Once relegated to the global financial system’s outermost fringes, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have entered the mainstream consciousness in a dramatic and disruptive fashion.

Many of us think of cryptocurrency as new. But the idea of creating a more open and accessible financial system with greater privacy and lower costs dates back to the 1980s.

Bitcoin was the first viable cryptocurrency, although there had been several previous attempts at designing more private ways to perform financial transactions.

Initially, Bitcoin enthusiasts were a select group of early adopters, mainly programmers and technologists. Computer programmer Hal Finney was the first to...

In elementary school, we learn that a noun is a “person, place or thing.” Rabbit. Cereal. Toilet. Especially toilet. Words like “toilet” make Mad Libs a hit with my kids when we take road trips.


However, at some point down the line, we learn that an “idea” is also a noun. I don’t know which governing English language body decided this or at what point it became part of the school curriculum, but I’ll bet it was met with the same backlash as Pluto being relegated to a lower-level planet.


Yes, ideas are nouns, and they’re my favorite types of nouns. These ideas were the ones the Founding Fathers often capitalized, and that the Bible extols: joy, honesty, freedom...

Of all the Scrabble letters, Q and Z hold the most value, at 10 points apiece. In 1982, Karl Khoshnaw — the Michael Jordan of Scrabble — used both letters to spell the word “caziques.” Caziques (plural form of a type of oriole) earned Khoshnaw 392 points, which still is the world’s top-scoring single Scrabble move ever.

You don’t see many Q words out there, but one has always intrigued me: queue. I’ve seen the following phrase online in many language humor forums, which probably means Mark Twain said it: “‘Queue’ is just the letter ‘Q’ and four silent vowels waiting in line.”

Queue can’t be a word. It looks ridiculous and feels even more strange to type...

Albert Einstein was ahead of his time. He revolutionized physics thinking, and his theory beginning with the breakout year of 1905, is still the basics of quantum physics today, over 100 years later. When Einstein is remembered for his work, it is almost always E = mc², the theory of relativity. However, I think a more interesting part of Einstein’s life was his view on compound interest.

Albert Einstein called compound interest “the greatest mathematical discovery of all time.”

The Power of Tax Deferral

Compound interest allows an account to grow by earning interest on the original investment and any accumulated interest. Here is a generally accepted definition of...