Monthly Archives: April 2011

Years ago, the cartoonist nonpareil Gary Larson showed a couple of guys out in the middle of the desert, totally parched, and clearly in desperate straits. Vultures were perched on a nearby cactus. But one of the men saw hope. … Continue reading →

“In God we trust.” You’ve heard this before, right? It’s the motto of the United States. Coins have displayed this wording dating back to the Civil War. [But it has been official and on paper currency only since the 1950’s.] … Continue reading →

In my circles, there’s an oft-heard idea that goes something like this: “If you want to know where someone’s heart is, look at the entries in his (her) checkbook.” In an era of on-line banking, a “checkbook” is an antiquated … Continue reading →

While I was a college physics major, I came across the book Cosmology, by H. Bondi (Cambridge monographs on physics, 1961, 182 pp.). It looked intriguing! So I bought and read it. Today, when I pulled it out of my … Continue reading →

Today my father, Robert Hooke, were he still alive, would have turned 93. He was a remarkable person. My mother, brother, and I still miss him every day. Others he mentored mourn his loss as well. Later in this post … Continue reading →

In the late 1950’s, when I was a high school student in Pittsburgh, life was simpler. Take electronics. One day our next-door neighbor, an electrical engineer who worked with my dad at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories, gave me a small … Continue reading →

If you’ve read the April 5 and March 30 posts, you know that we’ve been working (maybe even overworking?) an analogy between (1) our plight as seven billion people moving pell-mell into an opaque future, and (2) a commercial jet … Continue reading →

One hoary chestnut? Bad enough. But two of ‘em, end-to-end? What’s up with that? Simply this: these two overworked clichés – concatenated – describe the essence of human history, and our greatest 21st century dilemma. To set the stage, consider … Continue reading →