Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be car salesmen. Okay, that’s not how the original song lyrics went. But that’s what I thought of while listening to a podcast from National Public Radio’s This American Life. This episode is entitled “129 Cars” and originally aired December 13, 2013; it was recently rebroadcast. “We
If you’re fortunate enough to have a home-cooked meal for Thanksgiving, it will probably include the sweet potato. There is nothing like enjoying one of my childhood favorites, a sweet potato casserole topped with oven-browned marshmallows. Or is there? Many professional chefs are saying this is one dish we could all do without. The objections
When you are driving and come to a construction zone that requires traffic to merge out of a lane, what do you do? I usually merge into the first available open space. Frankly, it’s always bothered me when people speed down the soon-to-be-closed lane despite the signage, then merge at the last possible minute. That
A couple of days ago, I heard on the radio that Bill Gates is planning to build a futuristic community. As soon as I arrived home, I started researching. According to the article “Bill Gates Invests $80 Million to Build Arizona Smart City” by Matt McFarland (http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/13/technology/future/bill-gates-smart-city-arizona/index.html), it sounds wonderful — The community in Belmont
Of all the Founding Fathers, I think the most fascinating is Benjamin Franklin. He was our first humorist, and in his day the best writer in the Colonies. He was also an inquisitive scientist, perhaps best known for his experiments with electricity. But recently I ran across a Ben Franklin story that I’m sure he
On November 11, 2016, this country started something we take for granted every day — it established a highway numbering system. This was described so well by an entry in The Writer’s Almanac that I’m just going to quote it verbatim — In the early days of automobile travel, the federal government wasn’t involved
Remember when I wrote about dihydrogen monoxide, that dangerous chemical that should be banned because it causes thousands of deaths every year (http://www.dhmo.org/truth/Dihydrogen-Monoxide.html)? (News flash: it’s water. Think about it, two hydrogen and one oxygen.) I have another one for you. There are several videos on YouTube claiming that, because of a conjunction between Venus
While checking my email this afternoon, I ran across an interesting item on the Time News Brief: “Why You Should Eat Your Halloween Candy All At Once ” by Jamie Ducharme is the most counterintutive headline I’ve seen in a long time. It’s definitely the opposite of what my mother preached. Of course, no one
I know predicting the future is difficult (even today, our smart phones can do so much more than the fabled Stark Trek Communicators), especially when things are progressing so rapidly (when I was growing up we still had a telephone party line and got two TV channels in black and white). But if you think
If you could save five lives for the cost of one person’s life, would you? What about saving five lives by murdering one person? These are thought-provoking moral dilemmas explored in the podcast “Driverless Dilemma” on the National Public Radio show Radiolab, which was originally broadcast on September 26, 2017. Most people say “yes” to
