We study, analyze, organize, strategize, plan, anticipate, and calculate probabilities, but life constantly upends us. We enlist computers, algorithms, software programs, collected metrics, trend-spotting, forecast modeling and plain old intuition, yet fail to accurately predict much more than tomorrow’s weather. Despite insight, hindsight, or foresight... Continue

The human condition requires eventually losing everything, even our body; we don’t get to take it with us when we die anymore than we get to take our favorite sweater. Birth, aging, sickness and death comprise the totality of our physical experience - we all... Continue

Considering the immeasurable diversity of forms of life in this world - tube worms breathing methane at the mouth of 800 degree volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean, lichens digesting the minerals in rocks for survival, worms living inside glaciers, bacteria that grow... Continue

Cause and effect are so all-pervasive and unobstructed, most of the time we don’t notice it in operation. The world we enjoy (or not, as the case may be) reflects the continuity of cause and effect at work on everything, even hamburgers and ketchup. In... Continue

Thousands of years ago the idea of atoms was proposed. Ancient Hindus and then Buddhists wrote and taught about atoms, as did the Greeks. Reduced to smaller and smaller particles, physical material eventually became too small to be seen physically, so the existence of atoms... Continue

Having never been to Las Vegas my wife and I planned a visit to celebrate my birthday. We felt excitement mixed with horror; and every friend we told about our plan reacted with: “You’re kidding!” But kidding we were not. Like Ishmael having confronted Moby... Continue

I’ve just completed James Lovelock’s recent book, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”. Lovelock, now 90, is the scientist-inventor who popularlized the term “Gaia” in the 1970’s to define the earth as a single living organism – dynamic, self-regulating, and responsive to global and cosmic forces.... Continue

One of the great unsolved mysteries of existence is…existence. Given all the possible variations in the nature of time, space and physics, how is it that things exist as opposed to not existing? There is the issue of matter vs. antimatter, for example; when they... Continue

If marijuana is legalized in California the commercial floodgates will open. This is less a matter of good or bad than a simple matter of fact. The marketplace and its investors will swoop in and create an advertising juggernaut to capture customers, and the pot... Continue