When water becomes hot and agitated enough, it becomes a gas. When solid iron is heated to 2,800 degrees, it becomes a liquid. These are examples of what physicists call a phase transition or shift, a radical restructuring of matter from one form into another.... Continue
Public Citizen
The world is the sum total of its parts, a constantly emerging manifestation of all that has come before. The actions of causes and conditions – natural forces such as weather and human behaviors such as technology – naturally produce effects, and these effects become... Continue
My wife and I just bought a new set of wheels. Our dandy little Prius gets nearly 50 miles to the gallon, and we are already saving considerable money on gas. We Americans love our wheels. Cars were one of the 20th century’s first complex... Continue
Several months ago I predicted that rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would entail a massive taxpayer bailout, and I was correct. Keep in mind that I am not a financial analyst or stock broker and have no degree in economics, unlike many of the... Continue
When contemplating 9/11 many terrible things come to mind: The mind-numbing footage of two jets crashing into New York’s twin towers and the towers’ collapse mere hours later, the Pentagon on fire due to another attack-the crash of flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania-the... Continue
Every once in a while something meaningful appears on television, and at present it is a series on AMC called “Mad Men.” Taking place in the very early ‘60s and set in New York, the fictional series written by Mathew Weiner of HBO’s “The Sopranos”... Continue
It is commonly accepted that all human beings wish to be happy, but what is happiness, exactly? The framers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence believed that along with life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness was a primordial right of all people, yet they... Continue
Hi. My name is Larry, and I am a sarcastic. I don’t like being a sarcastic, and I’ve tried to change, but I am finding it, honestly, quite hard. Both my parents were sarcastics, and I suspect their parents were sarcastics, too. My father was... Continue
Biologists speculate that the adult human body is comprised of roughly 40 trillion human cells, give or take several trillion. Considering the rather remarkable fact that we begin life as a single cell containing enough information to organize 40 trillion anything (almost impossible to imagine)... Continue
A few months ago I wrote a column entitled “The Sutra of the Heart of Financial Knowledge” (5/08/08). It was a satire about the emptiness of money, but at its center was a serious message. Based on the famous Heart Sutra, I may have reached... Continue