The question Darren didn’t ask.
One of Darren’s most embarrassing moments happened over 50 years ago, and he still thinks about it. Seriously. It was the End of the Year 6th Grade Field Day. A big deal. Darren, being the “star” athlete that he was, was competing against the other 6th grade class’s candidate, a boy who Darren knew was […]
Backing up Blind.
Several years ago, my brother and his wife were moving back to our home state after some schooling. I was standing with our Dad on his long driveway while my brother tried to back a huge moving trailer into it – straight and clean. He was struggling a bit to get it into position. I […]
Three-lane Future.
Do you have a minute? It’s a weird week, so you might have a minute. I’m going to walk us through an imagination exercise. There is no pressure, I just want you to explore with me. Ok? Ready? We’re going to imagine three parallel tracks our lives could take from right here, right now. For […]
When the bill breaks.
In 2009, behavioral economists Priya Raghubir and Joydeep Srivastava designed a series of studies to observe how people handle cash. They found that a single large bill carried more psychological weight than the same amount divided into smaller ones. Participants who received a fifty-dollar bill tended to keep it intact. Those given the same amount […]
Wyna’s Herrings (and Thinking Sideways).
The New York Times Connections is a daily online word puzzle designed by puzzle maker Wyna Liu where players must group 16 words into four categories of four words each. For instance, these 16 words: Twist Fan Mint Fab Just Only Petit Spread Merely Fantastic Olive Connect Cherry Simply Radiate Branch Darren hates it. And […]
What the London Plane Tree knows.
The London plane tree (platanus × acerifolia) is a hybrid between the American sycamore tree and the Oriental plane tree. Wikipedia says it’s believed to have appeared by accident in the 17th or 18th century, possibly in a garden in London or Spain. Botanists noticed that this crossbreed had unusual strength: it could survive soot, […]
Capital “S” Stuck.
I’m going to start this post with a little lesson I learned from Marty, my brother, who has spent most of his career in city planning. There are different types of roads. Arterial roads are like the main highways or big streets in a city. Everybody goes on them. They carry lots of people going […]
Samuel Langley – and getting in our own way.
In the early 1900s, Samuel Pierpont Langley — the namesake of Langley Air Force Base — was one of the most respected scientific minds in the United States. As the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a pioneer in aviation, he had funding from the U.S. War Department ($50,000 according to Wikipedia), access to leading […]
4 Questions from Fiskars.
I grew up in a house of scissors. We had little kid scissors, dad’s big metal office scissors, huge shears in the garage, craft scissor, junk drawer scissors, kitchen scissors, mom’s hair cutting scissors, and the orange handled Fiskars – both straight and ‘pinking’ style. And we knew better than to use the orange ‘sewing […]
Chocolate Tasting — and 8 flavors of anger.
In 1929, at the age of 13, Roald Dahl attended Repton School, a prestigious boys’ boarding school in Derbyshire, England. It was during his time at Repton that the Cadbury company sent sample chocolate bars to the school for the boys to taste and evaluate. “It was a tradition that Cadbury’s, the great chocolate manufacturers, […]
