Frozen Toothpaste

Until recently, I wasn’t aware that “progressive” had an opposite. Surely, many Democrats would prefer that Republican or conservative were seen as opposites of progressive, but they’re not. “Regressive,” I now know, actually is the opposite of progressive, at least in taxes. (And in hindsight, I feel dumb for not having thought of that.)
This is […]

Maslow’s hierarchy is neither incredibly new nor incredibly novel. If Wikipedia’s to be believed, the idea was originally published in 1943 in a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Further, it’s an idea that, once known, seems to have been all but self-evident the whole time.
Maslow’s basic idea is that certain needs always take […]

Microlending — or microcredit — has gotten more and more press recently, both good and bad.
In the simplest terms, microlending is the practice of making small and unconventionally secured loans to those generally outside the banking system. That is: for people without collateral, a credit history, or demonstrable employment, it’s a way that they can get additional money to […]

Yesterday, Economist.com published a story about HSBC’s Climate Confidence survey, the results of which are intriguing, if not a little surprising. The basic table of result is at right (click for full size, cribbed from HSBC’s results).
The results show that though citizens of so-called developing countries are generally thought to be more concerned […]

For quite some time, I’d assumed that I simply didn’t understand these two words. I’ve seen the verb “to founder” in print, quite often where I expected “to flounder.” As such, I decided that flounder probably wasn’t proper English, but rather a perversion of the real word, “to founder.”
I even went so far as to […]