a week in sunny Southern California (although it did rain for a day). I was catching up reading my National Geographic magazines (they’re a good size for airplane trips) and I ran across this in the July 2015 issue — A 2014 study led by University of Melbourne ecologists showed
Al Roth is a professor of economics at Stanford, and he was co-winner (with Lloyd Shapley) of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. An engineer by training, he became an expert on designing markets because in certain situations, money alone can’t solve some problems. For example, Stanford University doesn’t use supply and demand to
I was out shopping Saturday night and I heard a cashier marvel about receiving a $100 bill. Is that the largest bill in circulation? That piqued my curiosity, and I got on my smart phone. According to the official website of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/denominations.aspx), the denominations of currency now in production are
I wrote this a long time ago. It was published on the Dayton Daily News editorial page in about 1990, although I’d have to dig out the date. I’m reprinting it here because it seems even more relevant today. My brother came home safely. I think about this every time there is another senseless
Mention the steam engine, and most people think of James Watt. Actually, the steam engine goes back to the 1st century AD — the earliest known design, the aeolipile, was described by the Greek mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria, as recorded in his manuscript Spiritalia seu Pneumatica. On July 2, 1698, British engineer Thomas Savery was