General

How you experience your life is all about your attitude.  You can go through life seeing few choices, feeling trodden upon by the people around you, and having to do things you don’t want to do.  Or you can see the silver lining in every cloud, find opportunities at every corner, and take full control […]

  As of October 2018, the top five websites in the United States are Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and Reddit (according to Alexa).  Odds are, five years from now this list will look pretty much the same.  That’s because there is a network effect that makes it nearly impossible to draw users away from the […]

Wallace Wattles is the godfather of the modern self-improvement genre.  He wrote The Science of Getting Rich over a hundred years ago, but the concepts are still applicable today.  It takes a little getting used to the vocabulary at first.  He uses New Age-sounding terms like the “Formless Intelligence,” the “Supreme,” and the “Certain Way.” […]

  Everyone wants to be wealthy and beautiful.  It’s no coincidence that the most profitable niches in the self-help industry involve becoming rich and more attractive.  There are hundreds, if not thousands of gurus online giving advice on how to make more money and look better.  Whose advice should you take? The best way is […]

  I had always heard and read mentions of a mysterious number called The Golden Ratio, which supposedly can be applied to a whole range of subjects including art, biology, architecture, and even investing.  It’s a number very much like Pi or the Fibonacci sequence. I won’t dispute the ratio’s importance in art and architecture […]

  Something is mystifying to kids about iPhones and iPads.  They always want to get their hands on one to play with the touchscreen. One button, in particular, is especially tempting to kids, but annoying to parents when they let their children play with their phone.  That button is the big round “home” button. There […]

Let me admit that I’m a nerd who wonders about some weird things sometimes. Just for fun… What if the United States redrew its borders so that each state had the same population? In 2016, the United States had an estimated population of over 323 million people.  That number divided equally among 50 states equals about […]

  After watching the 2009 film The Road and being so moved by the realism and bleakness of the movie, I hoped to read the novel someday.  Seeing that the novel won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction made me wonder if I was missing out by never reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in my life. There […]

  Want to consider yourself “well-read” but don’t know where to start?  Amazon.com compiled a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.  For most people, reading 100 books is too lofty a goal to seem realistic.  For this list, I’ve pored through both Amazon’s and Goodreads’ lists to come up with just the […]

  Any native English-speaker who has studied Mandarin Chinese should be familiar with the Pinyin system for romanizing Chinese characters.  Did you know there’s also a romanization system for Taiwanese?  It’s called Peh-oe-ji (pronounced Beh-weh-jee). Taiwanese is a dialect of Chinese similar to the Min Nan Chinese dialect spoken in Fujian Province of southeastern China.  The official language […]