Everybody knows that Santa Claus lives somewhere near the North Pole where a carpet of snow covers the mountains and the amazing Northern Lights shine brightly in the Arctic night. It has generally been assumed that he settled there because of all that snow for his reindeer and sleigh, but the real reason he put […]
In 1960, an American psychiatrist named William Dement published experiments dealing with the recording of eye-movements during sleep. He showed that the average individual’s sleep cycle is punctuated with peculiar bursts of eye- movement, some drifting and slow, others jerky and rapid. People woken during these periods of eye-movement generally reported that they had been […]
All around the world, it seems to be true that people prefer mysterious explanations to simple explanations. If someone is killed in a car crash, for example, many people say it was caused by fate, rather than by poor driving or bad road conditions. In many countries, a profitable business has developed around the subject […]
In 1850, during the Gold Rush, a twenty-year-old immigrant from Bavaria named Levi Strauss stepped off the boat in San Francisco. He had with him a special cloth called Serge de Nimes, which would later be called denim in America. Levi Strauss hoped to sell the denim as material to make tents and covers for […]
The most important holiday in Viet Nam is the Lunar New Year (also called Tet Holiday). Since it is based on the lunar calendar, it comes about one or two months later than the Western New Year. The Vietnamese New Year season traditionally lasts about a month; however, so that working life will not be […]
Surveys often reveal that more than half of all the teenage entrepreneurs that have recently emerged in the United States are firstborn children, and many are from immigrant families. Some are content with modest revenues, others are primarily after big money – but most are driven simply by the desire to shape their own destinies. […]
Two main techniques have been used for training elephants, which we may cal respectively the tough and the gentle. The former method simply consists of setting an elephant to work and beating him until he does what is expected of him. Apart from any moral considerations, this is a stupid method of training, for it […]
If you look around the area where you live, you may notice many different kinds of spiders. The world has anywhere from 40.000 to 120,000 different species of spiders. In any ordinary field, two million spiders may be hard at work. They thrive in the hottest jungles and the coldest polar regions. They have been found even […]
Generally, people are classified into three categories according to their attitudes towards money: misers, spenders, and economizers. Misers seem almost obsessed with the idea of saving, so they accumulate money in banks if their income is large, or in the house – stuffed in mattresses or under the living room rug – if they are […]
Alfred Nobel, the great Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man of many contrasts. He was the son of a bankrupt, but became a millionaire; a scientist with a love of literature; an industrialist who managed to remain an idealist. He made a fortune but lived a simple life, and although cheerful in company he […]