“Your mother’s right about those Hittites, Jacobaleh,” Isaac told his son.  “You can do better.  But none of these Canaanites, either!  I mean, you can date them, but you wouldn’t want to marry one, you know what I mean?  We have standards in this family.  Now I want you to head off to Paddan-Aram and marry one of your uncle’s girls.  Keep it in the family, right, boy?  Heh, heh.”  Jacob headed off to find the cousin of his dreams, wondering if maybe his brother Esau hadn’t gotten the better end of the deal. Esau still hoped to make a good impression on his father.  Snooping on Jacob, he learned how his parents felt about the Canaanite women, so in order to impress them, he took a third wife, only this time taking care to marry one of Ishmael’s daughters.  Ishmael was only his father’s half-brother, so it’s like they weren’t even related. Jacob walked on to the town of Haran, in Paddan-Aram, where Uncle Laban and all those s...

Paper money is a relatively recent invention.  It was first used in China around the 13th century, and was later adopted in Europe and elsewhere.  For a long time, paper money was viewed with suspicion.  The reason was that it wasn’t “real”.  Sure, the paper said you had so many pounds or francs or marks or dollars or whatever, but who was backing up that paper?  It was usually a private bank, so if that bank went bankrupt, your paper money was worthless.  Gold and silver were trustworthy—you could always take coins with you.  This is the way much of the world worked for a long time.  In fact, it wasn’t unusual to circulate gold and silver coins from ancient Rome and Mesopotamia as recently as the 19th century.  Ultimately, it was about the value of the metal. Metal isn’t the only thing that can have value ascribed to it.  After all, gold and silver are only valuable because enough people agree that they are; these metals aren’...

On October 4, 1957, the first manmade object was successfully launched into orbit.  It was Sputnik, the Soviet satellite.  Sputnik circled the earth in low orbit, giving off radio signals, beeping regularly for all its life.  Sputnik’s life was never expected to be very long, since it was battery powered, and there was no one in orbit to provide fresh batteries.  It kept beeping for about three weeks before it went silent.  Sputnik was a triumph for the Soviets in the Space Race, and a source of embarrassment for Americans, who couldn’t stand the thought of trailing the world’s foremost communist power in this contest. Replica of Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite. The Soviets had no intention of slowing down.  While Sputnik 1 was still beeping around the earth, Premier Nikita Khrushchev told Soviet scientists that he wanted to see Sputnik 2 up and operational in time for the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution.  This was a big a...

The first computer mouse (1964)   The English word mouse has been around longer than the English language has.   Its origin is in the Proto-Germanic word m ū s , which is also a word for the rodent.   It gave rise to the Old English mous and mowse , the German Maus , and the Dutch muis .   The reason the word has the peculiar plural form of mice is due to a process known as cheshirization, where a change in the way certain sounds in a language change, but an obsolete phonological distinction gets reclassified as a new form.   To make this simpler, mice is descended from the Proto-Germanic m ūsiz, which is the form of the nominative and vocative declensions of m ūs .   You need not know what a declension is, except that the vocative declension no longer exists in English (not as a distinct, marked form, at least).   The only way a declension changes the modern English word mouse is when we use the possessive declension mouse’s ....

"Isaac Blesses Jacob" by Govert Flinck (1615-1660). Isaac was old and practically blind.   He felt the end was coming, so he called his boy Esau in and told him to go out hunting wild game for him.   “Kill me something that tastes good and I’ll do something really nice for you before I die.   Which is soon.”   So Esau took off for the countryside to go kill an animal. Rebekah heard this and approached her boy Jacob.   She told him she’d like him to bring her a couple of kids so she could make something she knows Isaac will like, rather than take their chances on whatever animal Esau happens to catch.   (Oh, and kids means baby goats, just to be clear.   Isaac hasn’t converted to Baalism or anything like that.   Kosher laws do not exist yet, but cannibalism is still frowned upon.)   Jacob wasn’t sure about this plan.   “Dad expects Esau to do this, not me,” he told his mother.   “He can barely see anymore, so we might ...

A cheap, easy high.  Just watch your step. In the late 1960s, recreational drugs were becoming more popular than ever in the United States.  They were promoted and celebrated by the counterculture.  Marijuana and cocaine were widely used, as were hallucinogens like psilocybin and LSD.  Most of these drugs were processed plants and/or chemicals, but marijuana was pretty much rolled and smoked in its natural form.  Its only processing was drying it out, just like tobacco.  40% of Americans smoked tobacco, and it was perfectly harmless (except for increased risk of lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease, etc.)  “How can you ban a plant?” defenders of marijuana asked.  “It’s a dangerous, addictive plant!” its detractors replied. Defenders of marijuana wanted to move the fight to their territory: you can’t ban a plant.  That’s why the discovery of bananadine was so important.  It, too, came from a plant.  It was a hallu...