A belated birthday greeting to Tarzan, who debuted on August 27, 1912 in the pages of All-Story Magazine. The title was Tarzan, King of the Apes, and the story was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had failed at a whole list of occupations before he tried writing. His inspiration came from the pulp magazines
Have you heard the latest from the world of science? We are entering a new epoch. For some 12,000 years, we have been living in the Holocene era, a stable and relative warm climate that has allowed the present world to develop. But on August 29, a working group of scientists at a meeting of
In this very unusual political year, the electorate seems as polarized as it’s been since the Civil War. Many people feel dire things will happen if their candidate is not elected president. Which brings up the question, how much difference does a president make anyway? Remember our Founding Fathers distrusted government at least as much
Whenever I teach in middle school, it’s not unusual to see girls with babies. Not real babies (thankfully), but realistic dolls that mimic a child’s needs. Their job is to care for this doll as if it was alive, including middle-of-the-night demands. I don’t know how long the assignment lasts, but it’s a mandatory part
We have come a long way in this country from our founding when we were being led by an exclusive group of white male landowners. There has been so much progress that accounts of how social conditions used to be can be quite jarring. In just my lifetime, we’ve gone from racism being an integral
There’s a lot about this world we still don’t understand. That includes theoretical physics (especially for me). Scientists recognize four fundamental natural forces. They are gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces found inside atoms. Could there be a fifth? Basically, maybe. On August 14, 2016, physicists at University of California, Irvine (UCI)
I’ve always been interested in the origins of some of our most common expressions. One explanation for “the whole nine yards” came from some World War II fighters carrying 27 feet (nine yards) of machine-gun ammunition. When they came back empty, the ground crew would exclaim “He gave them the whole nine yards.” I’ve just
Have you seen this week’s Time magazine? The cover story has the provocative title of “Why We’re Losing the Internet to the Culture of Hate” by Joel Stein. Stein usually writes more humorous pieces as “The Awesome Column”. Sometimes his less-serious writing style doesn’t match well with the length of a cover story, but not
If you’ve been watching the Olympics, you may have noticed some athletes engage in certain pre-competition rituals. For example, sprinter Usain Bolt always points to the sky. Why? An article on the Quartz website written by Olivia Goldhill (http://qz.com/757757/athletes-who-wear-lucky-socks-arent-wrong-psychologists-say-superstitions-yield-real-advantages/) tries to answer that question. So much of what athletes undergo is beyond their control, like
As hot as this summer has been, I through it would be appropriate to page homage to the refrigerator. According to The Writer’s Almanac, the first refrigerator was patented in the United States on August 8, 1899. Not that the idea of keeping food cold to preserve it was anything new. Before the ‘fridge, food