Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
Alternate History Revisited — America’s Dunkirk
In December 2015, I wrote about some examples of one of my favorite subjects — alternate history. I thought of this again while following our contentious election campaign. We may take our democracy for granted, but it was actually hard-won, and could easily have been lost many times. In the book What If?, historian Thomas
The City Where College is Free
It’s called “The Promise”. Any high school graduate in Kalamazoo, Michigan gets to go to college for free. The website Kalamazoo Promise lays it out clearly — 1. The Kalamazoo Promise is for ALL students of the Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS). 2. You must reside within the boundaries of KPS. 3. You must have at
Have You Ever Heard of the Five-Hour Rule?
When I opened my email today and saw this, I thought it might be a come-on for a self-improvement course. But the source is “The Brief” daily news summary from Time magazine for July 29, 2016 and it sounds worth repeating. The Five-Hour Rule is credited to Benjamin Franklin’s practice of investing about an hour
Where History Comes From, Part 2385
How much of history can you trust? As a history nerd, I’ve thought about this often (at least 2384 previous times). I usually end up pondering some of my favorite quotes — “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it” — Sir Winston Churchill “History is the version of past events
How Trees Talk to Each Other
There are many things in this world I don’t understand. How women can walk in high-heeled shoes, for example. Now I can add tree communication to the list. Recently I ran across a TED Talk by a forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard. She has been researching Canadian forests for thirty years, and she’s concluded that
Meet Garner Holt
The clincher was a visit to Disneyland. Garner Holt had always been fascinated with figures and motion; he made his first animated show — a carrot and a cucumber — when he was six years old. Then he found the August, 1963 edition of National Geographic magazine with a picture of Walt Disney showed his
Another Reason to Become a Vegan
Have you ever thought about egg production? Only female chickens — hens — can lay eggs. So if you are breeding chickens for egg production, what do you do with the males, or roosters? The sad fact is that the roosters have no use, so they are usually put to death very quickly after hatching.
Can a Video Game Make You Cry?
There are all kinds of video games. Yet normally they are pretty devoid of emotion. But there is a new genre of games that tries to tap into our most primal feelings. The best example is That Dragon, Cancer, created by Ryan & Amy Green and Josh Larson, and published by Numinous Games. (The cover
Original Poem — Who Knew? A Teacher’s Lament
Here is an original poem about teaching from my book Some Poems About Life. Who Knew? A Teacher’s Lament She appeared upon the stage as if by magic, confident, radiant, playing her part with joy and self-assurance, her singing voice clear as a bell. The next day she entered the classroom and dutifully took
Vilfredo Pareto’s Big Contribution
Economists have a different way of viewing the world. Take the Italian economist, engineer and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto, who lived from 1848 to 1923. Among his other accomplishments, he discovered what is known today as Pareto’s Principle, or Pareto’s Rule. He realized that 20 percent of the people controlled 80 percent of the wealth in