From cradle to grave, in season and out of season, we solve problems. That is our lot. Life throws many at us but often we do a fairly good job of digging ourselves into holes. At birth, babies bring both joy and mild chaos into their parents' lives. Toddlers are little broncos that must be tamed for their own sake. Adolescents and teenagers can develop into well-adjusted souls or choose to become human flame-throwers. Under the veneer of maturity, adults excel at creating disorder despite their best intentions. Habitually, young people blame their parents for all the world’s problems but ..read more

Work-life balance has been a controversial water-cooler topic of discussion since the 1980s. Prior to that decade, the impact of work-family conflict had been studied for over a hundred years. What caused the change in semantics and, more broadly, how have we adapted to the dichotomy between toil and leisure? Pre-industrial age, there was hardly any barrier between work and family because most people lived off the land, and it was effectively all hands on deck. Highly labour-intensive, subsistence farming and animal husbandry demanded all-day, year-round attention and, in addition to fami ..read more

Lauded as the King of Beasts and King of Birds, respectively, lions and eagles are fearsome alpha predators atop the food chain. Both are living proof of the savagery and, paradoxically, the intrinsic beauty in creation. Watching a maned lion strut across the savannah at dusk or an eagle soar effortlessly out of sight can take the breath away. So regal, awe-inspiring, and oblivious of external validation are they, that humans have extolled them for ages.  From ancient Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages, and beyond, the lion has long been associated with sovereigns and the aristocracy, who sha ..read more

In No Country for Old Men, retired Lt. Col. Carson Wells was hired to hunt down a homicidal maniac, Anton Chigurh. Incidentally, both men were Vietnam War veterans, and Wells knew how utterly depraved Chigurh was. Nevertheless, he took the job because he needed the money, and misguidedly believed that he was smarter than Chigurh. He was not. Sure enough, the hunted outmanoeuvred the hunter. In their final scene together, Chigurh held a full-bore shotgun while sitting across from his hot and cornered prey. In his cryptic rhetoric that dripped with contempt, Chigurh asked Wells, “All right. L ..read more

A recent edition of The Economist ran an article captioned The Strange Revival of Vinyl Records. In all probability, few millennials would have any idea what a vinyl record sounds like. But for an older generation, it is hard to believe that it’s been over three decades since cassettes and compact discs (CD) supplanted vinyl, after its century-long domination of the music industry. Fast-forward to 2004 when the CD peaked at over 90% of volume sales. That year, the rise of MP3 and new streaming services signposted the beginning of the slow decline of digital sound storage media. Although t ..read more

No one knows what goes on in the mind of a designer. Maybe not even the designer does from one moment to the next. That is because we are all furtive organisers who, habitually, feel obliged to order and rearrange our lives, living rooms, right down to our smartphone user interface. Subconsciously, we strive for simplicity and are conditioned to find workarounds within poorly designed habitats. Professionally, there are design practitioners - the most familiar category being industrial product designers - who solve real-life problems and earn a living by creating products and services that c ..read more

On the fly, can you tell the difference between a nerd and a geek? Until recently, these two words were terms of derision. But, to get on the same page, what do they actually mean? Although they are virtually synonymous, a sliver of differentiation harks back to their original usage. Nerd, or geek, refers to someone who may be “obsessively studious, offbeat, bashful, or socially awkward.” But nowadays, nerd confers a degree of pride in single-minded expertise, while geek retains its old derogatory reference to eccentric carnival performers. Indeed, the term computer geek sums up the contemp ..read more

Every human being possesses one or more talents that vary across a broad spectrum. Deploying our primary senses, we interface with the world through our vision, auditory perception, touch, and other faculties. But while the majority of people perceive nature simply and unvarnished, there are outliers who instinctively search for patterns with their eyes either open or wide shut, indicative of how their brains are wired. Using symbols, logic and pure imagination, gifted mathematicians have the capacity to study the shape and motion of physical objects, and to delineate space in abstraction. As ..read more

Ignorance can be bliss but, sometimes and depending on the circumstances, ignorance could be debilitating. Earlier this year, a television documentary explored the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. Survey results revealed that a third of respondents in seven countries were unaware of the death camps strewn across German-occupied Europe three-quarters of a century ago. In the US, they discovered that two-thirds of American students were clueless about the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis. Recoiling from WW2 crimes against humanity, well-meaning people everywhere periodically echoed the ma ..read more

How tiny is tiny? Or how thin is thin? A pharaoh ant or a strand of hair, perhaps? Sounds like a specious response to a silly quiz. In fact, human cognition allows us to perceive nature at, and beyond, eye-level resolution while innate curiosity leads us to explore our environment in all its complexity. Unprompted, we are constantly seeking to make sense of our place in a universe containing objects both great and small. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we are treated to a satire featuring several voyages undertaken by Lemuel Gulliver. On his first trip, he was shipwrecked and held ..read more