My mother Erika  just published her first book. It is called “Now You Are 60 or More: So What!”. She describes ways to stay young in mind and spirit. As she states in the foreword: No matter what age you are now, you can adopt a new way of thinking which enables you to help yourself and others live healthy and happy lives with great longevity. My mother experienced her childhood in the horrors of World War II. As a ten year old,...

In high school, I read Goethe’s Faust for the first time. It used to be required reading in German high schools. My mother’s generation had to memorize large sections. While I greatly enjoyed reading Faust, I was never quite sure why this book is such a big deal in German education. The most memorable character in Faust is clearly Mephistopheles. I thought I would share a few points on this devious and fascinating...

daemon: /day´mn/, /dee´mn/, n. (Source: The Jargon File) [from Maxwell's Demon, later incorrectly retronymed as ‘Disk And Execution MONitor’] A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon)....