Well, I’ve Been Busy! January 1, 2014 Sorry for the spotty postings. I got to spend the holiday week in the shadow of amazing people. Like Roz Savage, who (as you know from this 2010 post) rows across oceans. Alone. In a row boat. And there I was sitting right next to her for 20 minutes getting, in effect, my own private TED Talk. (Here’s her real one.) To say she is charming in real life — as is her significant other, Howard Lack, who runs Plastic Oceans (“plastic pollution has become a man-made global catastrophe”) — would barely begin to describe their positive energy. And like Amory Lovins, about whom I’ve also written, who invented “negawatts” and lives in a huge Colorado home completely heated and cooled with the power of a 100-watt lightbulb. (Give or take.) He showed me photos of his latest indoor banana crop — yes, you can grow bananas in Colorado in the winter. You’ll find his TED Talk here. And like the Iraqi-Jamaican-American astrophysicist who explained to me (insofar as that would be possible) how to think about the seven dimensions we can’t sense. (The current thinking, he says, is that no more dimensions will be found; 11 are all that are needed to explain everything.) And enough others to send my little brain into overload. Hence the missed posts. You deserved a break anyway. GHOTI Jerry: “I don’t know if you were joking when you wrote about Shaw’s spelling of ‘fish.’ I think the original had it as ‘ghoti’ – GH as in ‘enough’ . . . O as in ‘women’ . . . and TI as in ‘nation’.” ☞ You spell it GHOTI, I spell it PHOT — either way, check its mercury level before you eat it. # Here’s wishing you a very happy, healthy New Year.