The tragedy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet hangs on the smallest of things: a missed message. As anyone familiar with the story knows, Juliet is separated from Romeo and agrees to an elaborate plan: She takes a potion that puts her in a deep sleep so that people think she is dead. When she wakes, she [...]
We’ve all heard it 1,000 times, the aphorism: “A picture paints a thousand words.” The modern use of the phrase is attributed to Fred. R. Barnard who wrote it (or something closely resembling it) in a December 1921 issue of the advertising trade journal Printer’s Ink, promoting the use of images in advertisements that appeared on [...]
Just one cyclist stands on the winner’s podium with the Tour de France trophy, but it took a whole team to get him there. That’s especially true of the “domestique”— the team cyclist who functions as an all-purpose helper. The domestique does everything from ride in front of the team leader to buffer him from the [...]
Endurance monsters, combo runners, speedsters - which kind of runner are you? In the world of distance running, marathoners fall squarely into the first category (“the more miles we log on a weekly basis, the better” is their mantra). As a general rule, most runners are able to adjust between long and short distances, which makes [...]
In 2005 Amazon Prime was born. Originally, Amazon Prime allowed consumers the ability to receive items for free two-day shipping in the US for eligible products in exchange for an annual fee. Dozens of factors have influenced the success of Amazon including their knowledge of consumer behavioral psychology which makes them one of the most innovative [...]
For Chuck Yeager and other legendary test pilots, success—or failure—required paying scrupulous attention to many factors affecting their flights at high altitudes. Ignore the basic laws of aerodynamics, Tom Wolfe writes in The Right Stuff, and a plane would “start tumbling end over end like a brick…” Failure was guaranteed—and so, unfortunately, was death. When it [...]
One of the most interesting forms of behavior in the insect world has come to be known, in the words of animal behaviorist Thomas Seeley, as “honeybee democracy.” To outside observers like us, a swarm of bees functions so much like a group that we don’t realize the disagreement and vigorous debate among the bees every [...]
Early Greek history chronicles how Lycurgus founded the first Spartan army by creating a force where no soldier was considered superior to another. He developed mastery through the army’s foundation of endurance, courage and self-control. The Spartans were skilled at the ancient Greek style of fighting in a phalanx formation. Just like in an ideal project team, the phalanx worked as a [...]
Considering he filed a record-setting 1,093 patents in his lifetime, it’s no wonder Thomas Edison is regarded as the embodiment of invention. While undoubtedly a genius, what made him so remarkable was not just what he made but the way he worked – his famous Invention Factory outside Newark, New Jersey was arguably the world’s first [...]
Naturalists say that the mother bird uses food to coax her baby from the nest and learn to fly. She stands farther and farther out on a branch with the food even though the baby bird will probably fall. If it doesn’t hurt them, falling eventually teaches them to flap their wings and return to the branch for their next meal. It’s a repetitive process that instills the independence they need [...]
