Several years ago, a friend of mine gave me a book for my birthday called Thought Contagion. I had not heard of the book or its subject matter, the science of memetics, but I was fascinated by what I read. Author Aaron Lynch explained, concisely and convincingly, how some of the most significant bel...

As much as I enjoy visiting Las Vegas, I can’t say it’s the healthiest place in the world for a vacation. The local culture encourages excessive and continuous consumption of alcohol and food (not necessarily of the highest quality). And given the large numbers of smokers, the air qualit...

Note: This article has been updated; please see the very end for the latest information. -Joe As I mentioned in Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, I'm the sort of person who compulsively applies every new software update the minute it becomes available, but that doesn't mean I recommend this prac...

I recently went to a toy store with my son, and found myself marveling at how little had changed since I was a kid. Alongside all the miracles of modern toy science were dozens of items that I remembered seeing on toy store shelves 25 years or more ago, and they looked exactly the same—except ...

When I was a small child, my favorite color was purple. It didn’t require any deliberation for me to make that choice; purple was self-evidently the most attractive color in a box of crayons—anyone could see that. In fact, I remember being perplexed at people whose favorite color was som...

Nowadays, we take salt for granted. Sold for a pittance, the most common of spices, we think of it as an everyday thing, when we think of it at all. It wasn’t always so. In fact, great empires and fortunes rose and fell according to its supply. It is hard to imagine a modern war being fought o...

Every few years or so, I like to look through my books and weed out the ones that have outlived their usefulness to me. Maybe I’ve read them and enjoyed them, but don’t expect to re-read them any time soon. Or maybe they’re books I picked up used long ago and simply never got aroun...

Although I certainly have my malevolent moments, I generally try to treat other people in a courteous and helpful manner. I do this not out of a sense of guilt or duty, or because I expect some reward; it’s simply a habit—albeit one that has served me pretty well over the years. My impre...

I lead what most people would consider a habitually stressful life. One aspect of this is that I’m nearly always busy—usually with half a dozen major projects in progress, all of which feel equally important, at any given time. Even when I have the luxury of focusing on just one or two t...

I have never been much of a sports fan, which explains the scarcity of articles here dealing with sports-related topics. Truth be told, I’ve always had a hard time generating enthusiasm for any sort of game, whether as a participant or a spectator. There are a few notable exceptions: I can get...