A renaissance man for the twenty-first century!
Continuing the series, A guest blog, by Chuck Ritley “Manuelito stood there waiting for the bike to charge as had all of the bulls in his career and all the bulls before that when he was young and he twitched the cape hoping to see some action so the crowd wouldn’t think him a coward […]
Switzerland: No country has more guns and people that shoot them except the United States. I am not entirely sure why, but I have always suspected that guns and shooting enjoys a very long and very deep historical impact on culture: the US was forged by cowboys, and cowboys need to shoot; and Switzerland was […]
I can’t think of any other state than Texas that offers so many commercial opportunities via the drive-thru channel. Here is a drive thru bank. You stay in your car, and real people (called bank tellers) pass money to you via pneumatic tubes: America is highly segregated into areas that reflect the financial class of […]
Switzerland is the land of cheese – well, it is the land of plenty more things than just cheese, too, but you have to give the Swiss a lot of credit for their cheese. And to take a lot of credit for their cheese, they need a lot of cows. And to keep a lot […]
Yes, I had the honor or privilege of having someone try to shoot me with a gun. On one of these occasions, I was driving around the back woods region of Kentucky, when my path was blocked by a couple of stray cows, so I spent the time to take their picture: I heard someone […]
User Experience – sometimes referred to as UX – is defined as encompassing all aspects of an end-user’s interaction with e.g. an IT system or, for example, a company, its services, and its products. And although you might not think about it, museums can provide a wonderful insight into the field of UX. I’ve recently […]
In the deep south of India, not too far from the Kolar Gold Fields and just on the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, is the amazing Shiva temple called Kotilingeshwara. It is not a temple in any conventional sense of the word. It is more of a indoor / outdoor park, filled with thousands […]
A guest blog, by Charles Ritley South Texas, East of San Antonio, is a giant cattle ranch: grassland chock full of quail and deer—and those who hunt them. While Californians discuss ways to save endangered species, Texans swap recipes for cooking them. But hunting, like golf, is a socio-drinking experience. Guys form clubs that sub-lease […]
I have been fortunate enough to have carried out physics research in many exciting places. Oak Ridge National Laboratory It may be different today, but in 1987 my colleagues loved reminding me that we were in “The South” and that I was a so-called “Yankee.” I was assigned to a team in the computational division […]
The Ongoing Debate A debate is now raging about the role of scientific journals (or more accurately, publishing houses that charge exorbitant prices to access to scientific journals). Many scientific institutions feel forced to spend valuable grant money on journals, money they’d rather spend on scientific research. Although there are some “open access publishing” movements afoot, […]