by david allan van nostrand | Oct 5, 2026 | Behind the curtain, Sociology, Teaching, The Wayback Machine
I’m an inveterate puzzle-solver with an abiding curiosity and a knack for explaining complicated subject matter simply. As a kid, I devoured everything math and science, geometry and geography, and imagined a career in engineering. Since I was 11, I spent my summers...
by david allan van nostrand | Aug 17, 2026 | Behind the curtain, Inventions, The world around us
When we look at maps, what we see is not what we get. In 1569, Gerardus Mercator solved the problem that had forever vexed mapmakers: maps are flat and the Earth is round, more or less (technically, it’s an oblate spheroid). The biggest downside to the Mercator is...
by david allan van nostrand | May 18, 2026 | Behind the curtain, origin story, The Wayback Machine
Harry Colebourn (1887-1947) was a lieutenant with the Royal Canadian Army Veterinary Corps. He was on a train taking him to the port where he would board a troop ship on its way to the fighting in Europe. When Colebourn’s train stopped for water in White River,...
by david allan van nostrand | Mar 9, 2026 | Behind the curtain, Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior, The world around us
Until he was killed when his single-seat lightweight aircraft crashed, Joseph Overton was a Fellow at The Mackinac Center for Public Policy. A policy analyst, he described the range of topics acceptable to mainstream thinking as the window of discourse. Overton...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 2, 2026 | Americana, Behind the curtain, The Wayback Machine
Party lines aren’t the ones where people wait to get in where the action’s going on. Not the Texas Two-Step, the Electric Slide, or the Hustle, either. In rural areas there were so few telephone owners that it was impractical and too costly to run lines to each...
by david allan van nostrand | Dec 8, 2025 | Behind the curtain, Human Behavior, The Wayback Machine
There was a rumor that Charles Boles sent some gold home to his wife via Wells Fargo. The stage was robbed and his gold was stolen, thus the story that Boles chose to get even with Wells Fargo by robbing their stages and no others. Another story has it that Wells...
