Presently I live in Chicago in a fifth-floor apartment facing Lake Michigan—about half a block away. On the 4th of July—ten days ago, after darkness set in a bit past nine o’clock, a hoard of inebriated amateur pyromaniacs began flaunting their arsenals of consumer-class fireworks. As usual, their displays demonstrated a dearth of individuality: impotent … Continue reading FORUM: Macho Fireworks

A second-year graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), I was working on completing most of my remaining mandatory coursework, and compiling the literature needed to write my proposal for a Master of Arts degree in academic health psychology. At that time literature reviews were conducted manually in the library—there was no … Continue reading FORUM: Friends and Enemies

Assessing the Authenticity of an Interviewee In a 2014 Auto Bild interview, Elon Musk revealed he assesses the authenticity of an interviewee’s claimed experience by asking for a detailed description of the most difficult problem(s) the interviewee previously worked on and solved. According to Musk, “The people who really solved the problem know exactly how they solved … Continue reading FORUM: Interviewing

I was in grade school in the 1960’s, living with my family in Sierra Vista, Arizona, about twenty miles from the Mexican border. A chain-link fence “separated” our backyard from the Sonoran Desert. We kept a Japanese Fighting Hen in the backyard to repel venomous snakes. Our hen reflexively attacked any unrecognized living creature with … Continue reading FORUM: Sonoran Desert

When I began writing this comment, according to the US debt clock (https://www.usdebtclock.org/): US National Debt = $27.8 trillion dollars; and US Workforce = 150 million workers (125 million full-time). Dividing the US National Debt by the total number of US workers reveals that every working US citizen owes $185,333 to the US government—just to … Continue reading FORUM: US Debt