In Plain Engel-ish

As a kid, I was a fingerprint junkie. Once I learned that every person had unique prints, I studied mine intently with my magnifying glass and “Finger Inker” kit (fun to say with a Swedish accent).  It became one of many afterschool activities I enjoyed with my neighborhood friend, Andy. When you were as lousy in sports as we were, weird hobbies were good for filling that time when more athletic friends were engaged in football or basketball. When one of those friends broke his arm playing football, we shanghaied him into our fingerprint club. He was so bored that...

Shortly after moving into the first house I purchased, I was mixing samples of two different colored paints on a board to achieve the perfect shade of white for a touch-up spot on the wall. I stepped forward to apply it, paint in one hand, reaching for the ladder with the other and brush poised between my teeth. I tripped over the large wooden platform we’d just used to move some heavy furniture into the living room. Fortunately, I caught myself so I didn’t fall flat on my face, but the pointed brush handle poked the roof of my mouth....

In about 2015, I knew there was trouble when we started using an abbreviation — two vowels — to replace the two-word term that had been hovering in the news for at least a dozen years before. The two vowels were our first and third ones: AI. When I first saw that abbreviation, I knew it meant that the scary term “Artificial Intelligence” was so commonplace that just its initials were now enough to send a collective shiver of dread through mankind. I think the nebulousness of the term itself is intimidating. “Artificial Intelligence” is defined as “the simulation of...

The History of Innovation was a particularly interesting study unit for me in one of my junior high school science classes. Our final project was a presentation on our favorite invention.  Most students chose the television, the telephone, or the car. One classmate, Axel, picked fire. Cue our seventh-grade eye rolls. Every classroom has an Axel. I was the only student who selected the invention that I chose. And sixty years later, it still remains my favorite invention. Imagine my shock, while doing my library research, in discovering that my invention could be traced to Ancient Egypt as far back...

What prosecutor wouldn’t want to represent this patient suing his terribly absent-minded surgeon? The over-scheduled doctor had clearly been in the operating room too many hours that day and should never have agreed to one last appendectomy. It was the definition of an open and shut case. Literally. After the patient had been opened and his appendix surgery performed, the surgeon had closed him up, using his no-scar-visible signature stitching. Sure enough, no scar would later be visible. But neither was the surgeon’s scalpel the next day—until an x-ray of that poor patient, now complaining of a severe stomach ache,...