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You’ve probably heard the old maxim, “Rules are made to be violated.”  Sadly, many of us take this to an extreme sometimes: don’t run red lights, don’t turn left from the right-hand lane, don’t follow too closely, signal before changing lanes, obey the speed limit, etc., etc.  You get the idea.  In traffic, rules guide the flow…

Here’s a few things I’ve been thinking about for the past week or so. This past Friday I went to the bookstore to get another book to read.  I bought another science fiction book and a magazine.  When I got home I wondered how many books I had bought since moving to Albuquerque about seven…

This posting is an update on the progress of my trilogy of science fiction novels about the inhabitants of the planet Anthanos.  I’ve titled them The Anthanian Imperative (an explanation of where the name comes from is given in the first chapter of the first novel) and designated each with a color.  The first is The…

Last Friday evening I watched, for the first time, the movie The Social Network, about how Mark Zuckerberg created the social networking site, Facebook.  (Full disclosure here, I have a page on Facebook.)  After the movie I went home, and later that evening I watched an episode of the science-fiction television series, Star Trek, The Next Generation. …

A recent blog by Nathan Bransford (www.nathanbransford.com) caught my attention a few days ago and gave me a topic to write about in this week’s blog.  He, and a lot of other people I’ve known or heard about, started their writing careers by penning a novel or two (or three or four or more), and…

A year ago, in May, 2010, I posted a blog entry about the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.  It’s a personal history of Ms. Skloot on what she found when she tried to track the derivation of the most important cell line in biology, HeLa.  (Note the way the term is capitalized.)  At…

A few days ago, I was watching a PBS program on how the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes (1485-1547) conquered the Aztec population in what is now Mexico, and I was intrigued by a parallel to modern life.  Without going into a lot of detail about the invasion, Cortes, with a force of Spanish and local…

How many words exist in the English language?  300,000?  500,000?  I don’t know, but I’m sure most of us use only a fraction of those words on a regular basis.  Many of them we probably couldn’t give a good definition to, let alone explain how to use them in a sentence.  Of the words I use, there’s one…

A recent mistake I made, coupled with some things I’ve read over the past few weeks has led me to use this space for a suggestion for the future. Several days ago someone sent me an e-mail asking me to send him something.  He asked me to send it by “email” (note spelling), but I read it…

As I’ve been watching the images of the destruction by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan over the past several weeks, I’ve been struck by one common factor among the Japanese people as they struggle with the devastation and the damage to the nuclear power plant.  Many of the Japanese wear masks.  Exactly why, I can’t say…

What’s new about writing?  The computer?  Well, yes, largely. In the March/April issue of Poets and Writers, Ellen Pollack, director of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, wrote a piece she titled “Ditto Machines to Digital Literature.”  In the article, she makes several comments that got me to thinking about what and why…

Recently I’ve seen a few news reports in which several people have claimed they have an IQ greater than Albert Einstein.  Einstein is a sort of benchmark, a point to compare yourself with.  (If you want.)  If your IQ is greater than his, you can consider yourself a member of a rather elite group.  One girl, 11 years old, in England, claims…