Alex Silady

When you get delivery or takeout from your favorite restaurant on the job, chances are you’ll get, along with your plastic cutlery, a handful of tiny paper packets of salt. If food needs it, we typically use one or two of these, and tend to throw the rest out. But why waste salt when it’s so useful? After all, to the ancient Romans and West Africans, salt was worth its weight in gold, and it still can be. Here are five ways you can put your salt packets to work at work. Read more

They’re as much of a holiday obligation as a card, a fancy dinner, or a phone call, de rigeur for certain people in our lives, as well as the go-to gesture for congratulations or apologies. And they constitute an industry that commands close to $34.3 billion in yearly revenue. Not bad for plant reproductive systems. But do you really need to buy your mother flowers on Mother’s Day? Read more

A computer is only as good as the information that’s fed into it. That’s one of the truisms of programming that has held for as long as computers have existed, and ever since Charles Babbage and Ada Byron Lovelace designed the first “difference engine” in 1822, there has been a need for professionals to program them. Read more