I have a favorite soft cushioned couch for an afternoon nap. I am on my back, neck tilted forward and open my eyes. I look through windows at the sky. I love to watch the clouds brushing against skyward straining branchlets of a red maple, denuded of its leaves. Branches are as tiny twigs stretching…

HIV drugs changed AIDs from a fatal illness to a smoldering disease. Like diabetes, HIV is rarely cured. One can never prove if your viral load is zero, that the viruses are totally gone. Once infected it’s possible infect someone else, particularly the case of pregnancy, or to reconvert to clinical disease. This was the…

I remember when I took tenth grade biology, our first discussion about what is alive. By that time I’d already had intense interest in biology. I had an internal premonition that I was destined to be a doctor since elementary school and considered medicine merely a part of biology devoted to humans. I was naive…

The great warrior Ashoka had conquered much of the Indian subcontinent for the Mauryan Dynasty about a quarter of a millennium BCE. He had won a great battle of Kalinga at the cost of one hundred thousand lives in the process creating an additional 150 thousand refugees and great suffering. We don’t begrudge our great…

Funny that as a longtime clarinetist I failed to notice the wooden-ness of the sound of the instrument until recently hearing a master clarinettist David Krakauer. I wondered, is the clarinet a woodwind by virtue of sound initiated by the vibration of a wooden reed? Probably not, as the flute and recorders have no reeds.…

Whether or not you believe in one or more deities or even in life after death, there are advantages to being religious.  This is counterintuitive but true. Being an atheist is not the same as being faithless, not the same as believing in nothing. Many atheists, are vigorous enough in opposing the widely accepted canon of Western…

In a earlier blog I talked about the extended period of dependence seen in our millennials. Many are living in our basements, having failed to find work, marry, buy homes, have their own families. Here I am wondering out loud, whether this extended period of adolescence might not turn out to be all bad. If…

Animals have devised a period of dependence and apprenticeship for their immature offspring called childhood. That strategy is meant to improve the fitness of the next generation but is expensive in time and effort. Most animals, for example dumb mollusks, and all plants too, take an opposite and equally efficient approach in producing in large…

Kids have more fun surprising us and themselves. They have youthful enthusiasm deriving from newness, the first time experience. Children wonder about everything and are questioning all the time. And when hormones kick in, young love waxes hot. Nothing trumps the depth of feeling of a childhood crush. Never mind that you are more likely…

  Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell’d in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may, By…