Reading A Brief History of Time was like taking the red pill offered by Morpheus in the 1999 movie The Matrix. Having recently seen Stephen Hawkins’ obituary in The Economist, I was reminded of the impact his book had on my life. The reality of theoretical physics, as explained by Hawkins, is a different paradigm than […]
That’s Not the Beer Talking
“You have no respect for cognitive reverie, you know that?” At the time I saw the movie, A Beautiful Mind, I had no idea what ‘reverie’ meant. However, when John Nash’s roommate retorted, “Yes, but…I have enormous respect for…beer,” I got that. And so did the John Nash character, because it drew him out of […]
Ya Think!
My wife and I used to receive compliments for being perfect parents… then our third child came along and no one ever mentioned that again. It wasn’t that she was bad, it was just that she had a different way of learning. Her oldest sister learned by logic. Sister number two learned by observing. And […]
Solving Problems
I hadn’t been applauded for kissing my wife and walking down an aisle since our wedding day. However, this time the aisle in question was on an airplane instead of in a church. And the mood was more factious than festive because a family had been split-up instead of joined together. A mother (with infant […]
Mind the Gap: Look Right
Upon entering the London Underground for the first time, I had no idea what “Mind the Gap” meant until I saw it written on the station platform as I crossed the gap to the train. Being visual, I got “Look Right” immediately. It appears that many Americans are prone to the pedestrian’s equivalent of a […]
You Can’t Buy a Game
“You can’t buy a game.” Even though I know my brother-in-law is right, it hasn’t stopped me from trying. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you are obviously not a golfer. Golf is a hard game to master. It requires lots of practice. My brother-in-law, a former teaching and touring pro, told […]
Olivia’s Christmas List
I want to do great things, but it is the little things I do each day that are the great things. That paraphrase of an Ann Kiemel quote is my life motto. It both inspires and frustrates me. It frustrates me because I wonder if I will ever do anything noticeably great. At the same […]
The Certainty of Death and the Uncertainty of Life
What I saw was unforgettable. What I heard was unrepeatable. Many years ago, I was helping a mortician and a police officer pull a car with a dead body in it from the Sacramento River. It appears that the driver had driven her car into the river, probably at the old Ord Bend ferry ramp […]