If you have a choice between experiencing a perfect moment and having an everlasting memory of such moment but never actually experiencing it, which one would you choose? There was a time when I would choose the former, like Hans Christian Andersen’s...

The integral sign reminds me of the salt water taffy machines in the  sweet shops of the Oregon coastal towns we  visited during the summers of my girlhood. I remember pressing my nose against the glass partition to watch  the machine pulled the...

Certain words are easy on the eyes.  Take,  for instance, iridescent, dapple, lilting, peal, sparrow.  Of course one reader's pearls  are another reader's sands.  Subjectivity aside, within one single perception, what makes certain words more...

The trinity of passive circuit elements have descriptive names: resistor,  inductor, and capacitor -- the resistor resists current flow, the inductor stores energy in a magnetic field and uses this energy to induce current, the capacitor is capable of...

Bavarian Gentians Not every man has gentians in his house in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas. Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s       gloom, ribbed and...