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, […]
The Wizard of Oz — and Remastering.
As some of you probably know, maybe even because I’ve told you, The Wizard of Oz is not in Kansas anymore. It’s in Las Vegas. And it’s incredible. According to the Wall Street Journal, Steven Hickson, director for AI foundation research at Google DeepMind, The Wizard of Oz project was “Very, very, very big and […]
When the system looks like Magic.
Justin Willman, the magician-comedian, has a trick that never fails to amaze people. Including me. He’s memorized every zip code in the United States. For real. Audience members call out their five digit zip code, and he tells them their town. Not just the state, not just the region — the actual exact town. It […]
Aztec Cocoa and 13 Spicier Ways to Live.
The ancient Maya lived in the region of Mesoamerica, which today includes southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, parts of Honduras, and El Salvador. By around 500 BC, they were already crafting a bitter, frothy beverage from ground cacao, water, cornmeal, and chili peppers — what we now think of as an early version of “xocolātl” (pronounced show-co-LAH-tul). […]
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 […]
From Word One to Level Eight.
I grew up in a very large family, surrounded by siblings. A LOT of them. There was a gaggle of us – to say the least. Everywhere we went, even in the 60s, 70s and 80s (when it was much more common to have larger families), we caused a bit of a spectacle. My dad […]
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 […]
The Kindest Thing We Can Do.
Investor Rick Buhrman was once asked “What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?”This was his response: “… our oldest son, Theo, spent the first six months of his life in several NICUs. He was eventually helicoptered to Indianapolis at Riley Hospital for Children. And while we were living in that NICU […]
