Category Archives: Uncategorized

Gut Bacteria and a Youthful Brain Middle age is in most respects a good age to be. You are hopefully making enough money to do the things you want to do. You know enough about yourself to know what you want. And you know enough about the world to figure out how to get whatContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 39 of 63”

The Art of Small Talk—Asking Questions I am probably the last person who should be giving lessons on small talk. Judging from my comfort level with it, I’m not very good at it. Even at my advanced age I don’t chat easily with strangers or casual acquaintances. But I’ve picked up a few tips overContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 38 of 63”

Staying Warm In many places north of the Tropic of Cancer it is already cold, getting cold, about to get cold, or some combination thereof. The best and most obvious way to beat the cold is to be in a location that’s warm…but that isn’t always possible, and often folks want to get outside andContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 37 of 63”

Palindromes A palindrome is a word, phrase, sentence or number that reads exactly the same forwards as backwards. As with units of measure, I don’t know why they fascinate me but they do. I realize now that I should have saved this post for Dec. 2nd, as that is a palindromic date (12/02/2021), at leastContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 36 of 63”

The Distances Between Things Why I find this topic interesting I don’t really know. I only know that I do. There are many ways to measure and document the distance between two things, and they mostly depend on how big or small the things are (as compared to our physical bodies). When you have aContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 35 of 63”

The Sierpinski Triangle Sierpinski was a Polish mathematician who expressed in numbers the intricate, self-repeating patterns that occur when you split an equilateral triangle into smaller triangles using the midpoints of edges. As far as I know he was the first to show this mathematically, but he was nowhere near the first to express thisContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 34 of 63”

The Mandelbrot Set In nature there are patterns that repeat, sometimes at many different scales within the same structure. Look at a seashell or a fern frond and you can see evidence of this. I’m not any kind of mathematician, math scientist or math student, so I’m very limited in how much I can intelligentlyContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 33 of 63”

The Halfway Point As I make this post, I am passing the halfway point of the 63 posts that make up The Neurocycle. Woohoo! It’s all downhill from here! Which makes me wonder, why do we tend to make such a big deal about the halfway point of anything? It seems like a very arbitraryContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 32 of 63”

Procrastination I chose this topic because it is precisely what I’ve been doing the last 7 days with my blog. Oh, I’ve had some very good reasons for not blogging (see my earlier post on Rationalization), but the bottom line is I could have prioritized my blogging had I really wanted to, but the factContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 31 of 63”

Online Reviews If you try hard, you can probably remember the days before online reviews were a thing. Remember what that was like? Trying out or even finding a new business was like doing research for a college final paper. You put a lot of time in, and at the end of the day youContinue reading “The Neurocycle: Day 30 of 63”