“Mommy,” calls my six year old as she heads down the stairs, “What’s for dinner?” Evidently, a few seconds of foreknowledge makes all the difference when it comes to the dinner menu. “Lasagna, salad, and fresh fruit,” calls back my…
Little Boy, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, used one hundred and forty one pounds of enriched uranium to produce its big bang. With improved technology, today’s nuclear bombs can be created with thirty five pounds of Uranium-235 or even…
When I was younger, I used to be an astronaut. Not a full time astronaut, it was more of a part time gig. Or maybe just a little bit of the time. Like when my parents would load up the…
You are not one, you are many. You are trillions. There are somewhere between ten and forty trillion little copies of you in this universe, each one as unique as you are. The trillions of you are found in your…
He’s 33 years old, makes a salary of $1 a year, yet he’s the fifth richest man in the world with a net financial worth north of $70 billion. He never graduated college, but he did get an honorary degree…
Construction is never a simple thing. The general rule is to expect projects to take thirty percent longer than scheduled and to cost thirty percent more than budgeted. But a building taking more than 200 years to build is considerably…
Shortly before I got married, I entered headlong into a massive controversy brewing among my friends, a number of whom were getting married about the same time as me. The question we grappled with was how to treat our wives…
I’ve never given too much thought to my last name. I know that Burnham isn’t much of a Jewish name; that was by design. My grandfather, whose last name was Berman, couldn’t get into medical school with a Jewish last…
After a raging debate, the Swedish authorities finally agreed to abandon the antiquated rules that had long been causing deep emotional pain to their constituents. The new law gives Swedish parents the rights and freedoms which are granted to almost…
Xi Cheng left home at the age of fourteen in search of bread. A two year drought had killed off all but the hardiest vegetable crops in his farming village of Zihua-Ni (mostly horseradish, potatoes, beets, and other root crops),…