Stories Short and Strange
17 short stories for general audiences ranging from the unusual to the unbelievable to the just plain strange.
Plussing the Vietnam Memorial
Every generation has its war. My dad’s was World War II; mine was Vietnam. I was in Southeast Asia (mostly Thailand) from the summer of 1972 to the summer of 1973. It was the kind of experience you never forget. We lost more than 58,000 of our finest youth during the Vietnam era. Appropriately, they
Thoughts on New Year’s Resolutions
This is a little late; I’m sure most resolutions have already been tossed aside. If that’s true for you (personally, I don’t even bother), maybe it’s time for a new approach. The Sunday, January 8, 2023 issue of the Dayton Daily News explained one such approach. Columnist Meredith Moss wrote about a woman in Centerville,
How Many Times Can You Fold a Sheet of Paper?
Something you probably haven’t considered recently: just how many times can a sheet of paper be folded? Conventional wisdom says about seven times, maybe eight, because the more times a sheet is folded, the thicker it gets. Once the resulting stack becomes thicker than it is long, it can no longer be folded. Consider a
In Search of Happiness
What is your approach to happiness? This subject came to my attention recently thanks to the cover article in the Jan 16-23 issue of Time magazine. This special section, entitled “The Happiness Revival Guide,” includes a brief article “Catastrophizing Doesn’t Have to Be Catastrophic” by Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor and coauthor of
On Wasting Time
The older I get, the more time becomes important. (This leads to some interesting discussions with middle school students when I think they are wasting their time, but that’s another subject.) So I was intrigued by the article “The Biggest Wastes Of Time We Regret When We Get Older” by Kristin Wong (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-biggest-wastes-of-time-we-regret-when-we-get-older?). It sounded
Book Review: A Man of Iron
Which U.S. Presidents have won the popular vote at least three times? Of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt holds the record for four (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944). but there have been two others: Andrew Jackson (1824 before also winning the Electoral College and becoming President in 1828 and 1832), and Grover Cleveland (becoming President in 1884,
Detecting Aliens the Star Trek Way
The speed of light has always been considered the limiting factor for interstellar transportation. For example, the closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, about 4.25 light-years away. The fastest spacecraft we’ve ever been able to build is the now-in-space Parker Solar Probe, which should eventually attain a top speed of 450,000 mph. Even at that high
What is Synthetic Gas?
Good news for the environment: recently a startup company in Chile, Highly Innovative Fuels (HIF), opened its first synthetic gasoline production facility. HIF was organized to run the plant, which is a collaboration among Porsche, Siemens Energy, Exxon Mobil, Enel Green Power, the Chilean state energy company ENAP, and Empresas Gasco. The plant will begin operating
Seeing Things That Aren’t There
On July, 25 1976, the Viking 1 orbiter transmitted this photo from the Cydonia region of Mars. Do you see a face in the upper center? Many people did. Except the “face” was simply a play of light and shadows. Nevertheless, the public’s imagination had been captured, and it is still thought of as the
A Chinese father…
I ran across this story that I think is worth sharing. It is attributed to appellate Judge David Bazelon. A Chinese father calls his children to a family meeting and tells them that somebody has pushed the family outhouse into the Yangtse River and asks somebody to confess; nobody comes forward. The father says, “Let