Archive for March 2024

The more I work with people—students and adults—the more convinced I’ve become that confidence is the most important quality a person can possess. Confidence is often the difference between performing well and stumbling along. It’s the difference between being able to defend your idea with force and skill and faltering under pressure. It’s the difference…

The Museum of Endangered Sounds is a website dedicated to preserving the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronic equipment. Dot matrix printers. Dial-up internet. The Windows 95 startup music. All the sounds of my past, as well as the sounds of pasts before my time. Clever idea. I’m happy that someone…

I learned a new word this week thanks to one of my favorite newsletters, Numlock News: Backronym Definition: An acronym deliberately formed from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word or words to create a memorable name In other words, you name the thing to create the memorable backronym instead of the…

Just for the record: Climate change is accepted as a dangerous reality by all reasonable people. Democrats and Republicans alike. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its summary report on the climate emergency, warning that our climate is now changing rapidly almost everywhere and that immediate and massive action is necessary.…

An 18-year-old hacker from Oxford has been sentenced to indefinite confinement after a series of astounding cybercrimes. While on bail for hacking Nvidia and the phone company, the hacker’s laptop was confiscated, and he was placed under police protection in a Travelodge hotel. While there, he used an Amazon Firestick, a mobile phone, and the…

A student asked me, “Why would anyone start smoking? It just means you’ll have fewer friends.” It’s a good point. Though smokers and nonsmokers don’t always segregate themselves from one another, it’s often the case. None of my friends, as far as I know, smoke. I was going to tell my student, “Smokers also have…

I was punched in the face – twice – in a dream last night. Both times, I argued that I had been sucker-punched, but in both cases, my combatants disagreed. They claimed that since we were already arguing and clearly facing each other, the punch would not qualify as a sucker punch. They claimed that…

Years ago, a principal was running my school, and he was a monster. A narcissist of the highest order. We had no affection for each other, and we made it abundantly clear, both in action and words. Happily, he made the mistake of asking me to lie on his behalf about a financial mishap early…

Years ago, on the way to Florida, my best friend and I played the “Best of All-Time” game, in which competitors must argue for the best of all time in a variety of categories: Movies. Books. Dictators. Handheld kitchen appliances. Pick-up lines. You name it. Anything goes. When it came to “Best Invention of All-Time,”…

When Darth Vader is chasing Luke Skywalker down the trench of the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope, he notes that “the Force is strong with this one.” Shouldn’t he be more alarmed with this observation? Less than twenty years earlier, Vader slaughtered every Jedi youngling in the Jedi Temple, effectively ridding the…