A month ago she began to patiently explain to me how to count dotted half-notes, and this is the last year I'll be able to even pretend to understand her math problems.

I am a proponent of lifelong math education.

Why not try to follow along with her lessons?

Math is like situps for the brain.

See, individualism doesn't seem so bad when you consider some of the real world alternatives.

Limbaugh's take is couched in the same oleaginous "Who me?" insincerity with which Bill Shaheen speculated about how "Republicans" might question whether Barack Obama sold cocaine.

What I'd like to know is whether Barack Obama supports the US Sentencing Commission's decision to erase the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity.

But I guess this is the WRONG place for learning anything practical like THAT!

As for Hillary, I feel for her. She's in a lose/lose situation. If she gives in and does what almost every other woman in her income bracket is doing -- she'll get abuse for it.

And if she doesn't do what every other woman in her income bracket is doing -- well, right, she's already getting abuse for it.

Maybe our intolerance for anything other than pink-cheeked perfection will leave us only with the well-shellacked John Edwards: bright, white and wrinkle-free.

And we won't find out where HE stands on the Sentencing Commission's decision, either, will we?

What if someone took this hacking stuff a bit too personally and started serial killing hackers by infecting them with real viruses and worms?

That would make for an interesting episode or two of crime TV.

I know lots of brilliant Indian scientists and I am absolutely sure that they have wonderful engineers who can engineer beautiful and beautifully functioning luxury cars.

But look what other baggage is being carried by the "India" brand -- the Indian caste system makes racial segregation in the American South look tame in comparison.

And then there are all their women problems, you know, like the way they treat widows. And daughters-in-law.

I think there's a certain amount of lack of self-awareness in operation when the Indians blame all of their branding problems on "white cachet."

And what's the mature way to deal with a branding problem?

A re-branding strategy!

So what's their re-branding strategy?

I don't think presenting themselves as "victims of white racism" is going to do it.

Remember that haunting Beatles song with "all the lonely people... where do they all come from?"

Ah yes -- Eleanor Rigby. The subject of Eleanor Rigby was the depopulation of rural in England in the sixties.

That's why they were all so lonely.

But isn't that over? I thought the London yuppies were fleeing back to the villages now.

In terms of popular culture, one can see this pattern reflected in the character conflicts in a typical episode of "Midsomer Murders," a mystery series on BBC.

In a typical Midsomer episode, there is a three-way class conflict in the village between the yuppie newbies, the traditional middle class villagers, and the tattered remains of the local aristocracy.

People go through phases. One generation gets all excited by the big city and then the next generation gets burned out by urban life and wants to go back to the land.

Look what crawled out from the rock when Communism fell -- ethnic cleansing and rape camps.

How could we have expected that it would be so simple to just take Saddam out and fix that country and make it whole?

Yugoslavia will never be made whole again, and that tyranny collapsed naturally from its own political dead weight.

Abstinence-only doesn't work. It doesn't work for sex.

And it doesn't work for other things.

Let me tell you something -- we have gang shootings now in Pasadena, just a block or two from Caltech.

After 34 years of fighting a War on Drugs, the gang problem has only gotten worse. And now even Nobel laureates are in the danger zone.

I am very upset about this and I wonder how can we make sure that we have accountability for these grand moral engineering schemes that the politicians dream up in Washington?

At least here we see a sign of accountability -- absitinence-only sex education is being held accountable for its failures.

I would like to see some accountability for the fact that after 34 years of fighting drugs, now we have powerful wealthy drug gangs fighting turf wars in Pasadena.

If something doesn't work, it doesn't work.

At least when sex education fails, nobody gets shot.

You can teach yourself science when you cook. It's all about thermodynamics and material properties. It's engineering.

Baked Alaska -- now that's an interesting lesson in thermodynamics, because it's ice cream baked into a cake.

How can you possibly bake ice cream into a cake?

It's the magic of physics!

If you think of the kitchen as a place where interesting science happens, then it can be an intellectual experience as well as one that binds a family together.

Maybe someone needs to write a book "Teaching Your Child Basic Physics in the Kitchen."

I would write it, but I'm 200 pages into my first novel.

Seriously, my love of cooking was one thing that really helped me in physics and engineering classes. My love of cooking and my messed up boyfriend who drove cars that always broke down.

So before I even got into college, I knew how food cooks and why cars break down.

Cooking builds thermodynamic intuition. You get a feel for what heat does, how steam behaves, how materials change when they are heated.

The more physical intuition you build up by the time you get into freshman physics, the better.