If you look up the term water clock in a certain online dictionary (which will remain nameless, though you can find it easily enough), you will find that the definition, in its entirety, is “A clepsydra.” (And you thought lexicographers didn’t have a sense of humor.) I’d like to be at least slightly ...

My life is full of contradictions, as is true for many of us. For example, if you asked me what my top five favorite things in life are, sleep would certainly be high on that list. I love to sleep—it’s not merely a necessity, it’s a joy. Circumstances permitting, I’d sleep 12 hours a day if I were physically ...

Do you ever have one of those days when you just can’t seem to get yourself moving? Or maybe, no matter how hard you try to get caught up, you always seem to lag behind? I have those kinds of days all the time—and so, apparently, did ancient Greek philosophers. One of them, Zeno of Elea, devised an ...

Among the many urban myths circulating on the internet is a document called “Life in the 1500s” that began as an anonymous email message and has since found its way onto countless Web sites that took it as legitimate history. Among other things, this list of alleged facts about Renaissance life purports ...

Let’s say you’re besieged by a bunch of Orcs and Nazgûl in some fictional city in the realm of Gondor. And let’s say your ancient allies from far away in the land of Rohan are your only faint hope for rescue. How might you call out for help over such a great distance, especially with a bunch of mountains ...

Mail used to be one of my favorite things in the world. I was always excited to see what might be in the mailbox today: a letter from one of my many correspondents, a magazine, a check, photos I’d sent out for processing, a gift from a friend or relative, a catalog full of interesting things, or a package ...

As a card-carrying, Star Trek-watching computer geek, I have naturally known about a project called SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for as long as I can remember. I’ve run the SETI@home screen saver on all my computers. I bought the video of the 1997 Jodie Foster film Contact, based ...

For several years, I’ve been in dire need of some new gadgets. My PDA is so old it died of shame. My TV is an old hand-me-down donated by a friend when my previous TV, which I’d purchased for US$10 at a garage sale eight years ago, went kaput. My home stereo, if you can call it that, is a 13-year-old ...

Allow me to open a very large can of worms. English spelling, as virtually everyone will admit, is absurdly complicated—and much more so than that of most other modern languages. While this situation may be good for editors and those who make dictionaries and spelling checkers, it’s bad for nearly everyone ...

Twenty-odd years ago, a friend of mine named Eddie spent about 10 minutes creating a simple substitution cipher, and handed me a little key to memorize—each letter of the alphabet represented by some other letter, number or symbol. I still remember most of that cipher, which we used to pass each other ...