Romance is a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love, accompanied by a feeling of remoteness from everyday life. Love on the other hand Is an intense feeling of deep affection, generating both interest and pleasure, often surrounding potential sexual attachment. Erotic refers to arousal of actual sexual desire. It is easy to say that humans typically follow romance with  love and finally eroticism, but we're also stimulated by the unusual so any progression through or simple ap...

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LET’S face it: The split in politics that strongly divides us is being reflected in government, foreign affairs, legislation, health care, transportation and, yes, education. But what’s with the extreme splitting at the expense of the quality of our lives? I’m going to take a big leap and say it’s not really politics (the “pop” explanation) or COVID (the shot across the bow) as so many claim, but simply lack of an effective future infrastructure from which to develop. This is, in ...

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META, a reincarnation of Facebook (?), is gaining quite a bit of attention in the news these days, given that I, for one, have little idea of what it’s supposed to be. This despite engineering the first apparent META-VR sexual assault — https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61573661. Not something I personally would be proud of. In fact, it doesn’t make me all that interested in that particular META (multiverse?). There’s far too much assault and battery in the “real” world.

But th...

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A doctor of philosophy degree wherein one knows more and more about less and less. The key is the word philosophy, meaning “love of wisdom,” whereas doctorate simply implies the highest degree (of). But seriously, what is wisdom? Or knowledge (shouldn’t all degreed individuals possess knowledge)? And where do information and data fit in?

In my experience, the lowest form of education involves the memorization of data. Having a storehouse of data at one’s fingertips used to be a major...

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SUCCESS demands celebration; but failure, as negative as it may sound, is how we learning. We learn from our mistakes and failures. The “trick,” of course, is to avoid fatal ones. The dead don’t learn from their mistakes or failures.

While it’s said, “Dead men tell no tales,” that isn’t necessarily true. The living, if curious, conscious and reasonably empathic, can learn from others’ fatal mistakes and failures. Call it science, if you wish, where science is the search for t...

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SOME years ago, I was fortunate to meet Yuri Denisyuk during a diplomatic trip to the former USSR. Yes, I was then working for the United States National Academy of Science/National Research Council as a Senior Research Fellow detailed to NASA. In that capacity and as a member of a People-to-People delegation, I met Yuri in his laboratory in St. Petersburg where we discussed the use of normal light holograms (for which he was famous) in analyzing the effects of micrometeorites on spacecraft �...

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NOW there’s a topic worthy of a post, don’t you think? Almost every author and reader would agree that authenticity is more than admirable, it’s essential to a great story and read. Easily said and even easier with which to agree, but what does “authentic” actually mean? Isn’t anything written by the indicated author “authentic” by definition?

My experience is that in life, authenticity is rarely if ever entirely clear. In contemporary-speak for example, authenticity can simp...

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I have been an avid dancesport enthusiast since as far back as I can remember (though it wasn't called Dancesport back then). My formal dance training began when I first met my life (and social/performance/competition dance) partner, Setsuko Tsuchiya, in the 1990's at a YMCA dance in Berkeley, California. We began studying American Smooth and Rhythm dance, later switching to  International Ballroom and Latin/American style dance, understudying professional champion and coach, Mr. Albert Franz...
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Okay, so it's Labor Day, and I thought maybe a labor of love would be appropriate, this time emphasizing my theory and method of learning, Transformative Learning, of which I write in UNLOCK THE GENIUS WITHIN (Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2015) - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BY13D2Q. The key to my approach to transformative learning is empowering the learner through curiosity and discovery, so I was particularly pleased to read "To Raise Confident, Independent Kids, Some Parents Are Tryi...
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Well, I'm back on my academic soapbox again, and this issue, in particular, is one close to my academic heart. Something happened -- subtly shifted -- in the 1960's with the advent of computing and the widespread application of statistics as a way to "prove" that something is valid ("true"). Stress within academic institutions, especially "higher" learning institutions, began shifting towards acquiring a working memory of data (raw numbers) and information (numbers with attached units, e.g. d...
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