Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Today's article involves one of the most famous presidents in US history, President Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for shaking things up and kind of making his own way. In 1901, he did something that wouldn’t seem too controversial to us today. Certainly not. He had someone over for dinner, you know. He’s the president at this time. He’s pretty busy in general. But because he’s the president of the United States, even the smallest of social decisions carry enormous weight in symbolism for the public. It’s not like you or I casually inviting a new friend or new coworker…
A stroke freed me and Leukemia caused my memory loss
Depending on your culture, you perceive death differently and react to it with feelings of sadness, anger, happiness, fear, surprise, hope, contentment, and peacefulness.
Everybody has experienced loss or will experience loss, it is inevitable. For me, it was during my teenage years. My dad had Acute ischemic stroke (AIS). I was told he had been driving and had to pull over because he felt some type of way. He discovered he couldn’t talk and he couldn’t move the right part of his body- a partial stroke.
I found a lot of treatments for stroke but we weren’t given a…
The United States worried that pinball would lead to the downfall of the nation’s children and become a driving force for organized crime
The origins of pinball come from a French table game called Bagatelle with the first-ever pinball machine being patented in 1871. However this machine was not like the ones we think of today with the little flippers. There’s a number of ways you can make a pinball game more elaborate with targets that you hit and little ways to sync the ball and double balls and all that stuff to blow up your score. In this early version, it was more like what we think of today as maybe Pachinko where you’re shooting the ball, and then it just jumping…
We all need feedback to improve. So why is it so hard to hear criticism?
When you say feedback makes you better, I believe in that more than I believe in just about anything on Earth. If you want to improve, you need really good feedback. But I would also say there are a lot of forms of feedback, including negative feedback that aren’t really criticism that aren’t painful at all.
Well, I think about like, I’m a kind of mid-career golfer, one of my favorite things about golf is that the feedback loop is super tight. It’s so short, because it’s immediate, right? You see if the ball went where you want it to…
How to recognize negative behavior
If you’ve noticed some negative shifts in your kid's behavior. They've probably also started using some really hurtful mean words. And some of them increase hitting and tantrums. You have definitely entered the power struggle stage. They’ve started saying things like I don’t like you and you’re mean and you’re not my friend. Sometimes they’ll even say I hope you die.
One tactic I’ve tried is to say, ‘I can tell you feel angry about ‘X’, but we don’t hurt each other in this family, and no matter what we always love each other. When you say you don’t love…
A variable hypothesis
This is a bit of a riddle. It turns out that if you have a glass of hot water and you have a glass of cold water, and you put them in a freezer, one of them freezes faster than the other. The hot water actually freezes more quickly. This is called the Mpemba effect.
The Mpemba effect was in fact named after a Tanzanian schoolboy who thought against all logical reasoning that ice cream would freeze quicker if it was first heated. …
The story behind, ‘the best thing since sliced bread’
People love food and wherever you go in the world, that’s one of the topics that you can easily talk to anyone about regardless of your cultural differences. Here in the United States, we’ve had a very old saying for a long time, which is the best thing since sliced bread.
This journey begins around 1928 with a jeweler from Missouri, Otto .F. Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa.
He saw a need that needed to be satisfied. He overheard homemakers in his jewelry store complaining about how difficult it was to slice bread and how much they hated it. It was…
How tomatoes went from feared to revered
People might love a pasta sauce, but they may hate the actual tomato. Historically, this is an echo of, at least in the US, our huge, weird relationship with tomatoes. It’s crazy that people don’t talk about it more often. I mean, I don’t know if anybody else had this misconception, but when I was quite young, I just kind of assumed tomatoes were Italian because I associated them with pasta sauce, but they’re not. They’re Mesoamerican. We have proof that the tomato was eaten in the Aztec culture as early as 700 AD.
If you lived in the early 20th century America, the leading cause of death in the country was not a heart attack, right? It wasn’t cardiac cardiovascular stuff. It wasn’t cancer. Instead, it was tuberculosis. Public health experts of the time were aware that spitting could function as a vector of contagion.
It turns out, In the late 1800s. Spitting was super popular. There was a spit culture, men would spit in courtrooms, inside buildings, on streetcars. There would apparently be puddles of spit on the floor to the point where women’s dresses were always in danger of dragging through…
So not many people look forward to death, even if they’ve lived a long and satisfying life. So it would seem there’s a big appetite for the opposite of death or immortality and a lot of scientists are working on if not immortality, per se, at least extending life by many years. Isn’t life precious in large part because it is so finite? And if there were an avenue toward immortality, how desirable would you find that?
I know my life has an end and that the end is not a blink of an eye in this sort of grand…
