Lying on my kitchen counter is an instrument that was produced by the hard work of over five million men and women. A marvel of international cooperation, its components come from dozens of countries. It is one of the most…
It was a gruesome way to die. The convulsions, vomiting, exhaustion, and gasping for breath lasted only a few hours, and then Thendara “Jagger” Satisfaction softly exhaled for the last time. His death would rock the world; the headlines screaming…
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…