In Philip Ball's Beyond Weird—which I am committing to finish before I dive into his newest book on biology—he makes this interesting point to open: "Quantum physics defies intuition, but we do it an injustice by calling that circumstance weird."  For a long time, even in the early to...

My maternal grandfather was born in south Alabama in May of 1924, and I remember him telling a story from his childhood of a Christmas morning during the Great Depression when he woke up to find an orange in his stocking. Such was the extent of the...