Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
How Big Can Black Holes Grow?
If I were smart, I’d stay away from this one, because it gets complicated, but I just ran across this topic on the EarthSky News. The short answer to how big a black hole can get is 50 billion suns before the food that powers them crumbles into stars. (Like I said, it’s complicated.) The
Happy Winter Solstice
It’s all downhill from here. The winter solstice — officially the first day of winter, although I have my own definition — is the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Of course that’s in the Northern Hemisphere; in the Southern Hemisphere it’s just the reverse. Depending upon your time zone, the
Happy Birthday, Ludwig van Beethoven
Actually, no one is postive when Beethoven was born. He was baptized on December 17, 1770 in Bonn, in what is now Germany, and his birthday is thought to be December 16, 1770. Beethoven was a bonafide musical genius who gave us some of our best-known classical music and who ironically went deaf later in
The Little Woman Who Made the Great War
Upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, Abraham Lincoln supposedly said “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” I found a secondhand paperback edition of Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin awhile back and decided to read it since it is one of the key books in U.S. history. It’s actually pretty short, 180
“It Was the Best of Times…”
In this, the last half of the last month of 2015, people are beginning to pass judgment on the past year. Was it like the opening of Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, both the best of time and the worst of times? Perhaps it depends on whether or not you’re a Republican
Who Really Did Write Shakespeare?
I was surprised to learn recently that the debate about who wrote the plays and verse attributed to William Shakespeare is still alive. My question “Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets?” got 259,000 hits on Google. The main problem seem to be the lack of recordkeeping. We simply don’t know that much about the man,
Is It Christmas?
You never know what you’ll find on the Internet. The most unusual website I’ve ever found is https://isitchristmas.com/ It answers the question “Is it Christmas?” in a very direct way. Be sure to check it on Christmas, although you will probably be disappointed.
Printing Your Clothes
You’ve heard a lot about 3D printers, but will there ever be the day when we can use them to print our clothes? A young lady named Danit Peleg thinks that day will be here soon. In a recent TED talk, she explains how a fashion school project let her to degisn and print some
The Origin of Shaving Cream
The word barber comes from the Latin barba for beard, and even in early Rome they knew beards needed to be lubricated to be cut without pain. Water worked okay as long as it was held in place with soap. Special shaving soaps were being sold by the early 1800s. One of the first
What Are Animals Thinking?
Anyone who has ever owned a pet has probably wondered at one time or another what their companion has been thinking. How much do they understand? Do they have the same feelings, or do they just mirror our moods? I haven’t had a pet in fifty years, but my own theory is when an animal