While the funny story of Yes Prime Minister has given me hours of pure joy, the dialogue inside this witty comedy is a classic in itself.

"May I just clarify the question? You're asking who would know what it is that I don't know and you don't know but the Foreign Office know that they know, that they are keeping from you so that there is something we don't know and we want to know but we don't know what because we don't

During the lunch I talked with my friends about winning the lottery, making precise prediction, and all those that will be too good to be true. Miracles, nonetheless, should always be interpreted doubly cautiously when they seem too extreme to be true. That may not be the kind of advice most of us want to hear. But that doesn't make it any less the truth.

This reminds me of the story that Oscar winners were found to live longer than their less successful peers. Alas, what a wonderful

My friend told me that great erhu player does not become an alpha by accident; unrelenting persistence in the focus on a task every day is always the case. I can't agree more. Think of Rice Condoleezza, the United States Secretary of State. Long before Rice became Stanford University's youngest - and first female - provost, she began studying at Alabama's Birmingham Conservatory at the age of 10, rising at 4:30 a.m. to spend two hours at the ice skating

If the tunnel fee of the Tate's Cairn Tunnel is raised, does anyone demur? On the other hand, if the grocery product - be it yogurt, toothpaste or toilet paper - shrinks in size without change in price, does anyone make a sound? Not much - and that's a problem.

Unbeknownst to most of consumers, manufacturers around the globe have been quietly trimming the content of their packaged products to maintain their profit margins. People might read intently the price tag during shopping and complain about the

Listening to her erhu teacher playing the instrument, as my wife told me, always makes her look stupid as a novice.

And her teacher said, "What does it take to be an erhu player? It takes audacity, devotedness and endless hours of playing erhu." The sentence went off in my head like a Roman candle.

The teacher went on to tell my wife his story when he was young: "When I was riding the bus to and from school, I clinched the passenger pole, running my

Once upon a time, a guy from Pluto came to visit a specialist gastroenterologist. "I hate to bother you, and as we all know, it is late," a voice pleaded eagerly. "But I'm in trouble and need to talk to you about my indigestion…"

"Fine – can you tell me how the indigestion is bothering you at such late hours?"

"Oh, yes. The stomach problem all started when I took the steak for my dinner."

"When did you

The New York Times ran a story describing the discovery that the shipbuilder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday.

The selection of the rivets has been a subject of interest. Great ships like Titanic require three million rivets that acted like glue to hold everything together. In the case of Titanic’s rivets, the builder company ordered No. 3 bar, known as "best" — not No

Many years ago, a psychology professor showed that he could significantly change people's ratings of their own moods by arranging for them to "find" a quarter on the floor of an experiment room before they made their mood ratings.

A pretty fascinating scenario, you might think. And what better way to go beaming with joy after simply bumping into a coin than manipulating all those complicated molecules like endorphin and serotonin?

But think again. We are simply humans whose ups and downs can be the result of completely inconsequential events

A few days ago my consultant mentioned that female medical graduates outnumber the male counterparts in medical schools. Such a comment did not raise much of an eyebrow until my attention was caught by a recent study which found that male medical consultants, on average, completed 160 more episodes of care each year than their female colleagues in the United Kingdom.

Well, I dare say you can guess what happened and how people responded. From the viewpoint of quantity - which was always the focus of the economists, accountants and people

In his elegant book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten , Robert Fulghum teaches us many golden rules that we can extrapolate into the sophisticated adult world. Very true. Another way to appreciate his wisdom is to see how the subsequent teachings after our kindergarten can be remarkably wrong.

As we move on from the kindergarten to elementary school through graduate school, we learn the mathematics. We were taught that "one plus two equals three" and then "minus one plus one balances out each other." Simple