If you live anywhere near a navigable — even barely navigable — body of water, today would be a good day to get your canoe out of the shed and try to see just how fast you can paddle it. Why do that today? Because by coincidence, two Olympic champion canoe sprinters were born on… Continue reading

Anybody can do canning at home — that is, preserving food in sealed containers, usually glass jars. Canning is also sometimes called “appertization,” which is a reference to Nicolas Appert. Appert was born November 17, 1749 in France, and while he (probably) didn’t invent canning, he was the first to really systematize it.  Appert was… Continue reading

Can you speak a second language? Or have you studied a second or third language? Everybody who has, whether they’ve succeeded in becoming fluent or not, has experienced how difficult it can be. And everybody who hasn’t probably imagines that it’s at least that difficult, if not more so. So it’s time to be impressed… Continue reading

Literature for young people wouldn’t be the same without November 14. Well, I mean, obviously any book that mentioned the month would, in that case, have to explain why the calendar goes from 13 directly to 15, but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about Jacob Abbott and Astrid Lindgren who were born on… Continue reading

Neil Young, the Canadian musician, celebrates his 79th birthday today. He was born in Toronto in 1945, and contracted polio when he was 6. It was the last major outbreak of that disease in Ontario, and it left him partially paralyzed on his left side. His family began spending winters in Florida, in the US,… Continue reading

Today is the eleventy-first anniversary of the birth of Albert Camus, who pointed out in a number of ways that whatever you do, whatever you accomplish, whatever you dream of, whether you achieve it or not…nobody cares. Well, some people might care, but the universe we live in doesn’t give a fig. He laid this… Continue reading

If you’re enjoying the US basketball season, you might want to celebrate the inventor’s birthday today — James Naismith was born November 6, 1861 in the Province of Canada. He moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in the US in about 1890 to study at the YMCA International Training School. From there he became a physical education… Continue reading

The situation in the Middle East seems like it’s going from bad to worse, and it’s seemed that way for a long time. Maybe public intellectuals like Edward Said could help — but unfortunately Said, who was born November 1, 1935, passed away in 2003.  Said was a Palestinian-American academic, critic, and activist. He was… Continue reading

An exercise in some high-shool physics classes is assembling and operating a Stirling engine. It’s a fairly simple device and can be surprising because it’s a “hot air engine.” All you need is a source of heat (a candle will do for a small engine) and the engine will operate. The Stirling engine was designed… Continue reading

In World War II, Germany used a mechanical encryption system called an Enigma machine. The Allies mounted a huge effort to figure out how to decrypt messages encoded by the Enigma, and one offshoot from that effort was, in part, electronic digital computers. As for the Enigma itself, the Allies may not have realized that… Continue reading