Early in the morning I was waiting for my friend in a coffee shop for our regular get-together. My friend showed up late—which is not his habit—and he looked frazzled. He told me he discovered he had a flat tire as he parked his car, and now a parking inspector was...

Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne made history by rowing across the Pacific Ocean. When they decided to embark on this ambitious voyage, they may have had no idea how they were going to make this journey a reality. How could they get a boat that would carry them across? How...

This summer I had the opportunity to walk along a small country road near the town of Bergen in the Netherlands. Along that road I encountered the bust of Mary shown in the image. The shrine commemorates the “Miracle of Bergen” where in 1421 a church was destroyed by...

Modern-day scientists and engineers work under challenging conditions; they face pressure to produce at a high pace in an environment where technology is rapidly changing. In this environment, balancing intellectual skills with emotional and interpersonal skills is...

As I left my house a wave of nausea swept over me and I threw up on the driveway. I was on my way to my first training in the burn building, which was part of my training as a firefighter. The burn building is a concrete shell of a building. It was filled with pallets...

Several years ago I watched the movie Cosi Come Sei. To be honest, I don’t recall the story of the movie at all, I watched the movie because the main actor Marcello Mastrioanni reminded me of my father. But I do remember one thing about the movie, this is when...

In my research I had developed a theory to extract information from recorded noise. I knew that developing a theory is one thing, but that without an application to real data the theory did not have much credibility. The problem was that I did not have any data I...

My father Wim passed away in 1994. My bothers and I deeply loved him and still miss him. After our father died, my brother Frank asked us if he could have our father’s watch. This question was unusual because my brother does not care about “stuff.” We told him that he...

In the still face experiment of Dr Tronick, a mother plays with her baby. The baby points and the mother responds by looking in the direction where her child points. She talks to the baby in a loving way. Suddenly the mother takes on a still face, meaning that she...

In the movie The Penguin Lessons a cynical and disillusioned English teacher Tom Michell moves to Argentina where he starts teaching at a boarding school. The movie is set in 1976 during the military coup in Argentina that marks the beginning of a dictatorship in...