A Californian for nearly 50 years I've infrequently traveled by train but I grew up in the suburbs of New York and took the train to Manhattan from time-to-time. My earliest memory of a long train trip was when I was eight years old and... Continue

It would be nice, I suppose, to believe that everything is just fine: the motivations of people are well-intentioned, science and technology always solve every problem, freedom and democracy are humanity's natural state, the world can accommodate an unlimited number of people, and infectious disease... Continue

Setting aside the purely commercial aspects of harvest decorations and TV commercials featuring cute turkeys and cartoon characters in Puritan outfits, Thanksgiving's acknowledgment of earth's bounty and the value of kindness towards others is a welcome departure from our customary year-long celebration of acquiring more... Continue

In the world's economy there are only three types of money, fast, slow and no. Fast money is just that, credit which moves so quickly it requires the use of automated computer algorithms. At its extreme, fast money is circulating the globe, staying in sync... Continue

Try as we may to be blasé - making it the subject of horror movies, detective dramas, novels and so forth - the mystery of death remains humanity's primary conscious and unconscious preoccupation. The heart of philosophy and religion, not to mention Hollywood, "the great... Continue

Every new artifact of human culture generates a set of effects. The most predictable of these relate directly to the operation or impact of the artifact; for example, the invention of the automobile made the horse and buggy obsolete. Less obvious is its relationship to... Continue

Countries have used a variety of excuses to go to war. Some cite the need for protection of people who speak their language, like Vladimir Putin is doing in the Ukraine or Adolph Hitler did before annexing the "Low Countries" adjacent to Germany in the... Continue

It's interesting how medical terminology has been applied to the digital realm; after all, computers are just machines, right? Machines don't get sick and that's what we've always loved about them and why they've effectively replaced human beings as a labor force. Tractors don't get... Continue

Back in the hippie-dippy days of the 20th century two things were a Big Deal: Hair and Astrology. Long-haired men faded as an issue when pattern baldness and changing fashion inevitably reduced their impact to statistically ordinary, and astrology - replaced by ecology - quietly... Continue