Seeing is believing! Is it? I’ll believe it when I see it. Really? Will you? The late great mathematician, Martin Gardner, columnist for Scientific American magazine for 25 years developed a famous card illusion. The magician shuffles a deck of cards and has the subject select and memorize a card. After a sequence of seemingly...
Back when I was fortunate enough to own a sedan whose engine boasted, not 6, not even 8, but 12 cylinders, I was often accosted by people approaching me in parking lots. “Why don’t you get a car that uses less gasoline?” complete strangers would ask. It was initially startling, but I got used to...
Charles Bronson starred in the 1974 classic film, Death Wish. Playing Paul Kersey, a New York architect whose family was brutalized by murderous thugs, Bronson goes on a vigilante rampage. I saw this movie in a Manhattan theater in 1975 and as a newly arrived tourist, I was astonished to see that every time Bronson...
For children, time seems to move slowly and ponderously. Most of us can remember a school year that seemed to last for 20 months, or a birthday that surely took more than 12 months to return. Adults often have the opposite experience. “What! It’s time to pay taxes again!” Or perhaps, “Didn’t we just put...
I had a great time the other evening! My wife and I spent five hours in deep conversation with a friend and rabbinic colleague whom I hadn’t seen since speaking in his synagogue a few years back. One time his family was away visiting relatives for a week. It also happened that he had no...
“All you need is love,” sang the Beatles in 1967. A pretty sentiment to be sure, but a poor roadmap for life as proven by the young and confused of that generation whose lives were shaped by a fateful summer of love two years later. Love is wonderful, but alone it is hardly adequate. One...
If you find yourself suffering from muscle cramps and unusual tiredness, you may have a potassium deficiency, but a doctor would need to determine this with blood tests. It is possible that you have not eaten enough potassium, but your symptoms may well have other causes. Nothing in our bodies tells us that it’s time...
Cultural messages beamed into us from entertainment, media, and politics often enter our hearts. When we become ‘infected’ by absorbing the message, it becomes a spiritual schematic inside of us that then influences our beliefs and soon also our thinking. Eventually, we become capable of infecting others and so the virus spreads. For a physical...
“I had to let three of my people go last week,” she told me, “and you have no idea how miserable I have been. I wish I could get toughened up so I could do whatever is necessary without feeling such pain!” “No, you don’t,” I replied. “In these frightening financial conditions, you may have...
All sorts of schools ranging from elementary to graduate level are abolishing grades or objective entrance exams such as the SATs. It is not a coincidence that this is happening as less learning and less transmission of verifiable skills take place. Numbers have a funny way of revealing reality. Just as most speedy drivers would...
