Purpose Built

The Mercedes W12 race car is arguably the best Formula 1 car ever built. On an F1 track against other F1 cars, it has proven to be nearly unbeatable. However, you could not drive the W12 to your local grocery and back without severe difficulty, if at all. My Mercedes is exceptional at running to…

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Walking In The Light

Walking early in the morning, I have noticed how the color of things around me changes as the sun begins to rise. When it is still mostly dark with just a hint of light in the eastern sky, the colors I can see are muted. In the circle around a streetlamp, everything is tinted with…

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Heat Wave

“We’re having a heat wave” is a phrase I have heard several times recently as the plummeting temperatures and record snowfall we have experienced this past week begin to fade. One of the latest was a dear friend of mine, in response to reading that the high temp on Friday would be 33°. Something is wrong in…

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The Flower Next To Me

“A flower does not think of competing to the flower next to it. It just blooms.” Zen Shin In 1724, a German physicist living in the Dutch Republic proposed a comparative scale for measuring temperature. He based his scale on three points: the low point as the freezing temperature of an ammonium salt brine solution…

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What Am I Meant To Know?

I am a data junky. I love to know things. How things work. How things came to be. How things are made. I want to know. This is not a bad thing in general. Knowledge can be good when it enables us to move ourselves and those around us in positive directions. Knowledge can lift…

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Let It Snow

Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike? As is often the case, the answer depends on what you mean by the question. With 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 crystals per year, if you checked a million snowflakes per second it would take you over 31 billion years to check just a single year’s worth. So, we can…

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My Prerogative

“Man is not, by nature, deserving of all that he wants. When we think that we are automatically entitled to something, that is when we start walking all over others to get it.” Criss Jami My greatest concern as I watch the events of this last election cycle unfold is not who is in the…

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Lost Sheep

“If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness and go to search for the one that is lost until he finds it?” Jesus (Luke 15) This is part of a parable Jesus told some people who were…

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A Hole In The Dam

In 1865, American author Mary Mapes Dodge published “The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland.” You may or may not have heard of this novel, but you have almost certainly heard of one of the sub-stories in the book: the story of the little boy who saved Holland by putting his finger in…

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Form Follows Function

The Eiffel Tower climbs 1,063 ft into the Parisian sky. The base is 410 ft on each side. When the tower was built, Eiffel was accused of creating something artistic with no regard to the principles of engineering. He replied in a newspaper interview on 14 February 1887: “Is it not true that the very…

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