It's far too much to say that effective hoping is the only - or even the biggest - part of what it takes to succeed. If 14% of business productivity can be attributed to hope, that means 86% is dependent on raw talent, fickle business cycles, the quality of the product you're selling, and often pure, dumb luck.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's a deep-freeze of sorts for all good intentions - a place that you store your plans to make changes in your life when you know you're not going to make them at all.

Well, I think of the folks who are the climate deniers as the flat Earthers and the people who say the moon landings never happened.

Never mind what you've heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President; Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.

There's only one thing harder than living in a home with an adolescent - and that's being an adolescent. The moodiness, the volatility, the wholesale lack of impulse control, all would be close to clinical conditions if they occurred at another point in life. In adolescence, they're just part of the behavioral portfolio.

A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge - out of fairness to goats.