An exploration of Space, Life, Energy and the Universe — Mama I grew in warmth and subdued light. Her voice echoed softly. I floated and began to form. But her embrace became tighter and restrictive. I struggled, I kicked, I pushed. I tried to roll. We battled. And then, through a growing quivering, I dived head-first. I emerged into bright lights…

A Sci-Fi Look at 2135 and the 38th Rugby World Cup The Red team players had fire and smoke coming out of their nostrils. It was 15 seconds to the final whistle. A scrum had been called 5 meters from the Black team line. …

The Story of the Awakening of Consciousness Thinking Tools — Becoming Conscious Helen Keller was born a healthy baby on 27 July 1880. When she was nineteen months old, an unknown illness made her deaf and blind. The next five years were full of frustrations. Helen wrote that she could not “truly remember emotions [but] had tactual memory of shedding tears, screaming…

The story of just and unjust leaders — The following is a conversation on Napoleon Bonaparte I (KT) had the pleasure of having with Professor Ludo Van der Heyden, the INSEAD Professor of Corporate Governance. Professor Van der Heyden (LVH) has written extensively on Napoleon. …

Lessons from the story of Trofim Lysenko — In a recent special report for the Council on Foreign Relations, Robert D. Blackwill and Philip Zelikow describe the contours of a deepening conflict between the US and China (The Council on Foreign Relations Special Report №90, February 2021, “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War…

The Story of the Choices We Make — A modern view of the Mechanics of Choices Amos Tversky, a mathematical psychologist, and Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and economist, did seminal work on how we make choices. Before their work, psychologists mostly came up with stories on human behavior that had a scant experimental basis. …

The Story of Pons and Fleischmann The challenges of experimentation In any effort to gain deeper insights into the universe, create new technologies or shape the future one has to have a firm understanding of experimentation. Richard Feynman wrote that the “principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is…

The story of reliability and the binomial distribution — A Definition of Stupidity Carlo M. Cipolla defines a stupid person as one “who causes losses to another person or a group of persons while himself [or herself] deriving no gain or even possibly incurring losses.” Most of our stupidities result in “local” harms to ourselves and a few others. We can thus be…

The Story of the Universe in Powers of Ten — From Plato’s Cave into the Wide Open In the ‘Allegory of the Cave’ Plato describes how prisoners are chained together at the back of a dark cave. They thus believe the world is all darkness with fleeting shadows. …