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Let me admit that I’m a nerd who wonders about some weird things sometimes. Just for fun… What if the United States redrew its borders so that each state had the same population? In 2016, the United States had an estimated population of over 323 million people.  That number divided equally among 50 states equals about […]

  After watching the 2009 film The Road and being so moved by the realism and bleakness of the movie, I hoped to read the novel someday.  Seeing that the novel won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction made me wonder if I was missing out by never reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in my life. There […]

  Want to consider yourself “well-read” but don’t know where to start?  Amazon.com compiled a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime.  For most people, reading 100 books is too lofty a goal to seem realistic.  For this list, I’ve pored through both Amazon’s and Goodreads’ lists to come up with just the […]

  Any native English-speaker who has studied Mandarin Chinese should be familiar with the Pinyin system for romanizing Chinese characters.  Did you know there’s also a romanization system for Taiwanese?  It’s called Peh-oe-ji (pronounced Beh-weh-jee). Taiwanese is a dialect of Chinese similar to the Min Nan Chinese dialect spoken in Fujian Province of southeastern China.  The official language […]