School is about to start, so — Here is a math trick I just learned about. If you added up all the numbers from zero to 100, what would be their sum? Sounds daunting, doesn’t it? Well, there’s an easy way to do this. Imagine a column of numbers from 0 to 100. How many
Is there anything in this world that’s completely logical? How about mathematics? This is one area in which every problem has a precise, finite solution. Or so many people thought. The seminal work Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell sought to describe a set of axioms and rules which, in principal at
Who teaches you? I teach sometimes. That’s how I met a boy, actually a young man, but it’s easy to think of him as a boy because he wears diapers and he doesn’t talk even though he’s 18 years old. Oh, and he’s also blind. We’d take him to the gym and he would walk
There are a lot of strange stories from World War II. My favorite is the Dam Busters (http://www.dambusters.org.uk/) — the attempt to flood the Ruhr Valley by breeching upstream dams with bouncing bombs. (Hey, it was a partial success!) Now a friend has told me of an even stranger story — The only time the
I’m not one to publically get into the culture wars, but recently I heard another reminder that what one finds on the Internet cannot be accepted without critical thought. For example, what happened to the dinosaurs? Type that into a Google search and and one of the top websites (and I’ve been told at one time
How would things be different if women ran the world? I hesitate to speculate about humans, but there is one primate species where females do run things — lemurs. After roughly 55 million years of evolution, most lemur species have females in charge. The June, 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine (in the “Basic Instincts”
This is from Some Poems About Life, available on this website. My Mistake I never make mistakes, I’m quite meticulous. I pride myself on veracity and never make a fuss. Of course I might make a gaffe, a misstep I might take, or even an inaccuracy, but never a mistake. I’ve been known to
There was a fascinating program today on NPR’s “Fresh Air”. http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/ The guest was Anil Ananthaswamy, author of the book The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self, which covers topics like Cotard’s syndrome, a very rare mental disorder in which the sufferer is convinced he or she
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