Steve Barkley was minding his own business. Cruising down the interstate near Campbell, CA, he was thoroughly enjoying himself. Depressing the gas pedal, he goaded his brand new Porsche 911 to lap up the pavement with increased urgency. The roof…
One of the most dramatic thefts of the past twenty years was the decades-long attempt of Chinese manufacturers to steal the color white. You think white is easy, but white is actually extremely difficult to make, and is a multi-billion…
George Washington led a supersized life, almost nothing he did was in moderation. For starters, George was physically a giant of a man. At a time when the average male was 5”6, George was a towering 6”2. Long before he…
There was a time in my life when I was actually pretty decent at that game we call basketball. There was a period when I spent four or five hours every day playing pick-up ball in the park. Back in…
When we think of the earliest explorers of our fledgling country, we tend to think of rugged adventurers of the Daniel Boone genre, people who would kill a bear with their bare hands and then eat its raw flesh for…
There are many things computer chips can do better than me, and I embrace it. They calculate better than I do, they find disease patterns for the CDC by culling meta-data, they control traffic lights of entire cities better than…
If necessity is truly the mother of invention, we should have invented teleportation devices long ago. The current air travel system desperately needs revamping, as it is far from great and only getting worse. More people are flying each year,…
Manju Das was quite possibly the richest housemaid in the world at one point, with close to two million dollars in her bank account. Today she lives in a hut, her body wracked in pain because she can’t afford any…
Of all the tens of thousands of emails being released from Hillary Clinton’s private email account, the one I find most interesting has two words in the subject line: Gefilte Fish. While the subject line of the email Hillary sent…
The fifteen passenger van was dented, rusted, and filled with benches covered with industrial strength vinyl. For four years that canary yellow van conveyed me to school, about twenty minutes from my house, and deposited me back home again in…