Pumpkin carving, aisles of candy, haunted houses… it’s that time of the year again Halloween is a kid’s paradise. The one time of the year you could eat gobs of candy and your parents didn’t mind. Trick-or-treating was like a rat race. Let’s see, I can do 30 homes in an hour. If I stay [...]

The camera (digital or not) is still an amazing device I’ll never fully understand. Have you ever taken a moment to think about how some device is able to take a snapshot of what your eyes see? I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s crazy we’re able to take something in [...]

Advertising is like a love-hate relationship. I hate that it seems to have found itself in every part of our lives, but I also enjoy a funny or clever ad It can be so annoying, yet it’s probably one of the oldest and most successful forms of business ever. Sort of a double-edged sword, isn’t [...]

Men partially base their preferences on physical attractiveness. But that’s not the whole story. Malcolm Gladwell gives a great example in his book, blink: John has an idea about what he wants in a woman, and that idea isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. The description he starts with is his conscious ideal: what he believes [...]

After 7 years, the ergometer (a.k.a. rowing machine) is still, by far, the best workout I’ve ever had at a gym. I used to be on the crew team in high school and one of the most common on-land exercises was to do agility and endurance tests using the erg. What I love about the [...]

In case you’re not a big seafood person like me, think about buying food created with omega-3 fatty acids. Research has shown that there are certain health benefits that come with a moderate consumption of omega-3 each week. Normally this is something we get naturally in our diets when we eat seafood, such as salmon. [...]

The oven can be a great tool when you need a little help In 2006, I dropped my cell phone into a pool (don’t ask). While I usually would have immediately turned it on (destroying it), per the advice of my dad I opened it up, turned on the oven and baked my cell phone. [...]

Studying in high school and college was hard. There is so much information to know and the teacher might ask anything. Here’s a technique I used throughout my entire academic career. Taking a page from Blink (a really great book), thin slicing refers to “our ability to gauge what is really important from a very [...]

I never thought I’d see the day when I started listening to radio again. But a few months ago, just that happened. I’ve been an XM user for almost 2 years now. However, when I moved to Boston, I found a radio station that trumped both every radio station I had ever listened to and [...]

If kids are going to be interested in engineering concepts for energy and the environment, then we need to make it fun. My senior project in college was to build a fun website for kids, ages 10-14, that teaches them engineering concepts about energy and the environment. The reason behind this project, called TEAK Education, [...]