A detail from the painting “Witch Hill/ The Salem Martyr” by Thomas Satterwhite Nobel, 1869. A woman, found guilty of witchcraft, walks to the gallows with the hangman and judges. (AP) When we think of witch hunts we here in the U.S. likely think of the Salem Witch...

Caesar's last words in 44 B.C.E. were "Et tu, Brute?"* His last breath, shortly thereafter, consisted of 25 sextillion air molecules. Each of us breathes, with every breath, at least one molecule of those 25 sextillion air particles that were a part of Caesar's last...

Flipping through HBO this weekend I watched a bit of a movie from the late 1980s. I noticed something strange - all sorts of people in the movie were smoking. We don't see that in movies anymore. Similarly, of all the people I know, I think only a handful of them...

Unattainable Triangles are simplified diagrams of three attributes where at most only two of the three are possible. It's a good way to frame choices. Here's "unattainable triangle" of quality, service and price. It looks like this: The concept is that as a consumer...

The "Wisdom Hierarchy", shown above in a pyramid format, was first formulated by organizational theorist Russell Ackoff in 1989. It describes the evolutionary path from mere data to having wisdom. The distinction between data, information, knowledge and wisdom is...

Rendition of rogue planet SIMP discovered beyond our solar system Sometimes former Governors of Alaska go rogue. Other times waves go rogue. This IFOD concerns planets going rogue. Fascinating stuff. When thinking of planets (which I do on occasion), I think of those...

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist who invented dynamite and died in 1896. In his will, he bequeathed a $9 million fortune to to award “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." His will directed that the prizes...

I've previously written on dialectical thinking: the notion that opposing thoughts or ideas can both be true at the same time. Dialectical thinking is considered a higher level thinking skill but is difficult because it can create cognitive dissonance. Cognitive...

In the book Death's End by Cixin Liu (which is the final book of the fantastic Three Body Problem Trilogy) a spaceship called Halo has a special propulsion system that curves space and allows the ship to attain light speed. Halo and its occupants journey to a star 286...

Reading time: 5 Minutes. A key to our species' success has been our ability to live and work in tribes and groups. Our social cooperation and teamwork is what has given our relatively weak, slow, and hairless homo sapiens the ability to dominate our planet. We've...

New York City recently experienced a tornado warning which is pretty rare for city inhabitants generally and NYC residents in particular. As a Midwesterner, I am very used to tornado warnings, but interestingly, tornadoes rarely hit the St. Louis area. Why do big...

Venus, photographed in ultraviolet light and rendered in false color. Source: Astronomy.com Venus, the second planet from the Sun is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. It is the second brightest object in the night sky after the moon. Earth and Venus...